Uterine Rupture and Hemorrhage: Coco’s Story

In this deeply personal and emotional episode, host Deborah Niemann shares the heartbreaking story of her goat, Coco, who experienced a uterine rupture and hemorrhage during a challenging kidding in 2013. 

Deborah takes listeners on a journey through Coco's life, from her birth to her tragic passing after giving birth to quintuplets. This episode not only honors Coco’s memory but also provides valuable insights into the risks of uterine tears and hemorrhages in goats, how to recognize the signs, and what steps can be taken to prevent or address such emergencies.

Key Takeaways

• Uterine ruptures can occur during difficult births, especially when there is excessive pressure or improper handling during interventions.
• Goats are horizontal animals, so internal bleeding may not be visible externally. Instead, blood collects in the abdomen.
• Warning signs include mental absence, lethargy, pale eyelids (indicating anemia), and disinterest in kids or milking.

Lessons Learned from Coco’s Experience

1. Recognizing Symptoms: 
   • If a goat seems mentally absent or unresponsive after kidding, check for anemia by examining their eyelids. Pale eyelids can indicate severe blood loss.
2. Importance of Veterinary Relationships: 
   • Having an established relationship with a vet ensures quicker access to help during emergencies.
   • University veterinary hospitals can provide 24-hour care and specialized expertise if local vets are unavailable.
3. Risks of Certain Tools and Procedures: 
   • Tools like kid pullers (wire nooses) can be effective but carry risks of causing uterine tears if not used carefully.
   • Procedures like fetotomies (cutting up a fetus for removal) are especially risky in small goats like Nigerians due to limited space in their uterus.
4. Postpartum Care: 
   • Small uterine tears can heal naturally but may lead to infections.
   • Severe tears often require surgical intervention or result in fatal hemorrhaging.
5. Preventative Measures: 
   • Avoid breeding smaller does with larger bucks to reduce the risk of oversized kids causing birthing complications.
   • Always ensure hands are clean, nails are trimmed short, and gloves are worn when assisting with kidding to minimize risks of tears or infections.

Resources Mentioned

1. Deborah’s book: Goats Giving Birth 
2. Previous podcast episodes: 
   • Blood Transfusion in Goats
   • Anemia in Goats

See full show notes here >> https://thriftyhomesteader.com/uterine-rupture-and-hemorrhage-in-goats/ 

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Transcript

Introduction 00:02
For the love of goats. We are talking about everything goat. Whether you’re a goat owner, a breeder, or just a fan of these wonderful creatures, we’ve got you covered. And now, here’s Deborah Niemann.

Deborah Niemann  0:17  

Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode. This is sort of a solo episode. I am basically going to be telling you a story from 2013 when our goat, Coco gave birth. This is the hardest episode I have ever recorded. It's an incredibly personal episode and very emotional. In fact, today, as I was telling a friend about it, I started crying again, and it's been 12 years. Coco was one of those goats that was really special. 

She was born in 2004, and she was one of the quads. That was the first set of quads ever born on our farm. And back then, everybody was in the Yahoo groups, including me. And I went in there, and I said, my goat just had quads. Can she feed all of them? And every single person was like, “Oh, yeah, absolutely. My goat fed quads.” And so I'm watching over the first two weeks of her life, and her brothers were getting bigger and bigger, and she was still staying very small. And at two weeks of age, I walked in there one day, and she was laying under the heat lamp. She could not even lift her head. So I called my mentor and told her what was going on, and she's like, “Oh, she's not getting enough milk.” And she explained to me how to tube feed, and Coco turned into a house goat, and we bottle fed her, and she was my baby, and so she was one of the most special goats I ever had. 

And when she was nine years old, she was pregnant and very large. She had already had quintuplets at one point, and so in 2013, she was in labor, and she was having trouble, and I was able to pull the first kid without any challenges. Then I waited a little bit, and she didn't really start pushing, and she was acting weird. And so I checked her again, and I realized that there were two kids, like, right up there in the uterus, both trying to come through at the same time. So they were still really high, which is why she didn't have an urge to push, and I would try to push one back, and then when I would pull the second kid, the head would flip back over the spine, and a kid's not going to come out neck first. And so I would try again, and every time I pulled on those front legs, the head would flip back over the spine. And I knew like this, I can't do this. 

