I called at the end of the day and Doris said they’d got the horse halfway across the yard, but then couldn’t get her any further.
Next morning, I went back and Beauty was still there, halfway to the sandy stable. She had all the same symptoms but she was sitting now. She couldn’t cop it any longer and we couldn’t get her to stand. This was probably the best thing to relieve her distress but it made the prognosis poor. I got down on my knees and gave her more intravenous painkillers and sedatives and left more painkillers for Doris to administer. I had a bad feeling that this wasn’t going to end well. Severe inflammation like this can cause the tendon up the back of the leg – the equivalent of our Achilles tendon – to pull the pedal bone so hard that it rotates through the sole of the hoof. And that’s the end of the horse.
I called Doris the next morning, the third day I’d been on the case, because I wasn’t confident she was treating it as seriously as I thought it needed. I suspected she thought it was just an ordinary case of founder – ‘We’ll give the horse some painkillers and she’ll be right.’
‘How’s Beauty going?’ I asked. ‘Has she got any better?’ I was expecting Doris to say she was terrible and why wasn’t there something more I could do. But no.
‘Yes, yes, Anthony,’ she said. ‘She’s much better now. She’s almost back to normal.’
‘Oh . . . great. That’s amazing.’ I didn’t quite believe it. I couldn’t see how it could have got better overnight.
‘Thank you for everything you’ve done. We’re really happy and the horse looks like it’s on the mend.’
‘That’s great.’
‘Ever since her front foot fell off yesterday afternoon, she’s just been so much better.’
‘What do you mean her foot fell off? A bit of its nail?’
‘No, no, her hoof fell off. And now she seems quite relieved. It’s going to get better.’
I’d never heard of such a thing. ‘Okay, Doris, I’m coming straight out. Don’t go anywhere.’ I jumped in the car and sped over. When I arrived, I didn’t bother pulling on my overalls like I normally would. ‘Where’s Beauty?’ I asked Doris, my anxiety clearly showing.
‘What’s wrong? She’s fine. She’s over there. What do you need to do for her?’
‘I think we might need to put her down.’
‘Huh? Why?’
‘Well, from what you described, I think she’s walking around on raw bone. She must be in excruciating pain.’
As we headed towards the shed, Doris touched my shoulder and pointed to a post. ‘There’s her foot.’ On the top of the post was the whole hoof, empty like a cup.
Extraordinary. I couldn’t believe it. Beauty had made it to the sandy stable now. When we reached her she was standing, so Doris might have been right when she said she was in less pain than the day before, but the rest of her didn’t appear any better. It looked to me that she was in just as much pain walking around on raw bone as she had been on her inflamed hooves. Her heart rate was up around ninety. She was sweating and really uncomfortable. Her eyes, bulging and white, were wild.
And there was no way she was going to move any further.
‘Can’t you see how much pain this horse is in?’
‘Oh yeah, but I think she’s on the improve.’
I gathered that the inflammation of the membrane that held the hoof to the bone had caused it to give way, allowing the hoof to just fall off. You could never nurse that animal back to health. You’d have to suspend it off the ground for six months of non-weight-bearing while the nail grew back, if it ever did. If it happened in a human you could manage it without a problem, but this was 450 kilograms that wouldn’t lie down in a bed. It just wasn’t feasible, even for the most valuable horse.
There was a famous case in the states where they kept a multimillion dollar trotter in a float tank while its leg repaired. After a long rehab, they led it out of the tank and as its full weight came back on its limbs it promptly broke its leg. The bones had gone soft after so long without bearing any load.
I put Beauty down immediately. I didn’t need a lot of help. She didn’t move. Even if she wanted to she wouldn’t have been able to lift a leg to kick me. I just needed to find the jugular. We don’t like the owners holding the horse during euthanasia because it’s always a bit unpredictable as to where and how the horse will fall. Beauty just crumpled at the knees and fell to her side.
