Memoirs of a Cotswold Vet

by Ivor Smith

  When it came to the crunch we did not do too badly in our final school exams. I was not awarded the school’s prestigious Townsend Scholarship or a State Scholarship in Mathematics and Physics which was tenable at Queen’s College Cambridge. That accolade went to Edward Rudge.

  I had my place at the Liverpool Vet School and that was what I wanted.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CLOSING REFLECTIONS

  All stories have to end at some point. I began to write mine during the cold wintry days of 2007. For several years now I have enjoyed being part of Churchdown’s Local History Society. At school I had no interest in the darned subject but as i grew older I became obsessed with it. You could call it an age thing I suppose. Anne Boden, the society’s ‘never take a break’ chairman, thought that I could give an interesting talk that revolved around my veterinary career in the village that now spanned decades. Anne and her family had been clients almost from the time I put up my plate in 1972. I gave the talk, and by chance that night a young commissioning editor from a local publishing company was in the audience. She believed I had some experiences others might be interested to read about and asked if I had considered writing a book of veterinary memoirs. So I did, and if you have managed to get this far I hope you have enjoyed my memories of life in the Cotswolds and its animal (and human) inhabitants.

  Writing the book was trickier than the talk. Which of the hundreds of rewarding, disappointing, happy, sad or simply ridiculous memories are of interest to readers? There is so much to tell and no chairman to tell you when to stop talking. The veterinary memories are not just of my patients; most of the unforgettable stories arose from a situation created by the innocent actions of an owner and their interactions with their pet. My last chapter ends with just a few memorable cases from my career.

  At the start of my career, my Vet School demanded that I spend a number of weeks working each vacation, always for free, at stables and farms to gain experience in horse and farm husbandry and management. This offered me a unique opportunity to spend time at the stables at our local pub, the Wagon & Horses, and I was in some ways privileged to be accepted there. At the same time the stable owners were happy for me to be there, mucking out for nothing. On the bright side it was part of my education and it kept me fit, and those few weeks were a real education. I toiled hard when the bosses were around and chatted to the locals and stable girls when they were not. It was also convenient for me to see horse practice there during the day and to see Angela at night. Her family home was just down the road and she was by now my fiancée: engaged to be married to a penniless student.

  The stables had been managed for a very long time by Mr Llewellyn-Jones and his business partner Gerald Brown. Both men were horse experts in different ways. Mr Brown was keen to teach me horse and stable management and I learnt a great deal from him. I learnt a lot too from Mr Llewellyn-Jones. It is not so easy to describe his equine speciality, perhaps ‘a study of the things that they will not teach you at Vet School’ might be close to the mark. Before I had been formally instructed at Liverpool to age horses by their teeth, Mr Llewellyn-Jones had already taught me the ways in which the apparent age of the horse could be altered with a dental rasp and a bit of chicanery. By the time I had been taught the significance of a ‘seven-year-hook’ on an upper corner incisor of a seven-year-old horse, I knew how to remove it.

  Two of the most important health aspects of buying and selling horses are ensuring that the horse is sound in wind and limb. A lame horse that cannot breathe properly is of little use to anyone. The old sage nevertheless was aware of methods of minimising nasal discharges and the low-grade chronic lameness that temporarily disappeared with a gentle warming-up exercise prior to a sale inspection. I am sure that he never indulged in this sort of cunning himself of course, and it was thoughtful of him to pass some of his wealth of knowledge on to me. As a young professional, I found the examination of a horse for soundness on behalf of a purchaser to be one of the most onerous of routine jobs. I often lay in bed at night wondering what imperceptible sign of some impending problem the horse might have had that I had missed that day.

  An occasion I remember well was the evening John Harvey rang. John is still a large local sheep farmer at Walton Cardiff, near Tewkesbury, now vastly developed. Like most of us, his rugby-playing days are now just memories. I would bet that one of his adrenalin rushes was the evening he scored a winning try playing for Cheltenham’s Old Pats in a 1960s Rugby Cup Final. It was a gigantic effort from the biggest, if not the fastest, forward on the field. On this occasion John wanted me to move fast. There had been a freak accident when his daughter’s pony had jumped a fence and a fractured pole had speared his posterior abdomen. The jagged point had entered the inguinal region, traversed the body and emerged through the gluteal muscles of the hindquarter.

  Somehow, miraculously, the pole had missed the numerous major nerves and blood vessels in the region, and the internal organs, and if it had struck the bony pelvis it had been deflected from it. At the time I drew up the Immobilon I was not sure of any of this. I sawed through the pole to shorten it, cleaned and disinfected it as thoroughly as possible and eased it gradually out of the anaesthetised horse’s body.

  Back in the farmhouse kitchen, over a cup of coffee, we discussed the possible complications that might arise over the next few days. The pony came round rapidly from the anaesthetic and was recovering well from the ordeal. With the help of a great concentration of antibiotics and other appropriate injections, the wounds healed well and remarkably he was soon back in action as though this alarming episode had never happened.

