Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  James

  I had my hands deep inside the yellow kelpie, performing my first ever spay – the desexing of a female animal – when I grabbed the right ovary to try and pull it out. Because the ovaries are deep inside the dog and you can’t see what you’re doing, I was operating by feel. But being so new at it, I didn’t have the feeling. That’s something you only get with experience. I knew enough, however, to know that something was wrong. I peered in as best I could. There was blood. There was uterus. There was no ovary. I realised that I had torn the ovary away from the uterus, ripping a hole in it.

  Holy crap. What do I do now?

  The situation was made so much better and so much worse by the fact that I was operating on my own dog. I didn’t want to kill somebody else’s dog, but equally I didn’t want to kill my own. Not Bailey. She was brand-new. Mum and Dad had just given her to me. And Bailey wasn’t just any old pup. She was the granddaughter of the dog who’d chaperoned me through my teens and early adulthood – Toby the Wonder Dog. I couldn’t tolerate the thought of losing his granddaughter through my own ineptitude.

  I was in the final year of uni. It was a tough time financially because I couldn’t hold down a job. I’d tried to do as many of my rotations as possible near Mum and Dad’s place so that I had somewhere free to stay. Bundarra is equidistant from the much larger towns of Inverell and Barraba and I’d managed to score a rotation at each of their vet clinics.

  When I’d been there for Christmas at the beginning of fourth year, Mum and Dad had had a litter of puppies running around and let me choose one for a pet. There was a yellow female that seemed to be the most adventurous. She was always coming back from her forays into the wide world covered in grease and poo. I liked her spirit so I chose her and called her Bailey.

  While Bailey was the granddaughter of Toby the Wonder Dog, it was a little more complicated than that. Even though Toby had been a useless working dog, because he’d been brought up in the city, he was genetically gifted. So when Mum and Dad had moved back to the country, they’d acquired an experienced working dog called Lea. Lea and Toby had had pups and two of those pups stayed on as working dogs. Buster was a female yellow kelpie and Dusty was a black-and-tan male. Their grand heritage had come shining through and they’d proven themselves to be very good at rounding up animals.

  Dad was working the sheep with them one day soon after Buster had been on heat. At least he thought she’d come off heat. But amid the chaos of a lot of sheep on the move, she and her brother Dusty did the deed somewhere out of his sight. Before Dad knew it, Buster’s breast tissue was showing a distinct swelling. She was about to give birth.

  So Dad let me have this beautiful golden puppy. I was so excited to have a new incarnation of the Wonder Dog. I expected her to be just like her bold and friendly twice-over granddad, but whether or not it was a result of the genetic screw-up or just that every dog is different, Bailey turned out to be nothing like him.

  Even though she’d appeared outgoing as a pup, as soon as I took her home with me she just wanted to hide under the blankets or lie in front of the fire. It was like she was scared of the world. It required a mind shift from me, and I was still struggling with that when I found myself operating on her to ensure that no more pups would come out of this lineage.

  I had started my stint at the Barraba vet clinic and one of the vets there, Margot, who was herself only in her first year out of uni, agreed to supervise while I had a go.

  Spaying a dog is a major surgery. And difficult. I’d heard older vets say things like, ‘Once you can spay a dog, you can do any other soft-tissue surgery.’ So I was pretty keen to get one under my belt.

  We knocked Bailey out with a general anaesthetic, Alfaxan, placed a tube down her windpipe and hooked her up to the anaesthetic machine so the gasses would keep her asleep. I made the incision in her abdomen.

  I would have been nervous regardless of whose dog it was, but doing the operation on Bailey added to the butterflies in my stomach. I’d done this operation once before on a cadaver at uni, and I’d assisted on one at the university clinic a few months earlier, but I’d never been truly responsible for one. As I pressed down through the skin with the scalpel, I was following my road map. I searched for the linea alba, which is Latin for ‘white line’. It’s a fusion of muscles that meet in the midline of the chest. I made a small stab there, putting me into the abdomen, then picked up the scissors to extend the cut down Bailey’s belly.

