My 1st Surgery.

Shepherding went well, though I feel the mantra may have been mistaken. It was cold, and misty - bad conditions for being a sheep-master (just imagine if it'd been an outdoor lambing hill flock!). On the plus side, we rang the vet about a pregnancy toxaemic ewe that had gone down on its legs, and she decided the best course of action was a caesarean section to whip the lambs out ASAP. She got us to draw straws for who would be surgeon's assistant (well, actually we played rock-paper-scissors), and luckily I won, so I got to stick on a waterproof top, and clean up. "Cleanliness not sterility for farm animals" was her mantra - we were performing the operation on the shed table, using an old sink as the instrument trolley and a wheelbarrow as the patient trolley to get her from the pen to the table.

I clipped her up, cleaned the site, and off we went - I got to have a go here and there, and sewed up the subcut/muscle layer, which was fab! We pulled out 2 lambs, but we could only save 1, which considering it was probably a bit premature was quite impressive.

All in all, it was a really quiet afternoon in the lambing shed, apart from the huge excitement of surgery!