Doris was okay with it. She’d seen a lot of horses come and go in her more than eighty years, but she was a little upset with me for letting her know I thought she’d let this one go too far without calling me.
‘If anything like that happens again, you’ve got to call me immediately,’ I said.
‘Well, if any of the others’ feet fall off, I’ll be sure to give you a whistle.’
CHAVS AND CHAV-NOTS
James
I loved Wales and would have stayed longer if the opportunity was there, but John and Caroline had a permanent replacement coming in. The farewell party started at the pub. They all dressed in what they thought was Australian national costume – there were lots of shorts and thongs, though the Welsh called them flip-flops. I was forced to wear a bizarre form of Welsh national dress – a barbecue apron and an inflatable sheep. The party headed back to my place and kicked on. It spewed out into the communal vet areas and red wine found its way onto the carpet, a gate found its way off its hinges, and a coffee table found its way back into its original flat-pack state. I didn’t find my way into bed till 7 a.m., and didn’t find my way out of it till 3 p.m.
The problem was that I was due in London the following morning for a flight to Spain and a holiday with some vet friends. Before I could even think about packing, I had to fix the gate, rebuild the coffee table and scrub the carpet till my arms could scrub no more, sweat dripping from my nose into the suds. It was horrendous to do all this while suffering a severe hangover. But there was no choice. I couldn’t leave John and Caroline’s place a mess and I had to catch that flight. So I cleaned and packed till 4 a.m., had an hour’s sleep, made a stiff coffee, then drove the Ford Fiesta I had bought from Caroline’s mother hard down the grey motorways to London airport.
There were twelve Sydney Uni vets working in the UK and someone had organised for us to meet up and go to San Sebastian. What a great choice. It’s an impossibly beautiful town that looks a bit like Rio de Janeiro; surrounded by imposing mountains with high rises on the beach but cobblestoned back alleys further inland, where behind every door hides a tiny bar. We moved from bar to bar where they line up the pintxo (the Basque equivalent of tapas), on the counter and you eat and drink to your heart’s content. No money changes hands till you tell them what you’ve consumed as you’re leaving. There’s no question of telling fibs. All the barkeepers are dark and mysterious types who look like Basque separatist hard-men.
We danced and shouted and had a wonderful time and all the while I was aware of this tall and beautiful presence. Her name was Ronnie and she was travelling with a school friend who was one of the vets from the year below us. We moved to a little bar with nets and jugs hanging from the ancient rafters and at last I got a chance to sit next to this girl.
Someone had ordered white wine and Ronnie had a glass that I noticed she’d hardly touched. ‘Not much of a drinker?’ I said, seizing my opportunity to make small talk.
‘No, I love a drink,’ she said. ‘It’s just terrible white wine.’ I ridiculed her for such snobbery. I’d never met a wine that couldn’t be put away. ‘Do you want me to finish it for you?’
She said okay, with a doubtful look on her face.
Before it had even passed my tongue it was just about coming back through my nostrils. It was, indeed, clearly the worst wine ever manufactured outside a vinegar factory. She found it hilarious and we spent the rest of the night and early morning drinking and dancing and going from pintxo bar to pintxo bar. She must have seen something beneath my dusty exterior because we made tentative arrangements to cat
ch up back in the UK when she got back from doing a lap around Europe.
After Spain, I returned to the UK and a new job in a place called Wisbech (pronounced Wizz Beach). Going through the locum agency’s job list, I’d seen this vacancy in Cambridgeshire and had visions of universities and punting on the river in flannels. I arrived on the train and my new boss, Mr Paton, picked me up and took me for a quick look around the old Georgian heart of the town. It lay on the River Nene and was quite striking.
‘I’ll take you to the flat we’ve rented for you,’ Mr Paton said. We proceeded to drive through drab streets of council flats and teens pushing prams. ‘It’s probably best you don’t go out after 7 p.m.,’ he said.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Things can get a little dangerous. The rougher elements of town tend to emerge from under their rocks.’
