by John Hicks
Stevo, our maths teacher, was a gruff but kind-hearted man, with a slow fuse of anger that we boys could light on occasions. After the restrictions of double English with Mrs B, the temptations to create a diversion were impelling and Stevo often suffered the consequences of our restless little spirits.
As he slowly paced down the aisles between our desks, appraising our progress on the problem he had set us, he had no cause to delay long over my blank page. The dapper and intelligent Ellis, in front of me, was more worthy of his help. Stevo’s black, scholastic drapery glided across my desk as he bent to his task. I swear I only had to move that button an inch to hook it into a triangular break on the edge of my bakelite inkwell. Inevitably, as Stevo moved on, the full inkwell slid up Ellis’ back and decanted over his shoulder—despite my self-serving warning cries. A blue-black birthmark spread over Ellis’ pristine grey shirt.
Oh calamity! Indeed, I think these were the very words Stevo uttered as he spun round, arcing the ink onto yet another desk. There was plenty of work for boys rushing to assist with blotting paper. Despite their best efforts I suspect Mrs Ellis was not best pleased at the end of the day; however, right now, Stevo was starting to lose his grip. An early version of paint-ball, involving rulers and ink-soaked pellets of blotting paper, was evolving behind his back every time he addressed the blackboard. When one hit him on the neck he finally flipped. Bellowing and red-faced, caught between jumping up and down with rage and running to deal with the miscreants, he bounced, kangaroo-style, to the back of the class. There, in a frenzy of flailing bat wings and a flurry of papers, two boys were belted savagely about their heads. Just as suddenly the storm passed. A saddened, careworn man whispered apologies for his human failings and departed the room. We never even found out how many oranges the Chinaman could fit in the box, although I was more interested in the accompanying illustra- tion in the textbook and wondered why his pigtail didn’t get caught in the spokes of his bicycle.
We became no less cruel as we became seniors, though we progressed from steel nibs and inkwells to fountain pens. The fun and mess of ink diminished, and as we matured we became more materialistic. With a luminous wristwatch and an elegant Parker pen, the average schoolboy was as happy as today’s teenager with a cellphone and an Xbox.
I treasured my blue Parker pen with its gold nib and used it right through my university years. I polished the nib with blotting paper till it gleamed and, by a strange compulsion, I was occasionally drawn to sip the ink—a repellent, salty tang—challenging and forbidden. Of course, it would never happen these days. Every bottle will come with a health notice warning of the dangers of drinking or gargling with ink, and to use a double-thickness glove technique before writing with the stuff. You can’t even buy a car without a bible-thick manual warning you not to chew on the doors in case you damage your dentures, and any other possibly damaging permutation of bizarre behaviour which could lead your lawyers to claim against the manufacturer.
However, ink ingestion as a youth could easily have been a contributory cause to my bladder cancer. How silly of me.
~
Thank goodness for modern medical science. A specialist removed my first tumour with a cystoscope not so very different from the laparoscope I had inflicted on those ewes. The cystoscope is inserted up the dilated urethra and the whole procedure performed within the bladder. As I awoke from my anaesthetic I was burningly aware of the insult to my urethra. An impossibly large plastic tube was keeping it stretched to pass the inevitable blood clots that kept breaking away from the operation site. A few days hovering between extreme discomfort and pain and then this wretched catheter could be removed. That was when I knew the true meaning of pain, or I thought I did.
Life went on. Every three months new tumours were detected in my bladder and the same procedure followed. Occasionally post-operative blood clots created total blockages and I underwent emergency ambulance dashes to the hospital. Most importantly I witnessed others in far worse predicaments than I was. A stay in hospital generally removes any vestiges of self-pity. Then one day, with the threat of radiotherapy imminent, my check-up was clear. My urethra had survived, slightly distended, but still very serviceable.
It wasn’t to be the end of my battle with cancer.
