Amen about the big uddered cows, cull them while you can becuase they always give you trouble down the road. Last year we had a cow do basically the same thing as what you are saying happened to yours, we gave her some penicillin and watched that quarter closely, what eventually happened was that the flesh around the whole quarter around the problem teat just finally shed off, only it was hanging by the teat itself, which was still intact. I put her in the chute and took a sharp knife and cut the teat off at the base of the udder. The huge chunk of meat that was hanging from the teat weighed a couple pounds, and it didn't smell good. We watched her closely for awhile, she felt better almost immediately, and when we brought her in off the forest last fall you couldn't even tell anything had happened to her except she was missing a teat. Her calf was just as big as the rest as well.
The funniest part about it, and I kind of hate to admit this because it makes me look stupid, is that the cow was so normal that we forgot about it for awhile, and when we culled our open cows I forgot to pull her out as well, so we kept her all winter and I just noticed her when we started calving because I was paying a lot closer attention to their udders, when I saw this udder that looked like it only had 3 teats, and then I realized what we had done. I had to laugh about it though, and its kind of a running joke around here now, especially because her ear tag number is, you guessed it, #3.
So, hopefully I can remember this fall.
