On Saturday Denise nicely offered to come over and weigh our sheep for us. Since the Phillips were here as well working with their sheep we quickly took her up on her offer. When she got here however the scale wasn't working properly and we thought maybe the battery was running low so Ashley quickly offered to run back over to the Maljaars house to grab the cord. It seemed to take her a very long time to get back! When she finally got back home I noticed when she got out of the truck she had a bit of a funny look on her face. She explained to Denise that when she got to their house she noticed the neighbor man was putting the sheep back into their pasture as they had pushed through the fence into his pasture. She decided she better help him and went into their pasture to take one of the babies out and put him back into the proper pen when the ram decided she had no business being in there and came at her. As she was explaining this she suddenly started crying! Which is very strange for Ashley. And she showed us her injured hand. The ram butted her good in the thigh, and then backed up, lowered his head and started coming at her again. She had the baby lamb in one arm so she put out her hand to try to fend off the ram and of course...now her hand hurt! We didn't think much of it as Ashley tends to get a large variety of injuries on a regular basis:/ Sunday we noticed her palm had a big bruise on it and her hand was definitely swollen. Sunday after we got into the car after church I asked to feel her fingers and noticed that her pinky and ring finger were ice cold while the other fingers were normal. Since there's a brand new urgent care clinic right down the road from the church I figured we should probably stop and have it looked at. When the xray results showed there was a break at the bottom of the pinky we actually both started laughing! You have got to be kidding. For the second time in under a year she had a serious injury thanks to a sheep!! They said it was a very clean straight fracture across the bottom of the pinky. They wrapped her up good in a half cast and instructed us to go see and orthopedist that week.
That week we went and saw the orthopedist, he was not quite as optimistic as the urgent care dr and pointed out that what looked like a nice clean flat line break, when viewed from the other side was actually a V shaped break down to the knuckle. He put her in a full hard cast up to her elbow and informed her the cast was to stay there for minimum 4-6 weeks. That means, Toppenish Fair, FFA state, Prom.... Could be a lot worse if you consider how big and powerful a ram is!