~
Actually, it was our battle. I drew strength from the courageous support of a loving wife. It involved both of us and we had two dependent teenage children. ‘Soul-searching’ is a much-used cliché, but it was vigorously applied as we adjusted to the changing prognoses. Good health becomes a precious commodity when it can no longer be relied upon. We learned to celebrate our blessings daily: the strength of our relationship, the pride we had in our two healthy daughters, the beauty of our surroundings, and our health. We aimed for, and I believe we achieved, a state of serenity which has not left us, though it has been sorely tested.
Of interest in all this is the psychology of cause and effect. If you take positive action—pray for deliverance, or start on a course of blue-green algae—and your condition resolves, is the cure a result of your action, or would it have happened anyway? I have a fair idea that my reprieve can be attributed to modern medicine. But How I Beat Cancer by Heeding Medical Advice will never be a bestseller.
To all those who are adamant that they have won their battles with cancer by fighting it in their minds, by adopting a vegan diet, by seeking endless second opinions and referrals, by adopting new religious beliefs—well good luck to you, but don’t go foisting your illogical baggage on the rest of us. It disturbs my state of serenity.
Perhaps, because of my obdurate attitudes, I was selected for a second bout of cancer. This time a small tumour appeared unheralded at the back of my mouth. It was an auspicious discovery I made one New Year’s Day. It was another malignancy: this time a squamous cell carcinoma. Once again I was at the mercy of the surgeons. The prognosis for this type of cancer with prompt removal was, once again, eighty per cent after five years. Take two of those and the odds are shortening; my luck may run out one of these days. It was time to review lifestyles. Time to re-invent myself.
Appearing in a local newspaper near you…
Moon metal Cure for Cancer
Jon Hix [pictured in thoughtful and sincere pose with flowing Manchu-style beard and orange toga] has returned from many years of study under Lunarian monks in Outer Magnolia.
Why Magnolia? Jon’s move was inspired after miraculous recoveries from two types of malignant cancer. He initially attributed these to his ability to attain a state of serenity. However, a dyslexic New Zealand ‘colour therapist’ convinced him that the word ‘serene’ is indistinguishable from ‘selene’—the Greek Moon Goddess—for Asiatic speakers of English. He also pointed out the similarities between the words ‘veterinarian’ and ‘vegetarian’.
These amazing orthographical co-incidences convinced Jon he was on the right track. He also knew that sheep deficient in selenium, ‘the Moon metal’, were prone to adenocarcinomata—malignant cancers of the small bowel [true] and it followed, by Lunarian logic, that there was some link between the Moon and a cure for cancer. A happy elision of ‘Lunar’ and ‘cure’ easily transpose into lucre.
Jon has set up a clinic to give Western cancer sufferers the chance to undergo the ancient healing rituals of ‘Lunatic Therapy’, the object of which is to attain a state of ‘lunacy’. Adepts can advance into ‘sheer lunacy’, at which stage their cancers will appear unimportant to them and even their loved-ones will cease to care.
Jon’s current best seller How I Beat Cancer by Sheer Lunacy is available at alternative book stores.
Chapter Thirty-three
Money for Nothing and the Kicks for Free
In a working life dealing with large animals it is inevitable that at some stage a ‘close shave’ is going to turn into an accident. Many accidents happen because of inadequate facilities, but the temptation is to complete the job rather than decline it and get back in your car. For younger vets there is ev
en more pressure. ‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about. Bud has been doing it behind that gate for years.’ On arrival back at the clinic you take issue with Bud. ‘I agree with you, John. I’ve been telling him to install a decent head-bail for years.’
A head-bail is a device, usually of strong metal pipe construction, that clamps a cow or bull by the neck. For any procedure a vet or farmer has to do involving the head or front end of a bull it is almost indispensable. It is possible to make do with a rope halter round the head, but that in turn has to be secured to an immovable object, and that was where my system was about to fail.
