Hog Cuttin
It's actually pronounced "hoawg" as in "hoagie" but with a "w" thrown in for effect. At least that's how Kay pronounced it when she asked me for that favor one morning. I was just coming off a night shift and about to walk out the door when a friend stopped me. It seems she had a problem with her hog.
Her husband and 2 sons are pig farmers. They have day jobs, but they are big into the 4-H thing and decided to raise pigs to market and to show, depending on various pig qualities. If a hog has good coloring or build, they might decide to show it in a fair or something. She has brought in pictures of some of their prize winning hogs. It's as you would expect a prize winning hog picture to be. Ribbons, hogs and proud people. If it does not have good coloring or build, they "send the hog to market", which is an actual expression used by pig farmers to take the edge off the word "slaughter". They make a call and a hog truck comes and takes it away to be prepared for your breakfast table.
Kay, I should mention, is an excellent nurse and good friend, and is about 5 foot tall and built like a healthey hog. She jokes around about this fact quite a bit, so it's OK that I do also. It seems she's proud of it, in fact. I have to admit, her husband's decision to take up pig farming does show a line of consistency.
Anyway, she told me a rather good looking hog has a blood wart. Up to this point in my life, I had never heard of a blood wart, so I asked her what it was. Apparently, it's some type of wart-like growth that if left alone is benign, but eventually turns the entire hog the color of the skin the blood wart is. Because this hog had a nice black and white pattern, and the blood wart is black, it ran the risk of turning the hog pure black. Pure black hogs don't win ribbons, I guess. Pure black hogs become bacon. So in fact, this particular blood wart was not benign at all to this particular pig. I would say it was pretty damn malignant, in fact.
After hearing this, I took it upon myself to save this pig's life. I told Kay we had to do something about this blood wart so the hog wouldn't be killed. Her response was a simple "um . . ok". I sheepishly realized she was in it for the ribbon, and could care less about another hog gone to market.
The next morning after work, I set out the Pennsylvania - MD border to cut this thing off and sew the pig up. It was a long drive, made worse by the small country roads I had to take once I turned off of 15, but I found the place. Feeling very James Herriot, I opened the car door to be greeted by an intimidatingly large albeit freindly Rottweiler. I had worn jeans and a flannel shirt hoping not to appear suburban, and the old dog was doing his best to add to it with what was my first exposure to pig dirt. The dog was hog dirty, the field was hog dirty, and Kay's son was hog dirty. This dirt was not fresh or earthy. This dirt was old and smelly. It was dirt that had been exposed to the elements of all seasons and has probably been on pigs, farm machinery, shoes, mixed with pigshit, dogs, tires, you name it. Dirt on a pig farm is the dirtiest dirt you can imagine. And it stunk. The marks it made on my jeans and flannel shirt made them look like a three piece suit in comparison. Kay's son, on the other hand, was covered in it, especially his pants, which I think were jeans also, at least at one point. His shoes were so dirty and crusted with pig dirt they looked like dried wax.
After some small talk with Kay (obviously not too involved with the management of the farm, since she was not covered in pigdirt) and her son (definately involved with the management of the farm), we strolled down to the barn where the pigs were kept. On our way there, I saw what appeared to be a large, rocking boulder out in a field of pig dirt. I didn't know what I was seeing, exactly, since the boulder was moving in place and was shaped oddly. Seeing my confusion, Kay said,"oh that's Grinder"
Grinder was their stud Hog, and he was apparently in the process of grinding a sow of similar size. Grinder was 400 pounds. The sow was almost 300. Kay told me Grinder will hump about 3 times an hour. I mumbled "wow" after I realized what I was witnessing. I played it off pretty well, but I think I tripped on every bump on the way to the barn since I was fixated on the once in a lifetime spectacle taking place out in that field.
Once in the barn, I couldn't play it off anymore. The smell had to be addressed. The humidity inside the barn may have made it worse, but the smell was to say the least, pungent. I said, "pretty stinky" and Kay and her son smiled and said something like, "sure is". As if they had no idea their barn smelled like one hundred pigs in shit.
