by Jo Hardy
We pampered and fussed over her, cleaning her wounds every day, squirting water into her eyes to keep them lubricated, keeping up her antibiotics and pain relief and giving her lots of her favourite treat – watermelon rind. The horses and donkeys in Morocco loved this, but when we bought them apples and carrots as treats, they didn’t know what to do with them.
It was extraordinary what the horses and donkeys in Morocco endured, but despite their resilience, every now and then there was a case so severe that not even the gallant vets and technicians could do anything to help. While I was at Chemaia, a transit van pulled up with a horse in the back. The poor creature had a swinging leg fracture – a leg broken so badly that it was impossible to treat. I had to turn away and take a deep breath to compose myself when I saw it. We had no idea how they’d got the horse into the van, and we had to get it out again, which was shocking in itself, as the horse had to jump down onto the ground. Finally we managed to get it out and hold it still while we placed a mattress next to it. It fell over on the mattress as we put it to sleep. I was so grateful that we were able to end its pain.
That happened on a Friday, which is the holy day in Morocco, which made it even harder for the owner. Driss spent a lot of time consoling him.
Chloe and I were touched by what a caring culture we found in Morocco, with everyone giving what they could to the less fortunate. We decided to become part of that, so we bought bread every day to give to those who needed it.
At the end of our week Chloe went to join her boyfriend for a week of surfing on the coast, and I went back to Marrakech for five more days. This time I met the second SPANA vet, Boubka, who had been away at a conference when we had first been there at the start of our trip.
Boubka turned out to be fantastic to work with and very trusting of my ability. The first day we worked together, he showed me a donkey that had suffered a horrific injury. He was the smallest adult donkey I had ever seen, so I had to call him Tiny. The donkey’s back leg had been de-gloved; in other words the skin had been stripped right off the leg after an injury at the top of the leg. I couldn’t bear to think how it had happened, or how much it must hurt.
Boubka anaesthetised him in the knock-down box, told me I was going to reconstruct his leg and then left me to it. The only companion I had was one of the cleaners, a tall middle-aged man who didn’t speak much English and who stood silently to one side, ready to run for help if I needed it.
It took the whole afternoon. I couldn’t just flap the skin back up over the wound and stitch along the edge, as there would have been a lot of open space underneath where the skin wouldn’t be attached to the muscle. To make sure it adhered down to the muscle, I put a stitch through the skin and muscle at regular intervals, then back through the skin and then tied it through a button. It is an old-school technique in England, but it works.
At the end I stood back, happy with my work. When Tiny came round, we moved him into a horse box and nursed him with great care. I got to know him well over my last few days; he was kind-natured, always quick to say hello and wanting to please. He always put his ears forwards in greeting and seemed happy and he never put up a fuss when I was cleaning his wound.
Tiny made it back to his delighted owner, and while I was sorry to see him go, I was so happy that he was recovering.
The next case Boubka gave me was a very naughty mule foal who was still growing into his ears. In the stable he was fine, although he always tried to pick your pockets for treats, but outside and in the stocks all he wanted to do was jump around. He didn’t know the meaning of still. The foal had an umbilical hernia, which needed to be surgically corrected by opening him up, pushing the hernia back into his abdomen and closing the hole in the muscle wall that it was coming through. I had never performed this surgery in practice, although I had helped to do it once as a student, but Boubka decided that was good enough. I knew how to do it and I had plenty of surgical experience from the UK on small animals so, again, he knocked out the foal for me and pretty much left me to it. There was no monitor on the anaesthetic, which was set up as a continuous drip into his neck, so they told me to ‘just shout if the animal moves, runs out of drip or starts waking up’. The technicians were nearby and once again the cleaner stayed with me to act as my runner. This time I had to get him to go and find the vet when it looked as though the drip was going to run out before I’d completed the surgery. Boubka came, set up a new drip and went back to looking after the new cases coming in. I was really pleased that he trusted me and I was happy with the final result, although I don’t think the foal was quite so impressed after that ordeal! Despite that, he made a full recovery and when last I saw him he was leaping around in the paddock.
I learned so much during my time in Morocco, and while there my confidence grew thanks to Boubka, the Chemaia vets and all the kind and competent technicians. They were all extraordinary people, giving so much time and effort to help others by treating their working horses, mules and donkeys who are so important to them. They constantly pushed the boundaries of their own expertise to save the lives of these animals. I was sorry to say goodbye.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Wedding Plans and Lucy’s Surprise
It was absolutely perfect. I knew the minute I saw it that this was the place where Jacques and I should hold our wedding reception.
I was standing in a beautiful rustic converted barn with Abi and my parents. The ceilings were high, there was a balcony overlooking the main hall and it would easily fit 100 people eating, dancing and celebrating.
Jacques and I had set a date for our wedding and at last it was beginning to feel real. We’d chosen early autumn the following year and although that was not for another 16 months, as everyone kept telling me and I was beginning to realise, that was not really so far ahead with so much to do and plan.