I said to my husband, I was going to have to take her to the university, and that's a two-hour drive. It was midnight, and he said, “We've got a milk test in the morning,” at which point I just lost it, and I screamed at the top of my lungs, “[bleep] the milk test! this is Coco!” and he immediately got very quiet, like, Okay, what do we need to do? And so we took her down there, and the vet was like, amazing. You know, I had been struggling for quite some time, trying to get this kid out. And she had a kid puller, which kind of looks a lot like a noose, and it's a metal wire, and she put it inside of the goat over the kid's head, and just pulled it out just like that, like so quick. 

It looked so quick, so easy. And pulled the other three kids out, and we had quintuplets again, five healthy kids, and it had been three hours since that first kid had been born. In fact, that first kid had been born on one day, and it was now the next day, so they technically had different birthdays, but ADGA would not let me register them with different birthdays. 

So anyway, Coco started acting really strange after the last kid was pulled, and in fact, she had been licking the kids and everything and acting like a great mom that she always had been. And then all of a sudden, she stood up, and she walked over and put her head in the corner, and I said to the vet, “What's wrong with her?” And she said, “Oh, nothing's wrong. She's just mad.” And I was like, that seems really weird. She's never acted like this. And so the vet said, “Everything's good. You can take her home. The kids are all good.” 

So it's two o'clock in the morning by now, and we load everybody up in the car. I am in the back seat with Coco, and we had an intern at that time, and she's holding babies, and I'm holding babies. And, you know, while Mike is driving back to the farm, and we get to the farm around 4am and Coco was still acting very strange. She was just mentally absent. And I said, I am really worried about leaving these kids with her the way she is acting. I would not be surprised if she fell down on them or something. And so I'm like, “We just went through a lot to get these five kids into the world safely. How about let's just put Coco in the barn, and we'll take the kids in the house, and we'll keep them in the house overnight and see how she's doing in the morning.” 

Two hours later, my husband came into the bedroom and woke me up and said, Coco's dead. And I burst into tears. I was so upset. And I called the vet that we had been working with, and she said, That's impossible. There's no way she shouldn't be dead. There's no reason for her to be dead. Can you bring her back for a necropsy? And I said, Yes. 

So I took her in, and the necropsy showed that she had a 14-centimeter tear in her uterus, and she had bled to death. And so that's why she was like so mentally absent, because she was in shock from all the blood she was losing. And I said to the vet, I don't understand, like, how could she have bled to death? There was no blood. I never saw any blood, which is true, she was on the way home, she was in the back seat with me. There was not a drop of blood on my seat of my car. And the vet said she bled out into her abdomen. And at the time, I didn't realize that's how all goats hemorrhage. 

Because as humans, we're vertical, and so if you've had a baby, you know there's a lot of blood, and you're going through pads every two or three hours. And with goats, they're horizontal. So think about how little blood you see after a normal goat birth. I mean, there's a little that gets on their vulva and their tail and stuff. But if you think of that, compared to a person like it's pretty much nothing. And so when a goat hemorrhages, you don't see a lot of blood. And I think everybody just assumes that if a goat is bleeding to death, that you're gonna see a lot of blood, and the reality is that you don't, you don't see any more than usual, because it's all going into their abdomen.

I first decided that I wanted to do this episode a year ago after some Facebook posts that we had that made me realize that there are a lot of people who don't understand much about a goat's uterus because I was talking about the possibility of a uterine rupture. And there were people on both extremes. There were people on one end saying that was impossible. There's no way that you could cause a goat's uterus to tear. And then on the other end there were these really strange people who said, Oh, goats, their uterus tears every time they give birth. That is really super weird. 

So it just made me realize that people do not understand that it is very possible to tear a goat's uterus when you're in there, and that you always need to be mindful of that. And if it tears, depending on the size of the tear, there's a variety of things that can happen. I mean, if it's a if it's a small tear, at minimum, you're looking at the potential for an infection, possibly tetanus. You know, there's all kinds of germs that could take up residence in a tear inside the uterus, and it's a very anaerobic environment, which, which is why tetanus is a real possibility. But just any kind of germs at all could cause an infection in a small tear, and then the bigger the tear gets, the harder it's going to be for the goat to clot enough to not bleed to death. 

The vet said she was very impressed by the clotting that had happened inside of Coco. You know, she said she was she had some really impressive clots, but it just, there wasn't enough for a tear that was 14 centimeters. And so it's really important to be aware of the fact that this is a possibility, and that it does happen. Someone just asked in the chat, how can you diagnose the tear before it's too late, and that is really hard. 

So we've actually had three goats that hemorrhaged after birth. The only reason I know this is because I take them to the vet, and I got so angry a few months ago when I saw somebody on Facebook who talked about their their goat dying from sadness after the baby was born dead. Like goats do not die from sadness. Okay? Like they die from infections. They die from blood loss. They die from toxemia or hypocalcemia. They do not die from sadness. 

