Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  We managed Bubbles pretty intensively with diuretics and drugs to increase the efficiency of his heart. I told Carol we weren’t fixing the problem, we were just masking it, but Bubbles responded well and bounced back with all his old energy, so she was pretty happy. I was seeing a lot of her, prescribing and delivering medications. I’d always try to leave her visit until the end of my run because then I could linger for a cuppa and chat without leaving other clients waiting. Carol was about seventy-five, slim, with short brown hair and the eyes of someone who’d lived through tough times. She’d travelled a lot, following her husband around the outback with his work, and she exuded that bush spirit of resourcefulness and bluntness. She reminded me of my grandmother.

  It got to the point where I’d stop by Carol’s house on my Tuesday run whether I needed to see Bubbles or not. We’d have tea and a biscuit and we’d chat at her kitchen table with its green vinyl top tacked down to the wood. I told her about my background and she told me all about her husband and kids and the difficulties of raising a family that was constantly moving. She told me of how, when she lived in the Northern Territory, the tank water got so hot that you could only shower at night. Even then it was almost scalding. It was a world away and I loved her stories.

  Sometimes I dropped in on my day off. When I sold the Magna and bought a ten-year-old Subaru WRX that was insanely fast and obnoxiously loud, I picked her up and took her for a drive one afternoon. She was keen for the outing but when I showed her what the car could do I think she regretted coming.

  Not long after our drive, Carol rang. As soon as she said hello I knew it wasn’t good. ‘Anthony, he’s dying.’

  I’d told her to expect this progression of the disease. The drugs can keep them good for a few years but eventually they crash. She knew what was coming. I drove straight there and found Bubbles barely able to lift his head. I took him back to the clinic on a towel in the back of the car and over the next couple of days gave him fluids and intravenous medication . . . but try as we did, I think we all knew it was hopeless.

  And so, with great sadness, I put Bubbles to sleep and the clinic organised to have him cremated. Probably a month later, a picture of Bubbles turned up with a thank-you note, a bottle of wine and a box of chocolates. Gifts are an interesting thing in vet science. You can do the most whizz-bang work to save an animal’s life and you barely get a thank-you. When the animal dies, however, more often than not you get wine or chocolates or both. I guess people appreciate the compassion that vets show in that time of need, but it remains a mystery to me.

  I really treasured Carol’s gesture and I hung the picture of Bubbles on the waiting room wall.

  A couple of months later, Carol got a new dog, a black cocker spaniel called Snoopy. I thought it was a great idea because it gave her a fresh focus. So I turned up at Carol’s house on my next Tuesday run, really happy that we’d be able to continue our personal and professional relationship. I’d missed our weekly chats. Carol opened the door with a big smile, but Snoopy took one look at me, marched to the far side of the room and started making a strange ‘huk, huk’ noise at me.

  ‘Come in, love. Don’t worry about him. He doesn’t know you yet. Cup of tea? Biscuit?’

  Snoopy was an ex-breeding dog who hadn’t received any socialisation or normality in his life. He had been kept solely in a cage for breeding. And he had been ‘debarked’, which is an illegal procedure whereby the vocal cords are damaged so dogs are less noisy. Instead of a bark, they honk like a seal. The noise is far more annoying than an actual bark and Snoopy seemed to be able to keep it up without respite.

  We chatted away and Snoopy didn’t stop hukking and honking the whole time. Next visit, same thing. He wouldn’t come near me and became pseudo-aggressive if I tried to get anywhere near him. Carol and I couldn’t chat with all the noise, so Snoopy got banished to another room which defeated the main purpose of the vet visit. It was awkward. The situation continued for twelve months but my visits became less regular and less enjoyable. One day I was in the clinic flicking through some papers and I noticed that there was a vaccination reminder for Carol. It said Snoopy was two months overdue. This was highly unusual. Carol was normally right on top of all her paperwork.

  Something must have happened to her. Worried, I grabbed the phone and rang straight away. She picked up after a couple of rings.