  Regrettably not all emergencies have happy endings and one I have never been able to forget began one Monday morning on my way to our Brockworth surgery. When I reached the Ermin Street junction a tanker lorry was stationary at an odd angle in the road, and it was surrounded by a crowd of anxious-looking people. I arrived at the same time as a police car and, after a brief discussion, said I was happy to crawl under the lorry to attend to a Collie dog that was unable to scramble from under the lorry. He was unable to stand and in his frightened state did not at all appreciate me wanting to move him. I slipped a muzzle over his jaws and eased him on to a blanket. We slowly dragged the blanket away from the underside of the lorry and transferred him to my car, and within minutes he was lying on my surgery table. It was important to assess the extent of his injuries as quickly as possible and when I left the surgery at Brockworth I took my heavily sedated patient with me.

  Back at Churchdown I anaesthetised him and X-rayed his back, his pelvis and his hind limbs to find the reason he could not stand. It was fairly obvious. His pelvis was fractured, a femur was fractured and the tibia in the same leg was in no better shape. His injuries were dreadful but nevertheless, given enough time, they were probably all treatable and with the aid of pins, plates and screws, the injuries could be repaired. We were now at the stage where we would be able to explain the situation to his anxious owner, what needed to be done to put things right, and not unimportantly, what it was going to cost. I felt sure that by the end of the day the worried owner of this plucky dog would be there to claim him. Then the client would have to be told that the final fees would, at today’s value, be around £1,000. You hoped they would respond with ‘Thank Heaven he’s insured.’

  Therein lay a problem. It was not that he was uninsured, but a couple of days later we had not found an owner, despite the many announcements and coverage on local radio and the newspapers. Nobody seemed to want him. I suspect that a nurse had detected a growing bond between me and this dog, and she suggested, ‘Why don’t you have him, Mr Smith?’ The persuasion continued: ‘He would make a lovely pal for Jimmy.’ The thought had crossed my mind.

  There would be a great deal of surgical work involved and it would be expensive to the practice in materials and time but it would be my time, and time was now of the essence. There was an optimum interval for commencing orthopaedic work following the injuries an
d we had already passed that while we waited for the owners to come and claim their dog. Friday came and went. Under different circumstances I would have been delighted. It was not my on-duty weekend and on Monday, yippee, we were off on our family holiday. It was a huge dilemma, and I realised that, not for the first time, I had become the judge and the jury. I weighed up all the factors. I would have to delegate the surgical work, and there was an awful lot of it, to the assistant vet or even the locum who may have relished the challenge or may have resented the apparent obligation. There were endless possibilities of complications that could arise and, rightly or wrongly, I began to realise that my heart was ruling my head and I decided to put the dog to sleep.

  I went into surgery on the Sunday night, looked into his eyes with more than a little feeling of failure, and painlessly injected the barbiturate. I was glad on this occasion that for some reason the nurses had not given this affectionate stray a name. We never did have a chance to find out what name someone else had given him.

  Defining what is an emergency is not always an easy task. Even in today’s enlightened world the telephone will ring in the middle of the night and at the other end is the owner of a young female cat, suddenly rolling in apparent agony with acute abdominal pain. There is a 99 per cent chance that telling the distraught owner that ‘what she needs is the attention of a tomcat to put her right’ is not the sort of reply they are expecting to hear from the vet at 3 a.m. So I often found myself carrying out a full clinical examination of the super-affectionate cat which had suddenly come into season just in case I was 1 per cent wrong.

  But what is an emergency call? From my own experience here is one snippet of advice for the new graduate vet. If the owner believes it is an emergency, it is an emergency, and they were not always wrong. I recall a time when a simple bitch spay could have turned into an emergency had not one of the owners insisted that the daft young Churchdown vet must have given stupid advice. The Friday morning operation had been quite routine. There had been no complications and in normal fashion the patient was discharged at the end of the day with the usual instructions, which included ‘no solids by mouth for 24 hours’, plus, ‘Come back on Monday for a check-up and in ten days for the stitches to be removed.’

  It was about the fourth day when the wife rang up to query the post-operative instructions. ‘Surely this cannot be right?’ she questioned the receptionist. ‘My dog hasn’t had any food this week, she’s ravenous and she cannot possibly just survive on fluids for the next ten days.’ There had quite clearly been a misunderstanding. After four days without food their dog was starving. This certainly was not the message I had intended to convey to her German husband. His English was poor and my German was non-existent. I could cope with a little French and understood Forest of Dean. All’s well that ends well and at the end of the ten days the chubby little Dachshund happily rolled over to show off her hysterectomy wound for the removal of her stitches.

  I will never forget Paddy either, a sprightly Irish Setter who couldn’t go too long without an obligatory trip to the vet, and his track record suggested that it was just a matter of time before he was involved in an emergency of one kind or another. It happened about lunchtime on a beautiful hot summer’s day. Paddy’s owner was an experienced nurse at a local hospital and earlier that morning she retired to rest after a night on duty. While she put her head down Paddy stretched out in the garden and did likewise. Now most dogs would by nature choose a cool shady spot to sleep. He must have selected a south-facing wall, and when he woke, he was hot, very hot. Nurse Avril rang at 1 p.m. She knew he was in trouble this time, and he was already showing the very serious early signs of heatstroke. Full blown heatstroke was not an uncommon problem in surgery when we saw some warm weather.