So if a goat is going to get an infection, that's going to happen two to four days after birth, but if they are bleeding, that is going to be really soon, you know, like Coco, right after they pulled the fifth kid, is when she just mentally checked out. The other two goats that we had that almost bled to death, and each wound up spending about a week in the vet hospital. One actually got a blood transfusion. Those two also were just mentally checked out. All three of these goats were experienced moms. They were all amazing moms, and in all three cases, they just wanted nothing to do with the kids. They walked away from them. One of them did not even want to let us milk her. And like, this was a goat that had had an extended lactation of two and a half years before. Like, she was a very experienced milk goat, and she was just like, Don't touch me. She just wanted to go crawl in the corner. And even the first time I called the vet about her, they said, Oh, maybe she's just in a lot of pain after the birth. And I'm like, I don't think so. Like, this is not quite right, and I'm glad I took her in, because she had lost a lot of blood. 

So now, like looking back on all of this, and knowing what I know, if I had a goat that was like mentally checked out, what I would do is I would check the eyelids, because we think of that as being associated with parasites, but it's just a check for anemia. And so if your goat was completely fine before she went into labor, and now, all of a sudden, she just wants to lay in the corner, and she wants nothing to do with you or her kids. If you check her eyelids and they're white, she's just lost a lot of blood somehow, and she needs assistance, and it's tough in terms of knowing what to do if it's possible to fix a uterine tear, you know, that would, that would cost probably a fair amount of money. You'd also have to have a vet that was knowledgeable about that. 

Somebody contacted me last year during kidding season, and they had a goat that was very, very lethargic, and it was just two days after kidding, and I told her to check the eyelids, and they were really, really pale. And since she was already two days after kidding, and like, we went through all the things for, like, worms, you know, like she's pooping normally, her body condition is fine, but she's very, very anemic, and it's like, well, since it's been two days already, she's probably clotted, and so she's probably not in danger of, actually, you know, dying. She's not going to bleed to death at this point, but she is very anemic, and you can, you know, either take her to the vet for a possible blood transfusion, or keep watching her and hope that she continues to improve, which she did.

That's the reason I wanted to do that podcast episode on blood transfusions and anemia. We've done two separate ones within the last couple months, and in both of those we talked about blood loss from kidding and that you can do a blood transfusion if you need to. And I won't go into everything that we discussed in those episodes because they were super thorough. In fact, I did the second episode on blood transfusions because I interviewed a vet professor who had used bovine blood, because you don't always have a goat available as a donor. 

What you really need for a donor goat is a big, meaty wether who has no stress on his body. You know, like you, you don't want to use one of your pregnant or milking does. You may or may not want to use an intact buck for a variety of reasons. So if you've got a nice, big, meaty wether that's an ideal candidate to be your blood donor. But if you don't have that, it was really cool that he talked about using blood from a cow to transfuse, and they did that in a couple of experimental cases, and it worked totally fine, and the goat did not respond negatively to it. So the two goats we had that hemorrhaged that survived, one did have a blood transfusion, and the other one did not. And looking back on it, I am really wondering why they didn't do a blood transfusion on the second goat. Because she was there for a week, and they said, you know, she's doing really great. You can come get her. And I went to get her, and she's still laying in the corner. And I literally said, I looked at her, and I'm like, “This is great? She looks horrible. She still looks like she's gonna die.”

“Oh no, she's doing so much better.” I was like, okay, and I took her home, and it still took, like, another week for her to really start acting like a normal goat again. So recovering from a really big blood loss is definitely challenging. If you've ever known a person who is severely anemic, and that's why, with people you know, once they're severely anemic, we do blood transfusions. So that's a really good thing to know is a possibility for your goat. 

If your local vet can't do it, possibly you can find another one that you could take your goat to. Or maybe your vet would be amenable to talking to a professor at one of the universities about how to do it. I know our guest that we had who talked about blood transfusion, you know, would be happy to talk about his research and using bovine blood, if you don't have a goat as a donor.

 I know people are often worried that their goat is just going to drop dead in the middle of labor. And so I also want to point out again that [with] Coco it it took us three hours, you know, like the first kid was born, and then I was trying for quite some time to get kid number two out, and then we went, it was a two hour drive to the university, and Coco did fine for that, her kids. All five kids were born kicking and screaming and very healthy. So you know, a lot of people think that they don't have time to get help, especially if they don't have a vet that's right around the corner or who can show up at their farm in the next 20 minutes. And the reality is that you really do have plenty of time to get help, but this is also why you need to have a relationship with a vet already, because if you've got a relationship with a vet that you can just call that is going to make everything happen way faster than if you don't have a relationship with a vet and you're trying to find one in the middle of an emergency situation. 

