Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  We stood there, still thinking Barry was going to drop dead at any moment, but he just stared back at us, wagging his tail and coming in for more pats from Duncan, who he must have noted was being unusually affectionate this day, especially considering he’d just swallowed all the guy’s yummy chicken heads.

  I went over and had a look at all the heads on the floor and noted that none of them had been chewed. Barry had just inhaled them.

  ‘All I can think of, Duncan, is that even though your dog has eaten more 1080 than any dog in the history of poison, he hasn’t absorbed any of it. Because he didn’t chew any of the heads, the eyes are intact, so none of the poison got released.’

  Then the phone rang. There was a difficult calving 60 kilometres down the road, out towards Narrabri. ‘Duncan we’ve got to run. Ben’s across the road and he’ll keep an eye on Barry till I get back, but I’m pretty sure the little bugger’s gotten away with it.’ And so we left our satisfied customers and raced off to the calving.

  It was pretty straightforward and we were back at the clinic less than two hours later. We had to hurry back though because we got a call that a kelpie with a branch sticking out its chest was waiting for us at the front door with its owner. The dog had impaled itself on the branch while jumping over a log. The stick had broken off and the owner had wisely left it there and rushed straight in. The poor thing could hardly breathe and was lucky to be alive. We rushed in to open the surgery. The first step was to get an IV line into him and some oxygen running, before knocking him out and starting the operation to remove the stick. There was no time to waste. The dog wasn’t able to breathe on his own, so Jandy had to breathe for him by squeezing the reservoir bag on the anaesthetic machine, forcing air into the lungs.

  I might have had the confidence of a full year’s experience behind me but I was still a new vet and this kind of pressure was tough. I traced the stick deep into the abdomen. Luckily it had gone all that way without piercing any major organs. The only problem was that it had gone through the diaphragm and one of the lungs had collapsed. Access to the diaphragm is tricky. You’re at the very margins of the abdomen and it is tucked right up under the rib cage. All I could hope for was that the hole was small and accessible, and that none of the structures that run through the diaphragm, like the oesophagus, were involved. I got lucky. When the stick was removed it left a nice neat hole that I could get to. I flushed and cleaned the hole, then started to stitch it closed.

  ‘Now inflate the lungs and hold it until I tell you to let the air out,’ I instructed Jandy. I needed her to pump the lungs up to expel as much of the extraneous air from the chest cavity as she could while I stitched up the last part of the hole.

  ‘Okay, Jandy, ease off the bag. Time to see if he can breathe for himself.’

  And he did. We seemed to be winning. I suppose we were on a bit of a high. What a day. It was barely lunchtime. But we’d pulled it off. Bad things come in threes, right, so we’d handled our quota, plus two more, and now we could get on with the weekend.

  And that’s when the cheery phone rang again. A snakebite on a dog. They were coming in. I dealt with that then the phone rang again with another calving. I called Ben to come in to recover the impaled kelpie and we left for the calving. But while we were on the 100-kilometre drive north towards Warialda, the phone rang again. It was another calving back east of Barraba. I told them we’d be late.

  By 3 p.m., we’d almost reached Warialda when the darned phone rang again. I was starting to loathe that tinny electric sound.

  It was another problem calving, 60 kilometres to the north-east of Barraba. ‘You should try calling the vet in Inverell,’ I said. ‘It’s a long drive for him but he might be able to come. I just can-not get there. I’m having the day from hell and I’ve got two other calvings booked in ahead of you.’

  The Warialda calving went smoothly. So we changed out of our overalls and headed for the one east of Barraba. We arrived at a rambling farmhouse that had obviously started as a small cottage before the verandas had been enclosed, then a fibro extension added to one side, while a weatherboard room was tacked onto the other, before it grew an aluminium-clad tumour out the back.

  The whole family came out to greet us. They were young by farming standards. The parents were in their late thirties and they had a team of tidy looking kids who wanted to be in the thick of it all.