I knew that Jacques would have liked an African bush wedding, but he knew that I wanted to marry among my friends and family in England, so in the end we had agreed to marry in England and have a second celebration, a reception, later on in South Africa. Some of his family and friends would fly over for the English ceremony, and some of mine would fly to South Africa for the reception there.
Before I went to Morocco I had started looking around for a church to marry in and a venue for the reception. The church we settled on was in Wadhurst, a beautiful little village not far from us. It would be decorated for the harvest festival, in yellows and oranges, and I planned to add more flowers in purples and pinks to make it, I hope, a riot of beautiful sunset colours.
We wanted our wedding to be fun, country-style, and a big party for everyone to enjoy – nothing too formal or pretentious. The barn I was looking at with Abi and my parents seemed perfect; it was only a few miles from the church and their chef said he would be happy to cook South African food. I hope we’ll have potjie, which is a beef casserole, in cauldrons on each table so that people can serve each other.
At every step I was excitedly Skyping Jacques, who said all the right things, although we both knew that he was happy for me to make most of the decisions. He trusted me, and there were only a few aspects of the arrangements that he felt strongly about. His main job was planning a honeymoon for us – and keeping it a surprise, so that I wouldn’t know where we were going until we set off. I promised I would leave it to him and not interfere – much! – but I did rule out a bush safari, just in case that was what he was thinking of. I hoped we would go somewhere that neither of us had ever been before.
My biggest challenge was finding the right dress. Mum and I had started going to bridal shops and looking through the racks, and although I tried on lots of dresses, none were right. I didn’t want a meringue; I wanted flowing, elegant and original. The weekend before I flew to Morocco, we went to a sale of sample bridal dresses in a tiny bridal boutique where everyone was rushing to grab the dresses from the rail. I really didn’t expect to find anything – but then I saw it: an absolutely lovely dress. I tried it on, and Mum
burst into tears. We’d found the one!
It was glamorous and gorgeous with a slight boho look to it as well. With flowers in my hair it would look perfect. The only snag was that it was far too big. But I knew someone at the stables where my horses were who was brilliant at alterations.
With the dress safely tucked away at home – and Dad breathing a sigh of relief because we’d got it in a sale – I knew everything else would fall into place. Of course, we still had to sort out the small matter of which country we would live in once we were married, but we still had time to decide that. And I would be seeing Jacques soon – he and his parents were coming over in early July for a holiday. Although my parents and Jacques’s had exchanged friendly emails, they hadn’t yet met, so we had planned a week in Cornwall for both families together, so that they could get to know each other. I was pretty sure they would all get on, but that didn’t stop me feeling nervous as the holiday drew nearer.
I had two very full weeks of work booked in before Jacques and his parents arrived, but first I was looking forward to a long-overdue catch-up with Lucy.
We had dinner one Saturday evening, halfway between her house and mine, and the moment she walked in I could see that something was up. She looked great, and she couldn’t stop smiling.
‘What’s up?’ I asked, trying not to sound too suspicious.
‘What do you mean?’ she said, trying to look innocent.
‘You look different. Happy. Very happy.’
‘I’m always happy.’ Still innocent.
‘Not this happy. You’re … glowing.’
‘OK, well, I’ve just finished my internship and been confirmed in a permanent job. So yes, I’m very happy!’
‘Oh Lucy, that’s wonderful, I’m so glad for you. We have to drink a toast.’
‘And there’s more … I’ve met someone.’
‘You what? Oh wow. I knew something was up. I want every single tiny little detail. Starting with his name.’
‘It’s Ant, and he’s lovely. We met when one of the farmers set me up on a blind date.’
I was hooked. I couldn’t wait to hear the whole story, and Lucy obliged, telling me how she had been visiting one of her regular farms, pregnancy scanning the cows, when the farmer asked whether she had a boyfriend. ‘A few minutes later he said he might have a friend he could set me up with.’
Lucy had blushed scarlet and stuttered that she didn’t need to be set up, but the farmer had insisted and had organised for Lucy and the mystery man to come over for supper.
On the way there Lucy stopped to take a call in a gateway and managed to reverse into the end of the gate so that the latch sheared the side of her car’s rear bumper. Needless to say, by the time she got to the farmer’s house she was feeling a bit flustered.
Ant, the farmer’s friend, seemed very nice, and at the end of the evening he took her number. Lucy carried on with the story.
‘As I left the farmer came out to check his cows and spotted my car, to great hilarity. He told most of the other farmers in the area about the vet who had crashed her car on the way to his house for a double date with his friend.’
Despite all the mishaps Lucy agreed to a date with Ant – but had to cancel twice, after which they eventually managed a coffee and a walk with the dog.
‘And …?’ I was all ears.
‘After the third date, which was mercifully incident-free, I linked my hand in his as we walked back to the car after having an epic Chinese meal. We shared a quick kiss and my stomach did all the right sort of flipping.’
‘What a great story. What does he look like?’
‘Oh, medium build, strawberry blond – OK, ginger, but that’s cool now, right? Muscly and with a lovely smile.’
‘I can’t wait to meet him.’