  ‘Oh, Anthony. I feel like such a heel,’ she said.

  ‘Why? It doesn’t matter if the dog’s just a little overdue for its vaccination. We’ll fix it up.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I’ve been going to see the new vet that started up out here. He’s nearby but I feel so sorry and I’m so sad.’

  A rival veterinary practice had opened at the Heads and she said that since we were only there on Tuesdays, it made more sense to go to him.

  I felt hurt. The excuse didn’t hold water to me because she knew that we’d always go out whenever we were needed. I was certain that the real reason was because Snoopy didn’t like me. Behaviourists be damned.

  ‘I’ll see you later, then,’ I said and hung up, stunned. It was fairly early in my career and I thought that Carol and I had transcended the client–vet relationship. We were friends, weren’t we? I had gone many, many times over and above my professional duties and now she’d turned around and gone to see another vet.

  The statistics don’t lie: the number-one reason that people visit their local vet is because they are the closest vet to their home, quickly followed by the availability of parking. Car trips in a WRX and afternoon teas don’t seem to rate a mention.

  I continued to drive past her house every Tuesday on the Heads run and I’d wonder whatever became of her, but I’ve never seen her again nor heard any reports. The picture of Bubbles remained on the wall too, delivering a painful little stab every time I noticed it, but when we renovated a year or two later, it got packed away somewhere and never went back up.

  AND JILL CAME TUMBLING AFTER

  James

  It was the end of summer when John asked me to go out and castrate a colt for an elderly couple. ‘I did one there many years ago,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult because it’s very hilly and it’s hard to find a good spot to do it. You’ll be all right, though. You’ve done loads of these before.’

  I arrived at the property to find a lovely old couple who didn’t have a clue about horses. The colt was a black Welsh mountain pony that belonged to their son, who’d moved away. All they knew was that they had a horse that needed castrating. When I asked if they could put a halter on him and bring him out of his stable, they looked at me like I was asking them to ride him in the lord of the manor’s hunt.

  As John had warned me, their house was perched on top of a hill, but it was worse than that. The hill was steeper than I’d imagined and at the bottom of it, 20 metres below, was the motorway, with a barbed-wire fence and a stream in between. There was a lot of potential for things to go wrong.

  Where am I going to anaesthetise this horse?

  At the house there was a small flat area that dropped away sharply. It was the only spot I could see where we had any hope of doing this. It wasn’t so much the operation that was the problem, it was what would happen afterwards. I explained to the couple, ‘When you recover a horse, it’s very groggy. It attempts to stand and it can stumble a little. That slope you’ve got there is a big risk. Perhaps we should consider some other options.’ They looked at me blankly so I continued. ‘Can we go to a neighbour’s place, maybe?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no. They’ve been done here before and everything was fine.’

  ‘All right then.’ I just had to repeat John’s words like a mantra. You’ll be all right. You’ve done loads of these before.

  Gelding a horse is a difficult procedure. You need to put the colt to sleep with a general anaesthetic. In a dog or cat you do that in a surgical environment where there are other people around to help. But with horses it’s done in the field. I coaxed the horse out. His name was Rhys.
The old man explained that there had been a Welsh king in the thirteenth century called Rhys the Hoarse, so their son had named this fellow Rhys the Horse.

  I drew up the needle of xylazine to sedate Rhys. No problems. I positioned him how I wanted him, then injected the anaesthetic and took control of Rhys’s lead rope. A minute or so later, Rhys eased himself to the ground and continued the jerky journey towards a deep, peaceful sleep.

  That was the first challenge. The next one was to restrain his leg so that if he started to wake during the surgery he didn’t boot me into the middle of next week. With that done, it was time for the procedure. Unlike all the other operations we do where we tie off any veins or arteries that are bleeding, when you castrate a horse you crush the blood vessels with a wonderfully named tool called an emasculator. We can’t leave stitches in there because the wound needs to drain and stitches give infections an added place to hide. So the emasculator clamps down on the veins and the spermatic cord. You hold it in place for a minute or two and it seals off the vessels, before the testicles are thrown away.