  The animal in question was a small, red shorthorn heifer – a female that hasn’t yet had a calf. I put my hand in her and couldn’t quite make out what I was feeling. The head was there all right, but the legs seemed to splay out to the side in a way I’d never felt before. Puzzled, I pushed my hand in further, straining to get it in, until suddenly I felt sausage-like loops of tissue.

  Oh Cripes! Intestines! I’ve screwed this up something terrible. I’ve pushed too hard and gone right through the uterus and into the heifer’s guts.

  It was the most horrible sinking feeling in my tired and rumbling belly. I paused for a moment, my hand still inside the heifer up to my armpits, and I thought . . . and I thought . . . I thought as hard as my weary brain could manage.

  Hang on, those intestines are tiny. That’s not the mum’s guts. They’re the calf’s intestines . . . schistosomus reflexus!

  I wasn’t certain. I’d never seen one of these before, but surely that’s what it had to be.

  I pulled my arm out and tried to explain it to the parents, Derek and Cat Tobin. ‘Basically, when you’re forming embryonically, you start off as spinal cord and nerve tissue. Your body folds out from that spine and comes around and meets back again at the midline. This is why you see a lot of midline deficits like hernias or cleft palates and things like that. It’s a failure of that folding mechanism.’

  Derek and Cat’s expressions indicated that maybe I wasn’t making it so clear.

  I continued: ‘If you look at yourself, you’re a tube on legs. This calf’s condition occurs when that tube is forming, instead of coming back and meeting in the middle to enclose all your insides, the fold goes the wrong way, so you’re actually inside out. That’s schistosomus reflexus. That’s what I think we’ve got here. The calf in there has all its organs on the outside.’

  ‘Ah, okay. So what do we do about it?’ was the fair and reasonable question from Derek. The heifer’s smallness added to the degree of difficulty. The calf had zero chance of survival. So I just had to get it out. I couldn’t bring it out through the vagina and I couldn’t get good enough access to cut it up. I was going to have to do a caesarean.

  I prepped up for the operation, inserting the epidural and shaving the heifer’s sides while Jandy held the torch in the darkened crush.

  The heifer responded by throwing herself on the floor into a couple of inches of mud. It was so muddy in those yards that I was already wearing gumboots, not items pressed into action that often in Barraba. The recent rain, combined with the cattle trampling through, had cut the yards up badly, producing a quagmire. This is hopeless. She’s going to die. I pushed on. The cow had at least thrown herself down with the left side up so I could get at the uterus without all the guts falling out. I had to cut a much larger hole in her side than normal because the calf was so misshapen, with stiff legs splayed in all directions.

  The whole family gathered around to watch. Word had passed around about this freak calf. All four kids displayed a genuine enthusiasm for the world, so the prospect of seeing such a calf had them circling in hushed excitement. This was the best thing. They talked about it in terms of aliens and monsters. The flash of their camera periodically lit up my muddy little operating theatre.

  As I cut into the uterus and opened it up, the first thing I saw was organs sitting out in the open, all attached to the calf’s body but otherwise floating free in the uterus. I felt relief and satisfaction that my diagnosis was correct. Thank goodness I was paying attention at uni that day. Everybody crowded in to get a look. Meat and bones were sitting out in the open. The ribs were turned upwards like w
ings. Butterflied. They were all oohing and gasping. It was better than television.

  The calf’s bones were fused and abnormally formed, so even though it was very small, it was much harder to get out than the normal streamlined calf. I prised the uterine tissue open and started manipulating the limbs, at the same time holding the uterus in place while I got Jandy and Derek to pull the bits out.

  Together we wrestled everything out of the big hole and laid it out for everyone to see. The kids’ excitement made the whole thing extraordinary. They seemed really switched on and I did my best to answer the questions they asked. The three girls and a boy ranged in age from six to twelve so they each required an explanation of different complexity. They were such enthusiastic people that I was happy to do it, even though I was tired and hungry and we had another calving hanging over our heads. I didn’t know if the people who’d rung at 3 p.m. still needed help.