  Once inside, I had to fish around to find the uterus and the ovaries. Blood oozed from tissues that were already a little slippery from the fat in the abdomen. Things were difficult to grasp and manipulate. It was something like a soup in there.

  A dog like a kelpie has a deep chest and small abdomen, so the uterus resides down towards the rib cage – deep inside. You find the uterus and trace along it with your fingers until you reach the ovary, which feels like a small, squishy grape. You’re doing it blind. There’s fat, intestines and other organs in there to confuse you.

  So I felt my way along. It took a while to get my bearings. There was tension and frustration, but I eventually had that ovary in my fingers. It’s attached to the kidney by the ovarian ligament, down towards the aorta and all the other serious blood vessels going to and from the heart, so you can’t just bring out the scalpel and cut it off.

  ‘Can you feel the ligament holding it in place?’ Margot asked.

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘Now you’ve got to snap that. But be careful of the blood vessels sitting right next to you there. Damage those and you’re in big trouble.’

  So I had the ovary pincered between my left thumb and index finger. I got my right index finger up underneath the ligament and pulled the whole unit upwards, backwards and towards the centre of the dog, while it also worked at snapping the ovary. I heard and felt a snap. My stomach jumped a little. I surveyed the scene to see if anything was wrong and then I breathed. It was all okay. The ovary and uterus were a lot more mobile now, so I pulled the whole uterus upwards and back towards me with gentle pressure. I could see it now. It looked like a piece of string with a grape at the end.

  Once I had the uterus out, I put three clamps on the blood vessels that deliver blood to and from the ovary. I tied them off with a surgeon’s knot that had been practised and mastered in surgery classes. Then, snip, it was done.

  ‘Make sure everything is okay before you let it go,’ Margot said. ‘Once you let go it will spring back towards the kidney and it’s hard to find again.’

  But everything looked perfect. I released the clamp and held on carefully with some forceps. There was no blood, so I let it go and in it went. Nothing changed, no blood welled up; it all looked great. I patted myself on the back; however, there were two ovaries and I’d just done the easy one on the left. Now it was time to tackle the right with all the confidence and experience I’d just gained. It was like playing one good golf shot and thinking that now I had the game nailed.

  The right ovary and kidney sit deeper in the dog and are more difficult to access. But I went in with self-assurance. I found the uterus, traced along it, grabbed the ovary and began to retract it to start the process of snapping the ligament again. This time, however, as I snapped I felt a different sensation and a different, almost inaudible noise. The uterus was now mobile but the ovary was still fixed in position. Something was wrong.

  ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. I’ve torn the uterus. Margot can you scrub in and give me a hand?’

  ‘It’s okay, don’t stress,’ Margot had the patience of a saint. ‘We’ll just make a larger incision. We’ll find what we need to find and get it done.’

  So I cut a bigger hole in Bailey’s belly. This gave us more room to work in and see what we were doing. There was some blood due to the uterus tearing, which meant that it was difficult to see things properly. Now with a big incision I had to very gently stretch the uterine ligament up just enough to give me access. I dared not attempt snapping it agai
n for fear of further damage and bleeding. I gently got in far enough to see what I was doing and was able to get the three clamps on, with Margot helping retract everything out of the way. Painstakingly, we tied up the veins and arteries.

  Then came the moment of truth. Swabbing out the abdomen, we let the tied-up blood vessels go. There was no more bleeding. Everything was okay. With an incredible sense of relief and with Margot’s calm voice keeping things steady, I stitched poor Bailey up. She didn’t seem to cope well with the recovery from her anaesthetic, so I stayed by her side diligently waiting for her to wake. As the first glimmers of consciousness started to come across her face and mouth, I reached down to comfort her. She looked up at me with those big woozy eyes . . . and bit me on the hand. Hard. It hurt a lot and I swore like a Brisbane motor mechanic, but I didn’t feel anger towards her. It was very out of character for her, and besides, after what I’d just put her through, perhaps she had reasonable grounds.

