Adventures in birthing

What were you doing Wednesday morning @ 6AM? Personally, I was snuggled all nice and cozy underneath the quilt on our bed in that lovely state of semi-consciousness one gets to experience when you have already woken up but are just lying there thinking about the day ahead or perhaps, more importantly, nothing at all. Jennifer had already headed up to the Arena several minutes earlier to do the morning baby check and refill princess Musette’s hanging milk bottle. Having sent our kids off Tuesday afternoon for a curtailed week on Cape Cod with my sister and her family, the house was unusually quiet too. Kind of nice. It was just me and our kitty, Crystal, who had popped up onto the foot of our bed to begin her own daily siesta after a long night out terrorizing the resident rodent population. That was of course when the Jen called down on the phone: “Can you come up here and help me? There’s something wrong with Reality.” Crap. Lie-ins are overrated anyway (not).

I’ve learned over the years that asking for more information and details over the phone in such situations doesn’t change anything or for that matter really ultimately make me feel much better anyway. Are you going to scrub up and go see what’s going on inside of said alpaca female, Ian? If the answer is “no,” then just get your boots on and get your ass up to the barn as quickly as you can.

“Reality” in this case, is in fact SHRA Virtual’s Reality, a highly valued — and highly proven — 10+ year member of our foundation herd. Of course if there was going to be a problem with a delivery it had to be someone like her. The situation in question was that when Jen looked in on the maternity ward first thing yesterday morning (there were 6 females all presently due), there was what looked like a piece of fetal membrane or possibly even placenta hanging out of Reality’s rear end. Not a problem of course if there’s already a baby on the ground but in this case the cria quite clearly was still inside. So with yours truly holding mom around the neck Jen washed up, lubed up, and went in trans-vaginally to feel what she could feel: namely that the baby was presenting upside down and that that was indeed the placenta trying to come out before the cria itself. That is generally not a good thing and is a scenario which often ends with a stillborn: the cria loses it’s oxygen source as the placenta detaches from uterus and because he/she is not out of the birth canal they can’t yet breath on their own. Though she had to tear through the placental tissue to get to the cria, Jen got the baby turned around in fairly short order and as she pulled out the front feet and the head with some help from mom, we could see that Reality and Matrix Majesty had at the very least gotten the color right: it was dark. At that moment I had to keep my enthusiasm in check though as alas, dark brown/bay black and dead wouldn’t count for much. With the cria over halfway out but still seemingly unresponsive, Jen asked me to run and grab a 3cc syringe and the bottles of Dexamethasone and Epinephrin in case we needed them to give the cria a chemically based jump-start. Even then I didn’t dare apply the jinx by asking if the cria was still alive or not, just run and get the drugs dufus!

As it turned out the cria was in fact fine. By the time I got back less than a minute later, Jen had the newborn male laid out on a towel behind his momma and the little guy was already breathing normally and thrashing around. Once fully out of his mom, the little guy had responded to Jen’s rubbing of his torso with a giant gasp as if seemingly coming back to life. No artificial stimulation would be required. Within 20 minutes his temp was good and he was well on his way to taking his first wobbly steps. Given how touch and go things had felt just 30 minutes earlier, that was quite a nice turn of events. Reality’s newest cria was a lucky little bugger.

While Reality has had some of the most important colored crias in our farm’s 15 year history (both Nutmeg of Consolation and Acomani are her daughters and remain in our herd alongside their mom), it had been a few years since she had delivered a cria that was A. dark colored and B. born alive. Though anyone that’s done this long enough will usually tell you that the bad and the good tend to balance each other out over time. Having said  that, with Reality just shy of her 12th year the fact is that we never know how many more crias we might get out of her. So even if it was a bit jarring at first, yesterday’s birth was in the final analysis a very nice start to the day. Plus, we can always sleep in some other time…