I gave Sandy his options. We could do further investigations and try to understand the lump better with biopsies, ultrasounds and X-rays.
‘Not much money,’ Sandy replied.
I pantomimed my way through explaining that the most pragmatic option was to anaesthetise Pedro and open his abdomen to see if the mass was a tumour and if it was operable. If it was, great. If not, we’d have to put him to sleep on the table. This was relatively cheap and the only proactive option, given Sandy’s budget. Alternatively, we could try to ease his suffering with palliative care, but realistically this meant putting him to sleep now. It was all too much for Sandy, who burst into tears. A whole range of emotions and Spanish words came flying out, none of which made any sense to me except, ‘We try, we try.’
We agreed that I would perform the exploratory procedure for a small amount of money. But the odds were not good.
I figured that I’d stabilise Pedro then take him to Barraba so Ben could oversee the surgery. But when I called Ben, he said he was 180 kilometres away. ‘I’m away for the next three days bull testing so, um, you’re going to have to do it yourself.’ He gave me some pointers and encouragement. ‘You’ll be right. You can spay a dog. And if you can do that, anything else is either going to be simple or it’s not going to be operable. See what you find.’
So I opened Pedro up for an exploratory laparotomy, which is a fancy way of saying I was having a look around in the abdomen. Regardless, I felt like I was totally winging it. The dog was on its back and I made the cut down its middle. The hole I made was big, from near the spot where the ribs join to where the pubic bone starts.
‘Shit! Are you planning on getting your whole head in there?’ Suzanne joked, breaking some of the tension. I needed this hole to be big so I could have a really good look around and understand what was going on. It didn’t take long. Ideally, you’re looking for healthy pink tissue, but I was seeing ugly dark-red to almost-black lumps spread through the liver and the spleen. The intestines, which should be quite mobile, were stuck to the cancerous masses. Deep in the abdomen, towards the spine, there is a fixed point called ‘the root of mesentery’ where some organs, blood vessels and lymph nodes reside. It was just horrendous there. That was the mass that I’d been able to feel from the outside; now I was face to face with it – and it was ugly. There were irregular black lobules bursting out of the wrapping of the lymph nodes and organs, like what you see on the cigarette packets.
I’d seen these sorts of operations through my final year so it wasn’t especially shocking for me. But it was going to be hard to tell Sandy that poor old Pedro had cancer everywhere. Even if Sandy was the richest man in the world and I was the best surgeon, we could not have bought Pedro more than a few weeks’ grace.
I called Sandy to break the news. It was my first such call. I knew that it was important to be clear and concise. I had Suzanne bring over the phone and put it on speaker. ‘Sandy, Pedro is in surgery and I’m very sorry to tell you, it’s bad news. There is a lot of invasive cancer and there’s nothing we can do to save him . . . he’s simply riddled with it.’
In these situations, you have to make sure the client understands the gravity of the situation but at the same time show empathy. I suspect, however, that after the initial bad news Sandy didn’t take much else in.
He had braced himself for the worst. Through his sobs we heard him say: ‘Put him to sleep.’
Once you’ve made that phone call you no longer have to worry about being sterile. I drew up the injection and put Pedro to sleep, knowing that it was the best thing for him and that I’d done all I could. After that I had to stitch him up and make him presentable so poor old Sandy could take him home to bury. He could barely speak when he came in. He hugged me for a long time.
We did a lot of emergency work at Manilla. It seemed to have an inordinate number of dogs hit by cars, chest traumas, pyothorax – pus in the chest cavity – and lots of snakebites. One day a couple of battlers, Paddy and Lynne Whiteley, came in with their little Jack Russell, Chuckie. Chuckie was weak, unable to stand, panting and convulsing. It wasn’t hard to diagnose with all the dual punctures on his neck. Jack Russells are the poster dogs of snake killers but if you take that up as a profession it’s just a matter of time before you become the poster dog of snakebite victims. This was the second time Chuckie had found himself on the wrong end of the fangs. My predecessor, Tim, had treated him a year or two earlier, but judging by the files this time seemed far worse.