  A typical scenario was the collapsed, exhausted pet brought into surgery panting madly and becoming increasingly comatose. The diagnosis was usually self-evident, and often followed a marathon over Chosen Hill on a tropical summer afternoon. It was sometimes difficult to explain to a devoted incredulous owner that no matter what we did now he may still not recover. Hospitalisation and intensive care, intravenous fluids by the litre, heart drugs and steroids to help prevent brain damage might be essential, but at the top of the list of immediate needs was a cold water bath.

  Before I left the surgery for her house, I asked Avril to start running a cold bath, and ten minutes later we carried a confused, floppy, gasping Paddy upstairs to the bathroom. When I had taken his temperature the mercury seemed to be trying to escape, but we would soon lower it. With one last heave we shoved him into the cold water and immersed him so that just his head was a little above the surface. We knew he was beginning to recover when he decided to get out, so we shoved him back in again. After several rounds of getting in and out, and on each occasion it became a bigger effort to keep him in, we assumed he was getting better, and by now we were both almost as wet as the patient. He made a complete recovery.

  I suppose most wives would question their husband’s behaviour if they arrived home from work dripping wet. Angela was used to me appearing at any time of the day dishevelled and in some sort of disarray, and took it for granted. Just another day at the office.

  The stories roll on and, regrettably, so do the years. The Brambles surgery that we had created in the 1970s had steadily grown and the original surgery building had reached the size of a large bungalow but even so, by the end of the ’90s, it was simply too small to accommodate the ever-increasing staff and to provide the facilities that we needed to maintain the standard of service to a greater number of our clients that I had always strived for. I was lucky enough to secure the derelict old cottages on the opposite side of the road and with the aid of both a very good architect and a local builder transformed a blot on the landscape into a state-of-the-art surgery.

  Angela and I were appreciative and perhaps even took a little pride in what we had achieved in those thirty years, but we were not getting any younger and we began to ask ourselves – what next? Perhaps we were subconsciously looking for a new challenge. At some stage others would have to take over the practice, and thoughts, followed by talk of retirement began to surface. The millennium was approaching and it came and went without anything much happening other than fireworks at midnight. The decision however was made, and now already (unbelievably) sixty, I retired in the spring of 2001. It coincided with the worst that nature had to offer: the biggest outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease the country has known.

  I am sure the dreadful events of that time are still fixed in the minds of many people as clearly as in mine. The slaughter and the sight of the bodies of the dead cattle and sheep piled high in the fields, the stench of the pyres and the distress it caused to the farming community will never leave one’s mind. Inevitably at times the stress of it all brought out the worst in people, and sometimes farmers behaved in unpredictable ways. My scariest moment occurred near Blakeney Hill in the Forest of Dean. One day I stopped my car in response to a thickset local chap who appeared to be waving me down, no doubt to give me helpful directions to a little farm that I could not find. This Forester seemed to know instinctively who I was and where I had come from. He walked slowly to the nearside of my car and an angry red face appeared through the window I had fully opened, perhaps unwisely. His initial remarks were not too welcoming, and he made his point quickly.

  ‘You’re a friggin’ vet, aren’t you?’ It was more of a statement than a question.

  ‘You’re from friggin’ MAFF.’ I cannot remember whether I actually got round to saying anything at all to him, but his inquisition and his venomous lecture to me on what we were all doing wrong continued, and his big fist was uncomfortably close to my neck.

  In his defence I suspect this temporarily demented chap who had given me a vicious tongue-lashing was acting out of character. Later I discovered he had already had his sheep destroyed and meeting me gave him the opportunity to take his feelings out on a Ministry official. Eventually he stood back
and I was able to raise the window, probably after I had nodded an assurance that I would forward his recommendations to the Divisional Veterinary Officers at Elmbridge Court. He seemed to know them all by name.

  I was a TVI, a Temporary Veterinary Inspector, and there were scores of us up and down the country. At the start of the outbreak MAFF was hopelessly undermanned and to fill the gap quickly an army of retired vets were asked to volunteer for service, and the Last of the Summer Wine responded. As so often in these situations, much of our work was of a very routine nature, and was combined not unexpectedly with the traditional government paperwork in triplicate. Nevertheless, most of us found it surprisingly interesting, and I think we did a reasonable job. Most importantly we took the pressure off the permanent MAFF staff and possibly our humour kept their spirits up.

  Within weeks of the start of the outbreak many of the senior MAFF people were looking drained and some did become quite ill under the strain. We took our work seriously, but as you can imagine in circumstances like these, there were often opportunities to swap tales with other TVIs and to enjoy the company of colleagues that you had not seen for years. All had experiences to relate, many were horrible but some were amusing. I was very pleasantly surprised to meet a vet there who was an old boy from my school, a very well-known one in fact. He was Old Cryptian Bryan ‘Grunter’ Green.