  A BLOODY FAST GREYHOUND

  Anthony

  When the infrared buzzer sounded on the clinic door and I saw the middle-aged man come in, I knew it wasn’t going to be an ordinary consult. He wore a small hat with a feather in it, had a notebook and pen in the pocket of his blue-hibiscus Hawaiian shirt and a newspaper form guide hanging out the back pocket of his grey slacks, which were held up by an overworked brown belt.

  ‘G’day, I’m Max Pringle. I wanna see the vet about me greyhound,’ he said.

  I was starting my very last rotation at a clinic in the Shoalhaven district. They had the contract to do the veterinary work at the Nowra greyhound track, so they saw a lot of racing dogs. When Max came in and approached the counter, it was clear that his dog had the problem which trainers hate most and which afflicts the great majority of racing dogs . . . it wasn’t running as fast as the dogs beside it.

  When the vet, Nigel, came out to see him, Max got straight to the point. ‘I wanna bleed me dog,’ he said. ‘And I want you to do it.’

  I’d heard about the practice of bloodletting before, but only as a historical oddity. I had no idea it still existed.

  ‘No, I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Nigel said.

  ‘Yeah, well he’s not going any good. I think he’s got some bad blood in him and we’ve got to get it out.’

  ‘No, that’s a bit of an old wives’ tale. It’s not backed up by science,’ Nigel said, flicking back his long blond hair. ‘There’s no reason to do it. I can’t do something like that to an animal unless there’s a reason.’

  ‘Yeah, well, my father did it and all the other guys are doing it. Their vets do it for them and I want you to do it. That’s reason enough isn’t it?’

  ‘Look, no, I’m not going to do it. But why don’t you bring the dog in and we’ll have a look at him to see if we can find something wrong?’

  But Max wouldn’t have it. ‘I know what’s wrong with him and I know how to fix it. Be seein’ ya.’ And with that he went back through the buzzer and out the door.

  The conversation had gone a bit over my head, but once Max left, the vet explained to me that there wasn’t a lot of money in greyhound racing. Many of its practitioners were poorly educated battlers and a lot of their medical ideas – like bloodletting, which had been a frontline remedy for doctors from the time of the ancient Egyptians right through to the early 1800s – had managed to persist because many of their training techniques were handed down from generation to generation.

  In horses there is a possibility that removing blood does improve performance. The theory is that newer red blood cells have a slightly higher oxygen-carrying capacity. When you remove blood from horses it is rapidly replaced by these new cells. But the greyhound trainers were missing one important point. Horses have an enormous number of new red blood cells waiting to be released from the spleen. Dogs do not. Removing blood from a dog simply makes it anaemic. About the last thing you feel like doing after giving blood is running a race. You didn’t see Lance Armstrong donating blood during the Tour; quite the opposite really.

  The greyhound track was a real eye-opener for me as I watched vets battling to re-educate trainers who thought they were doing the right thing in applying their ancient and not-so-ancient practices. And there was a lot of work to do on Max. Three days later, he reappeared at the counter, still smelling of the cigarette he’d stamped out on the path outside and the spaghetti bolognese he’d had for breakfast. In his hat and polyester slacks, he might have looked right at home at the track, but in the waiting room of a small-animal practice he stood out like a fur coat at a PETA conference.

  ‘I need to speak to the vet,’ he said. Nigel was summoned to the waiting room.

  ‘Look,’ said Max, ‘I’ve been thinking about this bleeding. I think I can do it myself. If I just cut the dog there over the neck with a knife, that’s its jugular isn’t it? I can see it right there. That’s all I’ve got to do isn’t it?’

  ‘Holy shit! You’re going to cut the dog’s throat,’ Nigel said, letting his exasperation show. ‘Do you really think that’s going to make him run faster? You’d better bring him in.’ Nigel was stuck in a bind. If he didn’t bleed the dog, Max was going to cut the dog’s throat. At least if Nigel did it the dog would be safe(ish).

  Max brought the dog in. His name was Harry the Far-Cup. He was grey, sleek and tall for a greyhound, almost coming up to waist height. His back legs were so muscular that he struggled to walk without the muscles chafing. Trainers often countered this problem by applying Vaseline between the legs, and when this mixed with sweat it formed a foamy white residue. This was evident on Harry the Far-Cup’s legs.