My flat was in a small gated community, beside a church and above a Subway. The smell of baking bread permeated the unit. When I turned on the television news that first night, late in the bulletin there was a story about police initiatives to curb crime in Wisbech because it had the third highest crime rate of any postcode in the UK. That was troubling. Later that night I heard a fight outside my window in the alley between my building and the church. I was to learn that the alleyway was a favoured venue not only for pugilism but also for romance and commerce, i.e. sex and drug deals.
And just to set the scene a little further, a doctor later told me that 22 per cent of the population had chlamydia and there was also a very high AIDS rate.
For all that, Mr Paton ran a really good practice. It was a tight ship, with a good variety of work. Even though there were elements of urban slum, it didn’t take long to drive out onto the Fens and into some of the best agricultural land in Britain.
The urban clientele was – how should I say? – ‘different’. In Australia some might call them bogans. In the UK they were called chavs. I couldn’t find an entry for chavs in my Manual of Exotic Pets, but the Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘chav’ as an informal pejorative used to refer to a type of anti-social, uncultured youth, who wears a lot of flashy jewellery, white trainers, a baseball cap and fake designer clothes. Chavettes, the female of the species, expose a lot of midriff.
Chav dogs were almost exclusively Staffordshire bull terriers. Chavs love Staffies. They’re pretty much their emblem. And all these dogs had horrendous problems, which the chavs had no money to fix. That’s one enduring memory. The other is that whenever the temperature went above 20 degrees, it was seen as an invitation to take your shirt off in order to display your fat, white belly covered in tattoos. I dreaded the heat, and found myself pining for the cold of Wales. And not because I had no tattoos on my belly.
I’d walk into the waiting room and there would be three big guys; covered in ink, no shirts, all with Staffies at heel. It was like there’d been a council order. A lot of the dogs had skin problems from fleas that hadn’t been treated properly. I’d say, ‘Tyson here has fleas, that’s why he’s scratching so much.’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, is m’dog scratching?’
It was a challenge.
The other thing that will stay with me was the landscape. The Fens were eerily flat. If it wasn’t for the odd tree, you’d swear you could see forever. It’s all reclaimed sea floor so, like the Netherlands, is crisscrossed by canals and dotted with windmills. And, like the Netherlands, it is flat, flat, flat.
There was no risk of your horse rolling down the hill after castration here. Mr Paton told me that there were people who couldn’t cope with the flatness. It would freak them out and they’d head for the hills. ‘But it also messes with the animals,’ he said. ‘I did a pre-purchase examination on a horse a few years back. This was a ten-year-old horse that I knew well. It was quiet and in sound condition. I signed off all the paperwork and the horse was bought by someone who took it away to another district up north. A few weeks later, the people who bought it rang me and said, “We’re not very happy. You did the pre-purchase examination and you stated that it is a quiet horse with an even temperament. We cannot get this horse to leave the yard. It bucks and kicks. It’s fine in the dressage arena but if we take it out it goes crazy.”
‘I had a pal up there who I asked to go and look at it for me and he confirmed what they said. This was very strange because I knew it was a good horse. They ended up taking the horse down the hill to another place and it was fine. This horse had lived all its life on the Fens. It had never seen a hill, and certainly wasn’t about to start walking on one. They had to re-educate the horse that hills weren’t going to kill it. I was very relieved that I wasn’t going to get sued for a negligent pre-purchase agreement.’
A month or so after I got to Wisbech, Ronnie returned from Europe and came up to visit me. It was a fairly brave step for her, but she ended up staying about a week. We laughed a lot about the funny little place we’d found ourselves in. That’s the beauty of working your way around the country. This was a view of the UK the ordinary tourist didn’t get to see – the have-nots.
I remember one night we did a mercy dash to Tesco after midnight for some supplies. We were amazed at the number of people who were there filling baskets with Coke and chips. Ronnie summed it up best: ‘If you ever want to feel good about your weight, just go to Wisbech Tesco at 1 a.m.’