  While I was instructing the kids, Jandy was stitching up the skin of the heifer and cleaning up. I started to take stock. This was the eighth job of the day. We were running low on gear. I knelt down beside Jandy as she injected antibiotics and anti-inflammatories and I whispered: ‘Don’t throw the needles away.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Keep the needles.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ve run out. The next calving is only 60 kilometres away. We’re not going back to town before we go, and we don’t have any more needles.’

  As farmers know, you can reuse needles just fine, but it’s not exactly the look you’re going for – turning up with old Trusty Rusty, your faithful injecting tool.

  After Jandy was done stitching, the heifer seemed to bounce back fine, despite the mud and trauma and the size of the hole in her belly. She had no right to survive but she did – Derek and Cat even sent me the photos to prove it.

  It was after the kids’ bedtime, so we said our goodbyes, unpeeled our overalls and got back in the car. One job to go. When we found some reception on the top of a rise, I rang to check that we were still needed, but the bars proved to be phantoms and no conversation could take place so we pushed on. I’d checked in with them about four hours earlier and they’d said then that they still wanted us to come. They hadn’t been able to get the vet from Inverell.

  We drove up the long driveway, over grids and past the shapes of large dark animals in the fringe of our beams. As we crossed another grid and drove up to the house, two men came out into the spot of our headlights with forlorn looks on their faces that said we were definitely still needed.

  ‘We didn’t think you were coming,’ the younger man remarked.

  ‘Well, I said I’d get here, I just couldn’t guarantee which month it would be.’

  They were a father and son who ran a big operation and were in the middle of generational change. The father owned the property but the son owned the cattle. He had bought a load of small heifers from a very well-known local stud. They were only fifteen months old, and one of them – this tiny, runty heifer – was calving already. A bull at the stud had found its way into her paddock and got her in calf at six months of age. She barely came to above my hip.

  I put my hand inside her and felt a head the size of a normal calf’s head. ‘There’s no way that’s coming out the back end,’ I said, but they looked at me like I wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know. ‘We can either shoot her or we’re doing a caesarean.’

  By this stage I was half praying they’d reach for the ammo. It was 11 p.m. and I hadn’t had breakfast yet. I’d been going since 5 a.m. I’d done umpteen procedures. Large animals. Small animals. I had three blunt needles in my car and a pea-soup fog in my head.

  ‘All right, we’ll do the caesarean,’ the son said.

  Aaarrgghh . . .

  ‘Rightio, Jandy, let’s go. You know the drill. We’re going to get this thing out.’ We had to make a huge cut in relation to the size of the animal. The calf was big and the cow was small. She wouldn’t have weighed 250 kilograms, about half the weight of a normal cow. We did the caesarean by rote. In the end it was nothing remarkable other than we pulled out a good 40-kilogram calf and I had massive pins and needles in my thumb. When you do a lot of suturing in one day, the pressure of the needle-holders on the edge of your thumb causes the tingling, and the suture material cuts through the skin of the last knuckle on your little finger where it naturally nestles. I was spent.

  ‘Jandy, you should stitch this one up.’

  I was stuffed and it was a good opportunity for her to learn. The farmer was giddy with excitement; he got a live calf and his heifer was up and kicking. Usually if a calving is held up this long, the calf has no chance, but because this thing was so big and the mother so small, it had never made it into the birth canal so neither mother nor baby suffered too much distress.

  Such little victories are the joy that this job brings, but the pleasure centres of my brain had closed for the day, like an airport shutting for fog. The hunger centre was still operating at full capacity, however, as we climbed out of our overalls and drove into the night. It was almost 1 a.m. when we got home. We’d been going for twenty hours. Aside from all the jobs, we’d driven 480 kilometres. Five and a half hours of the day had been spent in the car. We’d only had the pack of salt-and-vinegar chips and a vanilla malt milk drink.

  I sent Jandy to the shower first – thank God I had her to help me that day, otherwise I don’t think I would have made it – while I cracked a beer. It was only a light beer because I was still on call but its rich hops and malts exploded into my mouth like a super-flash boutique brew.

  After Jandy finished in the shower, I got in and then returned to the kitchen for a closer search of my young-single-person refrigerator. Eureka! A barbecue chicken.