There really were about 100 hogs of various sizes in this barn. Most were the size of a large watermelon, since they were so young, but there were about 10 sows the size of a large couch. There were little tiny pigs, running around in their pens, nursing off grunting mud leviathans, and medium sized hogs bumping into eachother and squealing. I expected to see this many hogs, but the cats took me off guard.
There were about 25 little cats that were pretty much everywhere. They climbed on the railings of the pens, the ground (covered in pig dirt), the backs of pigs, sacks of stuff having to do with pigfarming. EVERYWHERE. If you stared in one spot, the movement of all the cats in your peripheral vision was like seeing stars when you're light-headed. I asked how many cats there were, and Kay said, "oh 'bout 5 or 6"!
Either she was downplaying the number of barncats she had, or these cats were so highly mobile and active, they made a handful of cats look like an infestation. Probably a combination of the two.
There were globs of pinkish tissue all over the ground, and Kay, with a harsh word directed at her son, told me they were hogballs. These lima bean size globs were scattered around in the dirt and the straw, and apparently came off pigs a couple days old. Her son told us he thought the cats would clean them up for him. I guess the cats got tired of eating hog balls.
The freshly neutered pigs were running around in a little pen and boy were they cute. I thought this job may be easy on little guys like that. My target however, was a little larger. Kay's boy reached into a group of hogs and pulled one of the watermelon sized guys out by the hind legs. It was dangling there in front of me upside down and began squealing. And squeal it did. Holy Holy Holy God.
It was so unbeleivably loud it actually made me squint my eyes and shrug my shoulders involuntarily. I should have expected it by the look Kay and her son gave eachother when I told them I just brought a little local lidocaine and not a general anesthetic. What am I, an anesthesiologist for pigs? I stumbled backwards over some hogballs, and fought the urge to run out of the barn with my hands over my ears. And it didn't stop, either - after its lungs were emptied, it sucked in air for half a second and kept going just as loud, over and over again.
I yelled to them, "WHEN WILL HE STOP?", but I literally could not hear my own voice. They couldn't either, because they just shook their heads telling me it's useless to try to talk. Unbeleivable.
So I put my bag down and drew up a syringe full of lidocaine. As I approached the upside down pig, still being held by Kay's son, it was like walking into a storm. I kept on tilting my head away from the sound, giving each aching ear a break from the onslaught. Finally up close, the pig started to gyrate violently as if it had a hula hoop around his muscular little body. The blood wart was in the middle, and quickly became a blur of motion. The situation was impossible.
There are times at work when things need to be done fast. In terrible situations no one in health care likes to talk about, there comes a time when something needs to be done to a patient fast and in any manner possible, by you. They are usually life-saving situations and they generally suck. I don't often find myself in those scary situations, but they have occured in the past. I realized, staring at this vibrating pig, this was one of those situations. Stop farting around and do it. Now.
I stabbed that pig with my needle with a quick overhand strike, and kept it there. Impossibly, the pig screamed louder. My thumb reached the plunger and pushed. I did it again. And again. And again.
I was pretty sure the blood wart was numb now. OK, take a breath. I mouthed, "I NEED HIM FLAT", and with stunning agility, Kay's son, while holding an inverted pig, flipped a big wooden box over with his foot. He then layed the pig down on it with what looked like a pig-wrestling move. Now we were rolling.
I took out my scalpel and pickups, and begain cutting away. The gyrations became a little predictable and in between movements, I was able to slice the skin around this wart. Things were looking better when the pen fence behind me started to buck and rattle. Kay jumped behind me and started doing something, but I couldn't tell what exactly it was since my site was starting to really bleed. Her son mouthed to me over the squealing, "that's his momma". Holy God. I remembered how big that thing was.
Directly behind me a 340 pound monster had risen from the mud and began bucking against it's gate, trying to save her pig. Then the cats came.
They must have smelled blood, because as the wart was coming off, my field of view was obscured by a cat that had jumped onto the box directly infront of me. I swatted it off. Another replaced it. Things were starting to deteriorate rapidly.