‘You will. How are the wedding plans?’
‘Coming along, I have a dress …’
‘You have to show me. Have you decided about bridesmaids’ dresses? Because I’m not doing anything frilly.’
‘You know I wouldn’t make you wear frills. Just a few bows …’
She looked so horrified I wished I could capture the moment.
‘Only joking. Elegant and simple, and I thought dark purple. Is that all right?’
‘Phew. That sounds good. I can start looking forward to it now.’
It was a lovely evening. I was so happy to hear about Lucy’s new man, and her job. She was becoming a female James Herriot, living in a farm bubble, and it couldn’t have suited her more. She always had a way with cows.
The following Monday morning I was back at Dacre House with Sue and Bradley, and now my old housemate Andrew, too. He had settled in well and although he still said he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do in the long term, they liked having him there and he fitted in.
My first patient that day was a hamster named Eric. He had been found by his nine-year-old owner dangling upside down in his cage from one of the bars, affixed by a strip of bedding that had got itself wrapped around his leg. The family had cut him down but they couldn’t get the strip of bedding off and it was strangulating the leg.
Watched by an anxious small girl and her mother, I managed, with a lot of difficulty, to get the strip off his leg. By this time the leg had become engorged with blood – it was a really dark red colour and there was a real possibility that he could lose it. It had been starved of blood for some time and there was a danger that his circulation wouldn’t function properly again. Once I’d taken off the piece of bedding and given poor Eric pain relief, I asked the owners to bring him back a couple of days later. They phoned the next day to say he seemed in pain, but he did recover – he kept his leg, and his owners changed the type of bedding they used.
The theme that afternoon, though, was puppies. In came a whole box full of brand-new beagle puppies – five very sweet, wriggly little things. Along with their mother, they needed a post-birth examination.
I checked the puppies first, looking for cleft palates and heart murmurs. Cleft palates can be fixed and heart murmurs in new puppies often disappear within a few weeks, but these puppies had neither. I checked that their bottoms were not bunged up with meconium, the first stool they produce, and finally I checked their lungs to make sure they were nice and full of air. Puppies’ lungs have no air in them at birth, so they need to fill up and begin to function normally as soon as possible after they have been born.
Having checked the puppies I turned to their mother, a lovely young beagle, clearly delighted with her first litter. I made sure that she had plenty of milk for them and no sign of inflamed mammary glands and looked to see that she had not torn during the birth. Everything was as it should be, so I sent them all home with their very pleased owner.
A couple of hours later another puppy arrived, brought in by her worried owner Annie. This time it was a tiny Boston terrier and she was in a bad way. Just five weeks old, she was very sick and barely able to lift her head. She needed to be hospitalised while we worked out the problem. We had to put her on a drip to get some glucose and fluids into her, but she was too small, so we injected glucose solution under her skin instead. In fact, she was so tiny that she fitted into the palm of a hand – she probably weighed no more than a few ounces. Her name was Dixie and she appeared to be suffering, but it was difficult to say what the cause was. It looked as if it could be pneumonia, as her breathing seemed a bit laboured, but the main worry was that she had gone downhill pretty quickly according to her owner.
Annie left her with us and I promised to update her regularly. For the next few hours we nursed her and kept her warm. I gave her some antibiotics, in case it was an infection causing her to fade so quickly. The nurses took to carrying her around inside their tops – and she seemed to be responding to something we were doing. But I was worried, so I talked to Bradley, who was covering that night.
His wife and his small son had just been in to say hello and to bring him some food. He was about to eat when he saw how worried I looked. He asked
me about what breed she was and what signs she had been showing, so I told him that she just seemed to be fading and the owner had noticed her being a bit slower than the rest. He pushed his meal to one side and quickly came to look at Dixie.
‘I’m afraid we may lose her tonight,’ I said. ‘Is there anything else we can do?’
Bradley felt her skull.
‘As I suspected, there’s an open fontanelle. Feel this gap in her skull,’ he said. ‘Small-headed and domed-headed breeds like chihuahuas, Boston terriers, Yorkies and Pekingese, for example, are prone to fluid on the brain – hydrocephalus – and this may well be her problem. It causes the puppy to develop slowly and to be almost dumb, if the puppy survives at all, that is. Carry on giving her glucose. I know you started it because she’s a puppy and needs it because she’s weak, but it actually draws the fluid out of the brain so it works on two levels, and then just keep her warm on a heat pad. She needs pretty intensive nursing. I’ll watch her tonight and we’ll see how she is in the morning.’
Dixie may have been tiny, but she was a fighter. She made it through the night and in a couple of days she was well enough to go home. A few weeks later Bradley told me that Dixie had been back, with her brothers and sisters, for her routine vaccinations. She had been well, growing fast and full of mischief.
‘We’ve found homes for them all,’ Annie had told Bradley. ‘All except Dixie. She’s special, so we’ve decided to keep her.’
On a Monday evening in early July I made my way into London to meet Jacques’s parents, Elna and Johan, for dinner. They had arrived from South Africa that morning and Jacques was coming a few days later.