  The pleasure centre reopened for business. The flavour of that skin lingers with me to this day as one of the finest things I’ve ever tasted. We destroyed the chicken, leaving only a pile of gnawed bones. A full tub of ice-cream was also soon emptied and licked clean.

  We said goodnight and crawled into bed. It was getting up towards 2 a.m. and we had to be at work in five hours. I was still on call until 7 a.m. The tiredness went through to my bones, and if the phone had rung again that night, I don’t think I would have pretended to be wide awake when I answered. Or, if I did, I might have done what I used to do with Mum and just fallen straight back to sleep.

  WHERE’S WALLY?

  Anthony

  At Christmas 2006 Dad turned up at my place and said, ‘Go to the back of the car, Anthony. There are two things in there. One of them is your Christmas present.’

  I went around to have a look and there in a box on the back seat were two beautiful snub-nosed, black and brown puppies.

  I turned to Dad, feeling every bit as excited as I had the day he brought Stuart and Wesley home. ‘What are they?’

  ‘Dobermans. When they’re little they don’t have that long face.’

  These guys looked like Rottweilers.

  Dad knew I’d been looking for a dog. I’d almost taken one after a caesarean on a beagle. I was going to pitch to the owner that I’d waive the fee for one of the puppies, but I had some neighbours who were horrible people. They’d threatened to shoot our other neighbour’s dog if it so much as set a paw on their property. Beagles would be the worst breed to get because they would pick up a scent and just take off in pursuit, regardless of fences. So I pulled out of that. But Dad had a friend with a lovely Doberman bitch which had just had a litter.

  I was on call that day and got a request to go to the clinic. I grabbed one of the puppies and took him in for a road test. This puppy was the quieter of the two and no sooner had we hit the road than he was asleep. I carried him into the clinic and he didn’t seem fazed by anything. As soon as I put him on a towel in a cage he just went to sleep.

  When I returned home, Dad was playing with the other puppy. He was a different kettle of sardines altogether: very active and into everything, super affectionate and
constantly looking for attention. He only had tiny teeth and claws and his prime method of gaining attention was to use them.

  So I had a dilemma – the sooky, quiet puppy or the outgoing, exuberant one. I had no doubt that the quieter pup would be easier to raise and train but my heart lay with the active fellow. I liked his outlook on life: be active and demand attention. He was like me. So I chose him and he turned out to be fantastic.

  He didn’t have a name, and my flatmates – Hef and Izzo – and I racked our brains trying to think of one. We were mad keen fans of the TV show Entourage. There’s a character in it called Turtle who has a Rottweiler. Hef and I were watching it when Turtle came on screen with his dog and the idea came to me to name my puppy Turtle. It stuck.

  To this day when I’m watching the show and one of the actors calls out ‘Turtle’, my dog’s head comes up and he’s ready for action.

  We were living in a house on a property owned by Geoff Scarlett. The place wasn’t set up for a dog, so for the first few weeks, I kept Turtle in the bath while I was at work. It was the only place I could think of where he wasn’t going to wreck the interior. We hadn’t paid a bond. My career was the bond. And living with those guys I felt both house and career were constantly under threat.

  Turtle hated being put in the bath and would go absolutely berserk when he was left there. However, when I returned home everything was always quiet and he was usually sleeping on the blanket that I had left for him.

  I spent countless hours training Turtle, as I was acutely aware of how dangerous these dogs could be. He was very food-motivated so it was easy to teach him the basics. The hardest thing to teach a dog is to reliably come back. I would make him aware that I had a pocket full of dog food, and all it required was a quick whistle and he’d be sitting by my feet looking for a reward.

  We were lucky that we lived on a property, not so much because of Turtle’s antics, but because we were surrounded by lots of different species. I knew what damage dogs could do to livestock, so I would sit outside with Turtle in the paddocks, calmly talking to him while the horses and cattle watched and sniffed him. The first couple of times I had to sit on him to stop him going for them, but before long he would wait with me, watching the animals and basically just wanting to be patted.