The first thing was to give him some sedation to calm him down and then get an IV line in. Not a difficult task and one of the basics of veterinary medicine, but a challenge when the dog is convulsing and the pressure is on. Once that catheter was in, though, I was in control, and the sedation started to kick in. I administered drugs to reduce the reaction to the bite and guard against reactions to the anti-venom – cortisone, anti-histamines, adrenalin and antibiotics. He was very close to death when I gave him the anti-venom and got the mask over his snout to give him oxygen.
After that initial treatment, we wrapped a cage in Glad Wrap and put him in there, pumping it full of oxygen to maintain the ‘oxygen therapy’. He was terribly sick and we worked long and hard to save him, nursing him through the night, but by morning he was much better. That’s the thing about brown-snake venom: it is exceedingly lethal, but if it doesn’t kill the animal, they bounce back very quickly. By the time Paddy and Lynne came in the next morning to check on him, Chuckie was up and jumping around like a new dog. I tried to tell them that what I had done was all standard procedure – oxygen, anti-venom and fluids – nothing groundbreaking. It was just a matter of being attentive. Nevertheless, they thought the sun shone out of my large intestine.
The day before, while we’d hovered over Chuckie’s limp little body, we’d chatted for a long while, and I’d got to know and like the couple. They were both in their early fifties, both grey-haired and a little frumpy, with a classic larrikin streak about them. They’d told me about their pet cockatoo named Cocky, who Lynne had inherited from her father some thirty years earlier. Cockatoos can live to be 100, so you don’t just have them for life; you have them for your children’s and grandchildren’s lives as well.
‘It’s got a big lump on its leg,’ Lynne had said. ‘We’ve never brought it into the vet before because I don’t reckon there’s anything you blokes could do about it anyway.’
‘Yeah, birds aren’t my forte,’ I’d said. ‘But maybe you could see a specialist about it.’
They’d let the conversation slide, but now with Chuckie running around like it was open-day at the butcher they brought the subject of the cockatoo up again.
‘You seem to be pretty good at this vetting caper,’ Paddy said. ‘I reckon you could probably fix Cocky’s leg too.’
Bird medicine and surgery was the last exam we ever sat at uni (with the black-tie theme), and I chose to take a glass-half-full view of my results in that subject. I scored 51 per cent – representing an impeccable balance between no desire to study and the need to pass. Rumour has it that our bird lecturer didn’t even read the exam papers; he just gave you the mark he thought you deserved. I took from my 51 that he probably didn’t like me but was happy to see the back of me. Luckily it didn’t cost me getting honours, but we did graduate in academic order and the person who graduated one spot in front of me reminds me about it just about every day at work. I didn’t tell Paddy and Lynne any of that; just quietly wished I had been more studious in those avian subjects.
‘I’m happy to have a look,’ I said, ‘but there is a bird specialist in Tamworth. He only sees birds. He’ll know a lot more about this. You should see him.’
‘No, no. We want you to see Cocky,’ said Lynne.
‘Okay, bring him in. I can have a look.’ So they brought Cocky in on the back of their ute. He needed such heavy-duty transport because his cage was huge, probably 2 metres wide by 2 metres tall. Fortunately, the clinic was a small hut built inside a hug
e shed so they were able to drive into the shed, right up to the clinic and squeeze him into the only room that fitted his cage, the waiting room.
‘Can you get him out?’ I asked.
Cocky might have lived with them for thirty years but I could see they hadn’t handled him much. Eventually they threw a towel over him and I had to stick my hand into the towel to try to pull him out. As he wriggled and flapped in there, he proved to be most effective at piercing my glove with his powerful jaws. One of the interesting things about cockatoos and galahs is that their tracheal rings (the solid bits of their windpipe) are completely made of bone. While humans have soft cartilage in the windpipe making them easy to choke, Cocky and his brethren have complete circular rings of bone that make it impossible to choke them. So I took advantage of this and squeezed his neck hard to stop the little beggar making mincemeat of my hand, in the full knowledge his eyes weren’t going to pop out of his skull.