The object of my attentions was a frisky Jersey bull. Even ‘Slow’ had decided that it was time to put a ring in his nose and dehorn him. But ‘Frisky’, who had until now enjoyed free dominion, was extremely displeased with the constraint of the rope halter that we had somehow managed to drop over his head. From one side of a gate we slowly played him in, like a prize tuna, till he was adjacent to the gate of a milking bail, and then hitched him up to it as tightly as we could. Like most facilities on Slow’s farm it was apparent that this gate was approaching senescence. But it was to suffer no peaceful descent into oblivion.
With great difficulty I injected the local anaesthetic nerve blocks to desensitise the horns before I cut them off with a saw. Frisky rattled his head against the gate trying to pin my hand as I reached through the bars. There were angry prolonged bellows and he was pawing the ground. A fired-up bull at close range is an impressive sight. His struggles had already gained him about six inches of laxity as the rope stretched, and this gave him more leeway to batter the tottering gate. Somehow I managed to remove one horn, but the nerve block can’t have taken properly on the other side. I was over half-way through when Frisky had had enough and decided to annihilate what remained by butting his head clean through the frail timbers. As he lunged and raised his head, the gate remnant was lifted off its pins and we were faced with an unrestrained, rampant bull wearing a gate necklace.
Slow had a three-foot start on Frisky. Mine was considerably less.
Behind us was a narrow concrete passageway through which the milked cows, on less pressing occasions, ambled contentedly to pasture. The concrete was slippery with moss and slime. The wall, seven feet of it, was the back wall for the shed and continued at the same height past the roofed area. It was only when we revisited the scene that I made these observations. Both of us had cleared that wall in a trice as Frisky clattered through beneath our feet. I had discovered two things: Slow was not so named for any physical incapacities. Secondly, what incredible reserves we can all draw on when adrenalin surges in our blood!
Out in the paddock our maddened bull had finally cast off his wooden yoke and, in the surprising manner of such animals, had instantly settled once he was free. He was contentedly chewing the grass. With some trepidation I retrieved my strained halter, but Frisky wasn’t really interested. Most dangerous animals are not malevolent. They don’t hold personal grudges. They are just reacting to circumstances. If you happen to be in the way, well, look out.
~
Most accidents come out of the blue. I drove the long, straight Canterbury road to my next visit, to pregnancy-test a mare. There she was in the yard, already caught, and with Maggie holding a lead rope attached to her head collar. All ready to go then. This shouldn’t take too long. Not as if I was going to have to frig around for half an hour trying to catch her first, as is so often the case on these hobby farms. A Welsh mountain pony hovered in the background. Maggie was devoted to her equine friends.
‘Do you really need to hobble her? I don’t want her hurt,’ Maggie pleaded, as I slid the rope round her neck, tied the bowline and then looped the sidelines through hobbles on her rear fetlocks to stop her kicking me. It was the minimum I was prepared to do. All vets are brought up with stories of horrific injuries from kicks. Standing directly behind a mare with your arm in her rectum, an intrusion that many mares naturally resent, is putting yourself in a vulnerable position.
‘That’s one area where I won’t take short cuts, Maggie,’ I said firmly. The discomfort of the ropes for her mare were more important to her than my safety. Time and again vets have to override this protective instinct in the pet-owning public.
‘I think that if you had my job to do, you’d be the same. You might get away with it a few times, but eventually you’d be caught out.’
At this stage I was startled to see the mare’s perineum contracting. In equine parlance she was ‘winking’, meaning she was probably on heat. A bit unusual. Mares on heat aren’t usually pregnant. Maggie wouldn’t have called me out if she had displayed signs of heat earlier. It meant she wasn’t pregnant. However, I was all set up to examine her, so I thought might as well do a rectal examination while I was there ... Sidelines secure … OK, here we go. The next minute I was delivered a fearful blow to my thigh and lay in breathless spasm on the ground. It wasn’t the mare; it was that blasted Welsh mountain pony. It was a stallion. The mare was on heat. I was the competition, though I hadn’t realised it. I hadn’t even seen the little blighter sneak up on me. She was winking at him, not me!