At times there were two cats in front of my face, as I almost blindly made the final cuts to get this pigskin off. The excised piece of skin was about the size of the palm of your hand, maybe smaller, and the wound it left behind bled pretty well.
I tossed the wart aside and a cat ran up and took it. The little guy just picked it up and ran away, with most of the other cats following it.
I think I laughed, not out of humor, but because of how crazily impossible everything seemed to me. As soon as he held the pig upside down, I knew this little adventure was not going to be what I had expected, but with the cats stealing the blood wart, the situation suddenly entered the truly bizzare.
Kay was behind me holding a monster at bay. In the corner of my eye I noticed a cat fight, presumably over the blood wart. I was kneeling in the smelliest barn in the state, surrounded by baby hogballs. Before me was a bleeding, gaping wound in a pig making a sound so horrible and unimaginably loud, everything was barely noticeable. And I was operating on an animal. Sewing him shut, I realized any one of the above incidents would be a topic for at least a week in my suburban 40 hour workweek life, but all of them happening at once was a little bit of an overload on my system.
By the end of it, my ears felt like they were throbbing. The pig was released into a small lonely paddock and it downgraded its squealing to a whimper. The incision looked pretty good and tightly closed, and I have no idea where the wad of skin with the wart on it ended up.
Shaken, I accepted the thanks and made my way to the car, not knowing what just happened or how it ended. I was in a daze, and I was embarassed for some reason. Looking at myself in the rearview mirror, I saw that I was sweaty, had pigdirt on my face, and my hair was screwed up - I knew I appeared unprofessionally shaken up, but this was comical. I wasn't sure if I had just accomplished something heroic, or foolishly done something horrendous, but I was done, and I was leaving.
The whole situation faded into a repressed thought until the other day, when Kay stopped me again and told my how well that hog was doing. It's colors are the same, and she plans on showing it - not killing it.
I love bacon and eat plenty of pork, but I know that pig on a level most people will never know a pig, and I was actually nervous about its future. Very proud of that pig. I understand it's doing quite well and will be shown this fall.
Maybe I'll show you a picture sometime.
Her husband and 2 sons are pig farmers. They have day jobs, but they are big into the 4-H thing and decided to raise pigs to market and to show, depending on various pig qualities. If a hog has good coloring or build, they might decide to show it in a fair or something. She has brought in pictures of some of their prize winning hogs. It's as you would expect a prize winning hog picture to be. Ribbons, hogs and proud people. If it does not have good coloring or build, they "send the hog to market", which is an actual expression used by pig farmers to take the edge off the word "slaughter". They make a call and a hog truck comes and takes it away to be prepared for your breakfast table.
Kay, I should mention, is an excellent nurse and good friend, and is about 5 foot tall and built like a healthey hog. She jokes around about this fact quite a bit, so it's OK that I do also. It seems she's proud of it, in fact. I have to admit, her husband's decision to take up pig farming does show a line of consistency.
Anyway, she told me a rather good looking hog has a blood wart. Up to this point in my life, I had never heard of a blood wart, so I asked her what it was. Apparently, it's some type of wart-like growth that if left alone is benign, but eventually turns the entire hog the color of the skin the blood wart is. Because this hog had a nice black and white pattern, and the blood wart is black, it ran the risk of turning the hog pure black. Pure black hogs don't win ribbons, I guess. Pure black hogs become bacon. So in fact, this particular blood wart was not benign at all to this particular pig. I would say it was pretty damn malignant, in fact.
After hearing this, I took it upon myself to save this pig's life. I told Kay we had to do something about this blood wart so the hog wouldn't be killed. Her response was a simple "um . . ok". I sheepishly realized she was in it for the ribbon, and could care less about another hog gone to market.