Suzanne grabbed his wings and secured them in a towel, allowing me to inspect the leg where I saw a significant lump. I was blatantly honest. ‘Look, he’s got a tumorous growth. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know much about it. I could probably take it off but the anaesthetic would be very tricky and you’d be better off seeing the bird guy in Tamworth. I reckon he could get it off blindfolded.’
‘You could take it off,’ Paddy said.
‘I don’t have the right anaesthetic equipment.’
‘But you said before that you could do it,’ Lynne said.
‘Well, I’ve got gear that would do the job, but it’s far riskier than if I had the specialised bird equipment. That’s why you’re better off with this guy in Tamworth. He’d sort it out in no time. It’s half an hour’s drive. We could put Cocky in a smaller cage.’
They weren’t buying it. They really thought that since I saved their dog I was the man for the job. They had suspicious eyes, Paddy and Lynne, but I had obviously passed their scrutiny.
How am I going to get out of this?
‘How much would it cost for the guy in Tamworth to do it?’
‘Oh, it’d probably be less than $100.’ I tried to make it sound very attractive.
‘How much for you to do it?’
‘Because I don’t have the gear, it’s going to take significantly longer. It’ll also be riskier. It’s gunna be probably $350 for me to do it. It’s cheaper to go to Tamworth to see the guy who’s got the gear and the knowledge. Here, let me put Cocky in a cage for you.’
Paddy and Lynne exchanged glances. ‘Nah, we want you to do it.’
I realised I was stuck. I’d given them a quote and they’d accepted. Damn.
‘Okay then, I guess . . . umm . . . leave him . . . with me and I’ll . . . sort him out.’
‘Great, thanks mate. Can we come back and get him about 4.30?’
So Suzanne popped Cocky back into his massive penthouse apartment in the waiting room where he happily talked to the rest of the clients. ‘Hello, whadayawant? Hello, whadayawant?’
I got through the morning consults and it came time to anaesthetise the bird. Suzanne and I caught him a bit more efficiently this time and wrapped him in vet wrap, a type of bandage that doesn’t stick to skin or feathers – just to itself – like Glad Wrap for animals. I put a mask on him and he quickly went to sleep. The main difference between me and the specialist, aside from his greater skill and knowledge, was that he had specialised bird anaesthetic gas that was safer for them. So we kept our anaesthetic light. We didn’t want it to kill him.
The tumour was large, down on the lower part of the leg which is just skin and bone. But it bulged out in such a way that the normal skin was quite close together on either side. I was able to get in under the tumour with scissors, cut it away, then stitch the skin back together without much fuss. It all fell into place rather nicely. I put absorbable stitches in so we wouldn’t have to knock him out again to take them out. I was pretty chuffed with myself. We turned the anaesthetic off, unwrapped Cocky in a dark quiet room and waited for him to gradually wake.
As he came to, Cocky’s eyes started to flicker. His sulphur crest flared. He looked at Suzanne and looked at me. ‘Alo,’ he croaked; a deep throaty croak. We cracked up. Our patients don’t normally talk to us. It seemed so wonderfully ridiculous. ‘Helloooo,’ he said, clearer now. Coming to life for his audience. ‘What’s going on here? What’s going on here?’
With huge smiles on our faces, feeling like Dr Doolittles, we put him back in the waiting room. I went to write up the bill and faced a dilemma. How the hell can I charge them $350 for this? It had all been so straightforward. The quote I’d made up was just to deter them from having me do the surgery. I felt really guilty because I liked them. So, with a warm inner glow, I wrote $150.
But the feeling was not entirely reciprocated. When a little old lady, Mrs Eileen James, came in with her dachshund, Schnitzel, I came out to see them in the waiting room.
‘Fucking arsehole,’ someone yelled.
At first I thought it was Mrs James. I was taken aback. Then I realised it wasn’t a person at all.
‘Fucking arsehole,’ Cocky said again, clear as day.
‘Just ignore good ol’ Cocky here,’ I said to Mrs James. ‘He’s a bit upset over an earlier medical procedure. Please, follow me to the consult room.’
‘Fucking arsehole. Fucking arsehole,’ Cocky called out as I led her as quickly as possible away.