  So I got all my ducks lined up and followed the procedure in the old couple’s little flat yard. I gave Rhys the Horse the post-operative injections: tetanus, penicillin and an anti-inflammatory. It all went smoothly. About five minutes after I finished, the horse started to wake. He sat up, looking a bit groggy, but calm. Good. It was exactly what I wanted. He made snorty little noises, gathered himself and looked around to take in his surroundings. He recognised the old couple. Also good. Rhys got up gradually, stumbling slightly. I was holding a lead attached to his halter and was guiding him with the rope when something startled him. I’ve no idea what it was, but he stumbled to the ground on the edge of the hill. It was that precarious position, 20 metres above the roadway.

  Shit, don’t move.

  Calmly, I talked to him, trying to keep him exactly where he was, but Rhys the Horse had other ideas. He wanted to get up again so I tried to coax him back towards the flat, but he was too big, and I watched, helpless, as he rolled himself off the flat. He only needed one roll to go over, before he started sliding down the hill. He was still quite sedated and groggy from the anaesthetic as he glided downwards. A few metres down, he tried to right himself, stopping momentarily before rolling, sliding, stopping, then taking fright and starting the whole process again. It was a disaster unfolding in slow motion. I scurried behind him but was powerless against his weight until, inevitably, Rhys the Horse reached the barbed-wire fence, coming to rest with his legs underneath the bottom strand of wire just a couple of metres from the stream and a few more from the motorway.

  As all horse people know, horses and barbed-wire do not go together, and horses that are panicked, groggy and lying underneath a barbed-wire fence are an especially undesirable combination.

  Rhys, however, lay still long enough for me to get to him and put my knees onto his neck to hold him down. ‘Can you come quickly and lean on him?’ I called urgently to the old chap.

  ‘What can I do?’ the wife asked.

  ‘Can you get some wire cutters so we can get him out from under here?’

  I’d left a needle and sedatives in my pocket for such an emergency, so while holding him down I drew up a large dose and got it into him. Rhys the Horse calmed down instantly, drifting into a light plane of anaesthesia. By this stage, I was able to lift my gaze sufficiently to realise that cars were going past us at eye level, watching our capers. Fantastic.

  Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. Fortunately the wire cutters were sharp and did the job easily. I don’t think I could have handled another disaster.

  Now we had the problem of recovering the horse again. I didn’t want him to stand up on the hill so we pulled him through the now-cut fence to the narrow strip between the creek and the road. I kept my knees on his neck until he was ready to get up, fearful that any repeat of the episode would result in us entering the nearby stream, or even worse, the horse bolting onto the motorway. Rhys recovered just fine the second time around, and we walked him up the hill and back to his barn. I searched hard for any sign of injury but, much to our amazement, he was completely unharmed. The fence, however, would require some mending.

  I got back to the clinic and told John the story. He found it very amusing, especially since it had a happy ending. ‘I thought that hill might be a problem,’ he said.

  Caroline was mortified on my behalf. She only worked with small animals. I think these types of stories reassured her that she had chosen the correct branch of vet science.

  I didn’t feel too bad about it. Even though it was a bad day, I had foreseen a problem and tried to warn the owners that we should go elsewhere. I was so glad I had. It made me look prophetic. If you tell clients everything is going to be fine and it’s not, they can get agitated. But when the outcome is good in the face of adversity, everyone’s happy.

  At the pub that night, sitting at the bar enjoying the lovely community, someone tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Have a good day today?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Good day.’

  ‘Hmmmm. Had some horse work, did you?’

  ‘Yeeeees.’

  ‘On a hill by any chance?’

  My heart was sinking. Word was out. These people knew nothing of the way I’d predicted the disaster, the way I’d overcome it, my neat surgical techniques, nor the happy gelding now enjoying a good night in the stables. Rhys wasn’t the only one who’d have to suffer barbs that day.