The next morning after work, I set out the Pennsylvania - MD border to cut this thing off and sew the pig up. It was a long drive, made worse by the small country roads I had to take once I turned off of 15, but I found the place. Feeling very James Herriot, I opened the car door to be greeted by an intimidatingly large albeit freindly Rottweiler. I had worn jeans and a flannel shirt hoping not to appear suburban, and the old dog was doing his best to add to it with what was my first exposure to pig dirt. The dog was hog dirty, the field was hog dirty, and Kay's son was hog dirty. This dirt was not fresh or earthy. This dirt was old and smelly. It was dirt that had been exposed to the elements of all seasons and has probably been on pigs, farm machinery, shoes, mixed with pigshit, dogs, tires, you name it. Dirt on a pig farm is the dirtiest dirt you can imagine. And it stunk. The marks it made on my jeans and flannel shirt made them look like a three piece suit in comparison. Kay's son, on the other hand, was covered in it, especially his pants, which I think were jeans also, at least at one point. His shoes were so dirty and crusted with pig dirt they looked like dried wax.
After some small talk with Kay (obviously not too involved with the management of the farm, since she was not covered in pigdirt) and her son (definately involved with the management of the farm), we strolled down to the barn where the pigs were kept. On our way there, I saw what appeared to be a large, rocking boulder out in a field of pig dirt. I didn't know what I was seeing, exactly, since the boulder was moving in place and was shaped oddly. Seeing my confusion, Kay said,"oh that's Grinder"
Grinder was their stud Hog, and he was apparently in the process of grinding a sow of similar size. Grinder was 400 pounds. The sow was almost 300. Kay told me Grinder will hump about 3 times an hour. I mumbled "wow" after I realized what I was witnessing. I played it off pretty well, but I think I tripped on every bump on the way to the barn since I was fixated on the once in a lifetime spectacle taking place out in that field.
Once in the barn, I couldn't play it off anymore. The smell had to be addressed. The humidity inside the barn may have made it worse, but the smell was to say the least, pungent. I said, "pretty stinky" and Kay and her son smiled and said something like, "sure is". As if they had no idea their barn smelled like one hundred pigs in shit.
There really were about 100 hogs of various sizes in this barn. Most were the size of a large watermelon, since they were so young, but there were about 10 sows the size of a large couch. There were little tiny pigs, running around in their pens, nursing off grunting mud leviathans, and medium sized hogs bumping into eachother and squealing. I expected to see this many hogs, but the cats took me off guard.
There were about 25 little cats that were pretty much everywhere. They climbed on the railings of the pens, the ground (covered in pig dirt), the backs of pigs, sacks of stuff having to do with pigfarming. EVERYWHERE. If you stared in one spot, the movement of all the cats in your peripheral vision was like seeing stars when you're light-headed. I asked how many cats there were, and Kay said, "oh 'bout 5 or 6"!
Either she was downplaying the number of barncats she had, or these cats were so highly mobile and active, they made a handful of cats look like an infestation. Probably a combination of the two.
There were globs of pinkish tissue all over the ground, and Kay, with a harsh word directed at her son, told me they were hogballs. These lima bean size globs were scattered around in the dirt and the straw, and apparently came off pigs a couple days old. Her son told us he thought the cats would clean them up for him. I guess the cats got tired of eating hog balls.
The freshly neutered pigs were running around in a little pen and boy were they cute. I thought this job may be easy on little guys like that. My target however, was a little larger. Kay's boy reached into a group of hogs and pulled one of the watermelon sized guys out by the hind legs. It was dangling there in front of me upside down and began squealing. And squeal it did. Holy Holy Holy God.
It was so unbeleivably loud it actually made me squint my eyes and shrug my shoulders involuntarily. I should have expected it by the look Kay and her son gave eachother when I told them I just brought a little local lidocaine and not a general anesthetic. What am I, an anesthesiologist for pigs? I stumbled backwards over some hogballs, and fought the urge to run out of the barn with my hands over my ears. And it didn't stop, either - after its lungs were emptied, it sucked in air for half a second and kept going just as loud, over and over again.
I yelled to them, "WHEN WILL HE STOP?", but I literally could not hear my own voice. They couldn't either, because they just shook their heads telling me it's useless to try to talk. Unbeleivable.
So I put my bag down and drew up a syringe full of lidocaine. As I approached the upside down pig, still being held by Kay's son, it was like walking into a storm. I kept on tilting my head away from the sound, giving each aching ear a break from the onslaught. Finally up close, the pig started to gyrate violently as if it had a hula hoop around his muscular little body. The blood wart was in the middle, and quickly became a blur of motion. The situation was impossible.