Not to mention the fact that some vets don't even want to get involved in an emergency situation if they don't have a relationship with you, because they don't know what they're walking into. And I've heard some pretty bad stories, you know, from vets about trying to help in a situation where the goats had not been getting the best care. So it's really important to make sure that you've got a relationship with a vet. 

 I started going to the university way back in the early 2000s because our local farm vet sold his practice to somebody that just wanted to do dogs and cats, and so I had to drive my goats two hours to get veterinary care, and then I got kind of spoiled with a 24-hour vet hospital. Even if it is two hours away, it's 24 hours, and they've got a lab, and they've got specialists like surgeons and dermatologists and animal eye doctors and just every specialty imaginable. So think about that too. If you don't have a local vet, maybe you're close enough to drive to a university vet hospital. Surely you guys have questions.

Goats 365 member 1  19:18  

I do have a question, Deborah, did you ever figure out? Or did they ever figure out what the tear was caused from? Was it from you pushing or pulling a goat out, or it was just the pressure in there? Did they ever figure that out?

Deborah Niemann  19:34  

No, they didn't. And the thing is that the vet who had pulled the kids was still in total shock that she didn't realize that there was a tear while we were still there. And she was obviously very experienced. I mean, I was so impressed with the way she was, you know, getting those kids out of there like so fast. It was crazy, but somehow there'd been a tear. 

In my mind, I've had a couple of different thoughts. One was that they let a student do a final sweep after the vet had pulled the last kid. So I was always wondering like, Well, did that student do something because she was not experienced? And then the other thought I had was, was it the kid puller? Because, like I said, it's a wire noose that goes over the kid's head. And when I first saw it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I have to have one of those. If this happens again, I have to have that to be able to, you know, keep the kid's head from flopping back, and I bought one. 

I've never used it, and I don't really think I would use it, because the idea of a metal wire inside of a goat's uterus really just sounds like you're playing with fire. I know one of the things that I do feel confident saying I would never let somebody do a fetotomy on on a kid inside one of my goats. I have Nigerian dwarfs. They're very small. People with cattle are like, oh, a fetotomy is not a big deal at all. And it's like, well, yeah, because a cow has a uterus the size of my living room, you know, like, you could do all kinds of stuff in there, you've got tons of room to work. And a fetotomy is when they cut up the kid. Usually it's because the kid has been dead just the right amount of time, rigor mortis has set in, like they can't straighten it out into that big, long diving position. And so it's either a C-section or a fetotomy. And unless somebody's got really high-priced show cattle, they're not usually going to spring for the C-section because the fetotomy is much cheaper. And so people, they just sound so comfortable with this idea in a cow, but a goat is way smaller.

 And then, when you're talking about a Nigerian, that does not give you much room to work. I mean, I have small hands. I can barely get my hand into a Nigerian. So the idea of getting a hand in there, as well as the metal equipment required to dismember a goat fetus, that just sounds like you're asking for trouble. 

I actually know multiple people who have had a doe bleed to death after that was done. So it's not an unrealistic fear like that was actually the very first time I ever heard of it. And why I am so adamant that people not breed little does to bigger bucks. Um, many years ago, when I was still really new, I knew somebody she wanted to have pygoras, and she got it backwards. She bred her pygmy doe to an angora buck. And of course, the doe had a single, so the doe had this big single baby in there. And the vet came out to her farm and cut up the baby to remove it from the mom, and the mom was dead within hours. So that is one thing I heard, and I was like, Oh my gosh, that sounds so barbaric. I can't believe they would do that. Why didn't they just do a C-section? And a C-section is more expensive, yeah, because it's surgery, it's more complicated, but it's also a lot safer, because, you know, like I am cutting into the uterus here, I will stitch up the uterus here, you know, as opposed to working blind in this tiny little space and tearing something, or, in the case of a fetotomy, probably cutting, you know, they probably cut the uterus. And that was the first of quite a few stories that I heard about does bleeding to death within hours of having that done. 

There's another question in the chat: Can they be bred again, if they've had a small tear and recovered, or does that cause issues? 

