The good news is all ended well for Black Ivy, unless she takes a turn for the worst.
More good news, she will be joining the milk string to provide milk for the us & the bottle babies.
It could have been soooo worse, but the bad news is the single doe kid did not make it. In fact, she clearly passed a while ago.
My first clue something was off was when Black Ivy had some abnormal hind-end drainage this morning. It’s not really normal for a wet hind-end that early in the process. But I was optimistic. She had a soft udder and no indications of even starting labor the night prior. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that filling udder this morning. The discharge had a bit of a brownish blood tinge, coupled with the wet hind end, I decided to stick a gloved finger in... all I felt was a mostly closed cervix.
Labor was very slow, I watched her on the camera all day, but no distress so I left it alone. Rarely do good things happen when you push for an outcome (pretty good overall life advise, not just in regards to goats). Still with no real contractions going on, I poked a gloved finger in again around 17:00. Nothing to feel but a half open cervix. That eased my mind. She ate some dinner, I forced her to eat 4 Tums and I kept watch on the camera. Contractions of some significance started around 19:00. Still no distress, just doing the stand up, paw, eat hay, paw, lay down, repeat, routine.
Around 20:30 things got more serious. I check her again, still nothing to feel but a now wide open cervix. I milked her out a bit to stimulate natural oxytocin. She eagerly licked my hand, so odds are she’d clear the face of a kid if I was late to the party.
At 22:00-ish, she’s consistently pushing and staying down so something is now clearly wrong. I went to the barn, gloved up, and did not like what I find. I can feel a nose... just a nose... and it’s upside down! I can just barely see the tongue, it’s a yellow brown. The fluid is brown red. The teeth wiggle as if they’ll easily fall out. I can feel sunken eye sockets and the skull is soft. I pushed the mess in and feel for legs... nope. Might be easier if it wasn’t dry and sticky inside. That made me nervous. Forcing your way around IN a goat is grounds for a fatal uterine tear. Meanwhile, Black Ivy is handling all this fairly well. The kid is not terribly big and Black Ivy got the head mostly out on her own prior to me pushing it in, so I decided to forgo trying to flip or find a leg. I figure, if I let her get the head clear, I can pull. I get her up, she obliges, and I milk her out. If this goes south at least I won’t have to milk colostrum out of a dead goat... much easier to do when they are standing.
The bad bad news is, the doe kid was indeed dead. The good news is, all went as I anticipated. Shortly after milking Black Ivy out, she laid down & quickly pushed the kid out far enough that I could get a grip behind the skull. A bit of pulling and I found a leg. The kid stopped coming easy so I fished around for the other leg and found it up and over the shoulder... how, I’m not sure. I straightened it into ‘normal’ position and the rest came easy. I went back in to feel for another kid... nope. I got her up and bumped her abdomen to see if one might be low... nope. I put a uterine bolus in and gave her a shot of LA200.
I’m fairly confident that this one turned out as well as it could have. The kid was dead, probably for a few days. If I went ram-jamming around in that goat, I probably would have killed her. I’ve already had one uterine tear this year and it’s a crappy deal. Nature has a way of resolving some situations. It’s hard to know when to intervene and when to leave stuff alone, but my gut served me well tonight. Still, I wonder every time something like this happens if I could have had a better outcome. Was the kid alive that morning and the cervix still closed because the kid's position resulted in less pressure on the cervix causing it to not dilate? If I worked to manually dilate her, would I have a live kid or just a stressed, possibly dead, doe?