  Another voice came across the bar: ‘Hey James, I hear you’ve taken up steeplechasing over barbed-wire fences . . .’

  And another: ‘Oi, James, you leave our Welsh ponies alone . . .’

  ‘I heard you went for a roll in the hay with a filly.’

  ‘It was a stallion,’ I said. ‘At least it was a stallion before I got a hold of it.’

  FAT BOY SLIM

  Anthony

  Doris Irvine was one of my favourite characters. She was one of those people who might get referred to as ‘old Berry’. Wiry, wrinkled and hard of hearing, once she mounted a horse she lost about forty years. Her osteoporotic back and arthritic fingers seemed to straighten in the saddle as she trotted around the yard moving in sync with her old gelding, Slim. You’d never know she was well into her eighties and Slim was well into his twenties.

  She rang one day to say that a former show pony she’d bought for her granddaughter to ride was sore. ‘Yeah, I think it might be founder,’ she said.

  Doris knew her horses so I expected she’d be right with her diagnosis. Founder is a disease that horses get if they eat too many readily digestible sugars. It’s an inflammatory reaction that occurs everywhere in the body but is most noticeable in the feet. It’s very common in ponies because they have adapted to live in poor country where there is little food. Then they come to lush areas like the coast of Australia, get terrifically fat and suffer very badly from founder.

  I walked in and the white pony was standing stock-still in what we call the ‘sawhorse position’ – with her feet extending further out to the front and back than normal, like she was stretching. She was trying to distribute the weight evenly across all four feet because they were equally painful.

  The pony’s name was Beauty and she looked at me like, ‘Cripes, here comes the guy in the green overalls.’ She wanted to run, but moving hurt so much she had to stand there. The best she could do was lean away as I approached, her feet anchored in the same spots. At least she was standing. When horses lie down, they are waiting to die.

  The horse’s hoof is essentially a finger nail. With founder, the membrane between the nail and the foot bone gets excruciatingly inflamed and sore. To get an idea of what Beauty was going through, imagine someone jamming a piece of bamboo underneath your toenail and then asking you to bear all your weight on that nail and walk around. You certainly wouldn’t be lining up to go for a run around the paddock.

  Beauty was so sore I could not pick up any of her feet. Lifting one off the ground would put more weight on the other th
ree. So no way would she let me budge one. I felt her front left foot on the ground and it was hot with inflammation. I felt the blood vessel running down the side of the leg and it was pounding with all the extra blood flow to the foot. Her pulse was seventy-five beats a minute, which is catastrophically high for a horse.

  Beauty was about thirteen years old, and like all show ponies grossly overweight. For whatever reason, the breeders and judges of ponies have determined that their ideal stature is rotund. It’s a purely human construct. It’s the same for Labradors. People see a Labrador in good shape and they think it’s too skinny, but that’s just because they are used to seeing obese dogs.

  Beauty had a big fat belly and was almost flat across the back with a ‘cresting neck’, where she had deposited a huge amount of fat in a curve along the top of her neck. I grabbed the area below her mane and it was like a big roll of jelly.

  ‘She’s been on too much good feed,’ I said across her back.

  ‘What’s that, love?’ Doris was very hard of hearing.

  ‘She’s been eating too much,’ I yelled.

  ‘I know she’s a bit overweight,’ Doris said, ‘but I bought her in show condition and now we’ve had a bit of rain the grass has been jumping up.’

  ‘Doris, this is very bad. It’s a really severe case. It must have been going for some time.’

  ‘Gee, I don’t know. I only noticed it today.’

  I treated Beauty with painkillers and some sedatives to try to control her pain and reduce the inflammation. I wanted to get her into a stable with sand on the floor because that distributes more weight onto the sole of the foot and would ease the burden a little. So I left Doris with instructions to severely restrict Beauty’s diet and that when the painkillers kicked in, to try to get her to the sandy stable.