For the rest of the afternoon, as soon as I walked out to greet new patients, Cocky would see me and let fly with a cacophony of blue language. It was not really the look we were going for. I had to ring Lynne. ‘The operation was a success. But can you please come and get Cocky now. He’s doing terrible things to our business.’
There was definitely a downside to being Dr Doolittle.
A VERY EXPENSIVE 24-CARAT GOLDFISH
Anthony
Not long after my experience with Byron the guinea pig, the clinic received a message asking for someone to make a house call on a fish. Unsurprisingly, the job was passed down the line to me. I’ve got to admit, even I thought this was a little off beat. I gave the clients a call. ‘Can you bring the fish into the clinic in its tank?’ I asked.
‘No, no. He’s in a pond,’ said an elderly man’s voice down the line.
‘Right. So he’s outdoors?’
‘Yes. And we don’t want to catch him because we think it will distress him. He’s never been in a tank in his life.’
‘Okay, I’ll come and see you,’ I said, trying to mask my reluctance. I mean, people who have goldfish in their ponds don’t tend to do much for them other than scoop them out when they go belly up. But I’d learnt a lot from Byron the guinea pig. If people wanted veterinary care for their pets it was my duty to give it, and give it to the best of my ability. And it was immensely rewarding to work with people who cared so deeply about their animals.
I pulled up at the house with a positive attitude. The elderly couple were waiting for me on the porch of their 1980s brick dwelling. By the time I’d turned into the driveway and pulled the handbrake on, they were at the side of the Magna ready to take me to the patient. I grabbed my bag like I was a professional fish guy and refrained from making any jokes about having hooks and sinkers in there.
They introduced themselves as Alice and Bill.
‘What’s wrong with the fish?’ I asked.
‘If we knew what was wrong with the fish we wouldn’t be calling you,’ Bill said.
I hate that answer, but you wear it because you know people get prickly when they are worried.
‘Is it a pet?’
‘No, no. We just noticed there was something wrong with it.’
They led me around the back where the pond was situated under a pretty pergola. I saw there were quite a few goldfish in there, all nicely protected from cats and birds by faded green fly-wire strung over thick steel reo. The water was dirty so you couldn’t see anything down deep, but all the fish cooperated by coming to the surface.
Anybody who uses the phrase ‘the memory of a goldfish’ has never had a goldfish. Everybody who has had a goldfish knows that when you approach the tank all the goldfish immediately come to the surface to be fed. So they must have the ability to remember events. If goldfish had the thirty-second memory that popular myth says they have, they would have forgotten the fact that your appearing at the tank signals the arrival of food.
When the fish realised no food was coming, they got bored and returned to the depths, leaving just one on the surface. He was big for a goldfish, about 10 centimetres long, floating on his side, right side up. When I approached, he dived down with all the others, but then he couldn’t seem to stay there and soon floated back to the surface, with the right side again coming to the top. I could see he had a distended growth there.
‘He is our oldest fish,’ Bill said. ‘We got him when we first moved in twenty-six years ago. We hope he is not in any pain.’
‘I don’t know what the growth is, but given his age it could be a tumour,’ I said. ‘In order to find out for sure, I’d have to catch him and take him back to the practice to have a better look. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s obviously affecting his buoyancy.’
Alice and Bill were probably in their late seventies. They were both short. Bill wore beaten-up brown leather shoes under trousers belonging to a suit that would have been new two generations ago. Alice was in a floral dress with a cardigan. She wore a concerned look on her face.
‘We’re worried he’s in pain or distress,’ she said.
‘I don’t think you need to be worried about that. He’s still eating happily. He’s still interacting with the other fish and able to submerge himself if he has to. He’s not floating on the surface like a balloon. And even if he was he’s protected by the mesh.’
At uni, we spent less than a minute every day studying fish, and that was at the canteen when you were deciding whether to go the fish sticks or the chicken. We did actually do some fish lectures but the topic wasn’t prioritised. It was done as a stream when we were living at Camden, which was a pretty wild time so we didn’t always attend. The fish lecturers were people who came in from outside so you never had the chance to bond with them or the subject either.
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