Towel-eating donkey and ailing mother saved by expertise of Veterinary Teaching Hospital

My name is Elaine Caffe. I'm a large animal surgeon here at the Virginia Tech Veterinary Teaching Hospital. And the patients we're talking about today are Harper, who's an approximately 3.5 month old donkey full, and her mother, Daisy, a Jenny that came along with her for treatment and care in the hospital. So this little donkey was seen in the field for Colic by her regular veterinarian who recognized that she was quite ill and sent this on to us pretty quickly. She came into my service where we evaluated her and recognized that she needed an abdominal replaratory surgery or Colic surgery. Which is where we found that she had actually ingested a couple pieces of towels, and those were obstructing her colon. Her mom arrived the day after surgery to allow her to nurse and kind of put them back together. But her mom, over the course of being here, had developed a couple of fevers and had some medical issues, developed a little bit of titis. And so The mom initially arrived to the surgery service to be care for with the baby, but when we recognize she had these additional illnesses, our internal medicine team took over and took primary care for her case. So mom and baby had two separate teams. Fortunately, they're both doing quite well. She's doing great, so her care is relatively simple at this b, which is wonderful. That's our goal. Is that they're back to totally normal. They've been all great and very helpful and, like, you know, transparent with everything with us. It's just been hard because we can't come up and see her so often, but she was in great hands. Ready for her to come home, both of them are bring day, so.