CUSHION’S DISEASE
Anthony
‘There’s something drastically wrong with Dolly,’ Kathy Sabel said, following me through the unusually crowded reception area with her fluffy white dog cradled in her arms.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, dodging a little yellow puddle at the feet of a panting bull terrier.
‘She’s got a huge appetite,’ Kathy said, doing her best to emphasise the vastness of it. ‘Yet she still seems to be losing weight.’
‘Okay, what are you feeding her?’ I asked, thinking that the main reason dogs have big appetites is they don’t get fed enough.
‘A cup of dried food in the morning and a cup in the afternoon, plus some tuna and bits and pieces. That’s what she’s eaten all her life and now she’s got this huge appetite and I weighed her today and she’s a kilo lighter than she was last time. She was eight and a half, and now she’s only seven and a half.’
‘Well, dogs are gluttons,’ I said. ‘They don’t have an off button with their appetite.’
‘But I got home from work yesterday and Dolly had broken into the pantry and she’d eaten two full boxes of Tiny Teddy biscuits and she was so bloated she couldn’t move. Her belly was sticking out like a balloon.’
‘Did you do that Dolly Sabel?’ I said, addressing the fluffy white shih tzu-Maltese cross now sitting on the table in the consult room.
‘So I was pretty horrified about that,’ Kathy continued, ‘but then Lachlan got home from work and he always feeds her as soon as he comes in. Before I realised he’d done it, he’d scooped out her usual cup of dog food. Dolly took one look at it, peeled herself off the ground and waddled over like a great fat slug and demolished the lot.’
Lachlan and Kathy were a lovely couple who owned the antique shop in town. They really loved this dog and I knew they were pretty sensible about its care.
‘Was this a one-off?’
‘No, she broke into Lachlan’s mum’s room when she was down for Christmas. Dolly ate all the soap in her toiletry bag and then she ate all the buttons off a dress his mum had laid out to wear that night.’
Kathy was on a roll now. ‘Then we took her down to the beach the other day and she started eating bluebottles. They were stinging her. You could see it was uncomfortable by the way she was shaking her head and pawing at her mouth, but she kept going. She’d run a bit further and find another and eat it.’
The fact Dolly was losing weight despite all this food intake indicated there was something wrong. I had my suspicions as to what it was, but didn’t want to say too much till I could be sure. ‘We’ll take some blood tests and have a look at her.’
We did the tests and t
hey came back showing Dolly had some very elevated liver enzymes, which gave me a further clue. It didn’t appear to be an actual liver disease because her symptoms didn’t match that, so I suspected a separate problem that was affecting the liver as a secondary issue. There’s a disease called Cushing’s disease – where a tumour on the adrenal gland or the pituitary gland causes the adrenal gland to secrete too much cortisol. This in turn leads to, among other things, a huge appetite, a huge thirst and a lot of urine production.
I asked the Geoffs about it and they said they’d never seen a case of it in Berry before. I ordered in the hormone that is used to diagnose Cushing’s, did the test and the readings came back ballistically high, confirming my suspicion.
Kathy and Lachlan both came in to talk about it. They were very concerned. Their children had grown up and moved out, so Dolly was the centre of their lives.
Lachlan, tall with a thick moustache, didn’t speak a lot but his words were considered. Kathy, striking to look at with her pale complexion under an always-made-up face, was more inclined to speak quickly. You knew what she was thinking immediately she thought it.
I explained the prognosis to them as best I could but it was difficult to get across what lay ahead. They kept calling it Cushion’s disease. The treatment back then was particularly dangerous. The only drug we had was mitotane and it was more like chemotherapy than normal medicine. If you overdose a dog it can die from a lack of cortisone (Addison’s disease).
‘You have to give her just enough over three to seven days to partially kill the adrenal gland to the point where things are brought back into balance,’ I said. ‘If I prescribe her too much she will die. If I get it right, she will be back to normal and then we just have to give her a dose every week or two to keep her in balance.’
Village Vets Page 21