There are times at work when things need to be done fast. In terrible situations no one in health care likes to talk about, there comes a time when something needs to be done to a patient fast and in any manner possible, by you. They are usually life-saving situations and they generally suck. I don't often find myself in those scary situations, but they have occured in the past. I realized, staring at this vibrating pig, this was one of those situations. Stop farting around and do it. Now.
I stabbed that pig with my needle with a quick overhand strike, and kept it there. Impossibly, the pig screamed louder. My thumb reached the plunger and pushed. I did it again. And again. And again.
I was pretty sure the blood wart was numb now. OK, take a breath. I mouthed, "I NEED HIM FLAT", and with stunning agility, Kay's son, while holding an inverted pig, flipped a big wooden box over with his foot. He then layed the pig down on it with what looked like a pig-wrestling move. Now we were rolling.
I took out my scalpel and pickups, and begain cutting away. The gyrations became a little predictable and in between movements, I was able to slice the skin around this wart. Things were looking better when the pen fence behind me started to buck and rattle. Kay jumped behind me and started doing something, but I couldn't tell what exactly it was since my site was starting to really bleed. Her son mouthed to me over the squealing, "that's his momma". Holy God. I remembered how big that thing was.
Directly behind me a 340 pound monster had risen from the mud and began bucking against it's gate, trying to save her pig. Then the cats came.
They must have smelled blood, because as the wart was coming off, my field of view was obscured by a cat that had jumped onto the box directly infront of me. I swatted it off. Another replaced it. Things were starting to deteriorate rapidly.
At times there were two cats in front of my face, as I almost blindly made the final cuts to get this pigskin off. The excised piece of skin was about the size of the palm of your hand, maybe smaller, and the wound it left behind bled pretty well.
I tossed the wart aside and a cat ran up and took it. The little guy just picked it up and ran away, with most of the other cats following it.
I think I laughed, not out of humor, but because of how crazily impossible everything seemed to me. As soon as he held the pig upside down, I knew this little adventure was not going to be what I had expected, but with the cats stealing the blood wart, the situation suddenly entered the truly bizzare.
Kay was behind me holding a monster at bay. In the corner of my eye I noticed a cat fight, presumably over the blood wart. I was kneeling in the smelliest barn in the state, surrounded by baby hogballs. Before me was a bleeding, gaping wound in a pig making a sound so horrible and unimaginably loud, everything was barely noticeable. And I was operating on an animal. Sewing him shut, I realized any one of the above incidents would be a topic for at least a week in my suburban 40 hour workweek life, but all of them happening at once was a little bit of an overload on my system.
By the end of it, my ears felt like they were throbbing. The pig was released into a small lonely paddock and it downgraded its squealing to a whimper. The incision looked pretty good and tightly closed, and I have no idea where the wad of skin with the wart on it ended up.
Shaken, I accepted the thanks and made my way to the car, not knowing what just happened or how it ended. I was in a daze, and I was embarassed for some reason. Looking at myself in the rearview mirror, I saw that I was sweaty, had pigdirt on my face, and my hair was screwed up - I knew I appeared unprofessionally shaken up, but this was comical. I wasn't sure if I had just accomplished something heroic, or foolishly done something horrendous, but I was done, and I was leaving.
The whole situation faded into a repressed thought until the other day, when Kay stopped me again and told my how well that hog was doing. It's colors are the same, and she plans on showing it - not killing it.
I love bacon and eat plenty of pork, but I know that pig on a level most people will never know a pig, and I was actually nervous about its future. Very proud of that pig. I understand it's doing quite well and will be shown this fall.
Maybe I'll show you a picture sometime.
posted by All Rounder | 1:38 AM
4 Comments:
"Mud leviathans", that's great.
Please, next time you go on a hog-cuttin' excursion, invite me.
Since when did you become a Vet?
Pictures! I wanna see pictures!
Even funnier the second time. The visual , over coffee in the early morning was wonderfully hilarious. Now, you could have saved me a bundle extracting Simbo's tooth!
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