Maggie helped me up. The pain eased. Nothing broken. In numbed discomfort I slowly unlooped the sidelines. Maggie had removed the little sod responsible for my injury. As with Frisky, he was not innately vicious. I had merely been competition in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I must have looked pale because Maggie, by now profusely apologetic, insisted I had a cup of tea. She really shouldn’t have had that stallion wandering around loose in the yard and she knew it. Fortified by the sweet elixir I limped to my car. Fortunately, the long, straight road home did not necessitate too much gear changing, because my left leg was rapidly seizing up.
At last I reached the sanctuary of our driveway and that was where Viv found me ten minutes later.
‘I thought I heard the car come in,’ she said. Did I detect a slight tone of impatience? Yes!
‘What on earth are you still sitting there for?’ she continued.
‘It’s not my habit to sit in cars,’ I responded. ‘You know I only regard them as a means of conveyance. The fact is I can’t move. Once again I’ve been nailed by one of those creatures so dear to your heart.’
This was an oblique reference to her misspent youth with ponies, one of which had trodden on my toe shortly before our wedding. (That bruise had become infected and the abscess under my large toe nail had played a significant part in our honeymoon—at one stage of which I had been rendered delirious with pain rather than the pleasure I had so eagerly anticipated.)
Somehow Viv managed to coax and manipulate me from the relatively pain-free refuge of my car seat and into the house. A massive haematoma in my quadriceps was surgically removed a few days later and after a week or so on crutches I was once again on the road.
I can still feel the calcified remains of that bruise, the largest they had seen at the hospital, or so they said. A couple of inches higher and the hoof would have connected with the bones of my hip and not the fleshy padding of my thigh. A shattered hip would have been far more serious. I had been lucky.
Frisky, the bull, was an accident waiting to happen and these days neither I, nor any of our staff, would be expected to perform their job with unsafe facilities. But the job is inherently risky. Despite being careful, most equine vets have been kicked; and every small-animal practitioner has been bitten or scratched at some stage. There is the occasional dog that attacks without warning, but usually the owner alerts you to that fact before you deal with his (it is, as a rule, a male thing) ‘pet’. Even Barry Hargreaves may have been savaged by the odd guinea pig during his fictitious career. But perhaps the worst prospect is putting yourself in a position where you know there is a reasonable chance of getting a hiding. Most deer vets have had one.
Any vets who dealt with deer in the days when deer farming was a new venture will appreciate my sentiments. Farmers had yet to establish the optimal layou
t for deer yards. Some arrangements were diabolical: unroofed pens with high walls. Try concentrating on clipping a stag with a pair of noisy clippers while a couple of his frantic 200-kilo companions repeatedly attempt to jump for freedom, not caring where and on whom they land when they bounce back into the pen.
Some farmers who had joined the cervine gold rush had no empathy with their animals and were unable to adjust to the different level of stockmanship required when working with deer. The worst of them were frightened of their animals.
The comment ‘It’s OK, John, I’ll close the door now’, meant from the outside, leaving you alone with a heaving mass of hinds, a clipper and a tuberculin syringe.
Clippers are noisy, and already nervous animals can behave in unpredictable ways. Subordinate types crouch on the floor and there you have to follow, trailing the clipper cord behind you. This presents an opportunity for the aggressive, dominant ones to have a go at you. None of this is a problem if you are supported by capable staff who look out for you as you concentrate on the job in hand, but there were some farms where we all dreaded going. For the recipient of an attack by a stroppy deer the reality sinks in moments after you’ve been struck, so sudden is the assault. Your helmet and shoulders are peppered by a maelstrom of heavy blows and there she is; wild-eyed, trembling and hair on end, waiting to have another go. Warily you keep other deer between you and her while your team, with luck, can draft her out of the pen. In a very crude way you have been reminded of human frailty. No matter how macho we are, our strength and reaction times are feeble compared to those of these wild animals honed by millennia of evolutionary adaptation. Our brain power, aided by medical advances, is surely taking humanity in the opposite direction on the evolutionary highway.