  After another attempt to convince Max that this treatment wasn’t going to achieve anything, we took Harry into the operating area, leaving Max calling out from the waiting room: ‘Make sure you take a good amount. I want at least a litre.’

  Harry had a lovely placid nature and he nuzzled into me as we sedated him. Being as lean as greyhounds are, we could see every vein, so it was a simple matter to put pressure on the base of Harry’s neck to make the veins swell and bulge. Nigel placed a 14-gauge needle into the dog’s jugular and attached the needle to a blood collection bag. He lowered the bag below the level of the dog and just let gravity do the work.

  There was no way we were going to take a litre. That would just about kill the dog. Human donations are usually 470 millilitres. But Max didn’t need to know that we were taking less than he wanted. Doing this in a backyard would be so dangerous it was hard to conceive of anybody getting away with it. At least we were doing it in a controlled, clean environment.

  Nigel was going to keep the blood in case he had to do any dog transfusions in the next three weeks. Dog blood only remains good for about that long, but the beauty of it is that you can transfuse it into any dog receiving their first transfusion.

  So we bled Harry the Far-Cup. We took 400 millilitres, and a few hours later Max came by to pick him up. ‘You took enough didn’t you? I wanted you to take a litre and a half.’

  ‘Don’t worry. We took enough.’

  ‘I wanted you to do it properly,’ Max said. ‘I won’t be happy if you haven’t taken enough.’

  I was flabbergasted at the gall of this know-nothing who thought he could tell the vet not only that he wanted the dog bled but how much he should take.

  Max clipped the dog on the lead and walked it away, but I noted its head and tail were a little down and there was no spring in its step.

  The following week we were at the track performing all the routine veterinary functions. I was impressed by those dogs. They were elite athletes beyond anything humans could hope to emulate. When the winners came through after the race, there was a system whereby the officials would draw a number out of a basket and if it matched the winner’s number it would have to be swabbed for drugs.

  These dogs might have run 520 metres in almost thirty seconds, so you’d hold the cup out for them to urinate in and what came out looked like blood. It was actually mu
scle fibre that had broken down in the massive exertion of the race then been excreted via the kidneys. And despite all that they were the most even-tempered of animals. They’re fascinating to work with.

  So we were at the track and I was really enjoying the hubbub of it all when I saw Max in the ticket-strewn public area. I was a little disappointed when I saw him change direction and head towards us with his fast little steps.

  ‘G’day Max, how’s your luck holding up?’

  ‘Look, the dog’s a bit sluggish,’ he said, his face tightening to a grimace that made it look like he was thinking very hard. When he opened his mouth for a second time it was apparent that he hadn’t been. ‘Any chance I could get some anabolics to build him back up?’

  ‘You don’t reckon it’s sluggish because it’s anaemic from all that blood you wanted removed?’ Nigel said.

  ‘Nah, nah, that makes them go faster,’ Max countered. ‘What it needs is some steroids.’

  ‘You do know I’m the official course vet here?’

  Max looked at Nigel like he was thinking real hard again, sizing him up.

  ‘Yeah, I’m not saying I’m gunna do it. It’s just that that’s what it needs. Maybe some more bleeding too.’ And with that, he turned and scurried into the ring, pulling the form guide from his back pocket and disappearing into the crowd.

  INVERELL CAESAREAN

  James

  I’d heard Bob’s voice on the phone. It was throaty and distinctive, like he should be presenting the Country Hour on ABC Radio. But when I met him at the Inverell vet clinic he was quite different to what I’d anticipated. He was short and tanned with wavy hair and a few extra kilos hanging off his middle. He was chatty as he gave me a quick tour of the place, then pointed at a little mongrel in one of the cages. ‘Come on, we’ll spay this dog,’ he said, grabbing the cage.

  He arranged the gear on a tray and asked me what size gloves I wore. ‘You do it, I’ll watch,’ he said.