So it's interesting, because of the other two goats that hemorrhaged and survived. One of them was uterine the other one, it was a vaginal tear. And I also discovered last year, a lot of people don't actually know where the vagina is on a goat, so they see this hole at the back, and they think it goes right into the uterus, and it doesn't. The goat's vulva opens up to a long tube, which is the vagina, and inside that is the cervix, which is the opening to the uterus. And the uterus is like this giant balloon inside the goat's abdomen.

So this one goat gave birth completely unassisted, and the kid came out covered with blood, and there was an intern there with me, and she sees this kid covered with blood, and she's like, Is that normal? And I was like, “No, I've never seen that before.” That was the one. And, like, the kids were born. And she just like, she got up and she walked away, and she wanted nothing to do with us, so I took her in, and they found out she had a vaginal tear, which is basically that long tube that goes to the uterus. It is not the uterus. And the interesting thing about that, that they told me, is that they said that was actually worse than a uterine tear, because a small uterine tear can heal up, but a vaginal tear, the problem is that the scar tissue with that is not going to stretch. So they said if she ever gets pregnant again, she would need to have a C section. 

So we made sure she never got pregnant again, and she had a three-year lactation after that. So it's like, alright, well, we're just gonna see. So this was a goat that, like, had three lactations for her whole life. It was like a year and a half, two and a half and then three years. So, yes, a small uterine tear can heal, but you need to know what it is, you know, like, you need to actually get a diagnosis, rather than just guessing. 

I had Victoria at the University vet hospital, and that's how they knew where the tear was. And this is why I'm so adamant too about not breeding goats to bucks that are too big. 100% of my goats are Nigerians. They have been since I sold the last of my La Manchas like 12 or 13 years ago. So 100% of my goats are all Nigerians. None of my goats are overheight. But in her case, she was small. She was on the smaller side, and for some crazy reason, she had a five-pound kid, which was just too big for her. 

So that's why you just don't want to take chances in terms of breeding a larger breed to a smaller breed. Yes, I know there are people bragging on Facebook that it worked out for them, but that does not mean it's going to work out for you, and you are playing with fire when you do that, even if the goat can get it out without a C-section, it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be some kind of repercussions. And, you know, I think if, if Victoria had been on a lot of farms, she would have, she would have just been dead within a few days, you know, if she hadn't been taken to the vet when she was because she was just in such bad shape. 

Any other questions? I do want to start doing this more often, though, because when I was at Podfest last month, they were talking about telling stories and the importance of telling stories, and that people learn from stories sometimes easier and better than they do from facts and figures. And I'm such a facts and figures person, I always feel like, oh, I need to give you the scientific evidence to back up this thing. And the reality is that a lot of times hearing a story is more impactful, and it's just easier to remember, you know, rather than trying to remember all of the facts and figures. I think it's still important to have all the facts and figures, and we're still definitely going to be having all of our experts on because I want to know all of the science behind why things happen and everything, but being able to share the stories with people, I'm hoping that that's going to make it easier for them to remember stuff.

Goats 365 member 2  28:22  

You're a good storyteller. You give a lot of detail, and it makes a lot of sense, so I think you should tell stories too. Thanks. Yeah, sorry for your loss too. It sounds heartbreaking.

Deborah Niemann  28:37  

It was. I kept trying to, like, get prepared for this. And Coco's story is in my book, Goats Giving Birth. And I thought like, oh, well, this happened, you know, 12 years ago. I need to reread that story so that I refresh myself on all the details. And I was sitting at my kitchen table crying as I was reading it. It's still just so upsetting. And you know, like I was telling Shawn in our group, you just, you keep replaying stuff in your head. It's been 12 years, and I still think like maybe if I had done X, Y, Z, you know, it would have had a better outcome. 

But I don’t have a crystal ball and neither do you. It’s completely futile and counterproductive to beat ourselves up when things don’t turn out perfectly. Taking Coco to the vet hospital was the most responsible thing I could have done at the time. And the vet did deliver four healthy kids in addition to the one that I had delivered on the farm. 

I hope you found it helpful to hear Coco’s story. Maybe it helped you better understand how uterine ruptures and hemorrhages can happen. Maybe it helped you be a little more kind to yourself because of a past birth that didn’t go perfectly. Or maybe it helped give you a more realistic view of how things might not go perfectly in every birth, even when you make responsible decisions. 

This week we are celebrating our fifth anniversary of the podcast by bringing you two additional episodes with members of Goats 365. And as we enter our sixth year, we are moving back to weekly episodes while also including more case studies and personal stories of goats and the people who love them. Want to join our Goats 365 community? Visit goats365.com to learn more.