: The Life of a Yorkshire Vet

by Norton, Julian

  A year after I started at Skeldale, Pete and I were invited to attend a fundraising dinner for a local animal rescue charity, the Jerry Green Foundation. It was held in the Golden Fleece in Thirsk and Fred Trueman was the guest speaker. I was a big cricket fan and loved Fred’s humour. Fred himself had acquired a rescue dog from Jerry Green’s, and did his best to help support the work of the charity. The problem facing us, as usual, was that we were both on call. Pete was on first and I was on second, so theoretically he would take all the calls, and I would help out only if it got too busy or if there was a two-man job. Usually it was folly to go to a social event while on duty, but since it was local and for a charity with whom we worked closely, we felt we should both take the chance.

  The meal was enjoyable and then came the after-dinner speeches, and the time for raising money. Right at this point, just as Fred was lighting his first cigar of the evening, Pete’s beeper went off. It was a call to a nearby farm to see a cow, down with milk fever. As junior, I offered to go, so Pete could enjoy his coffee and the rest of the speeches. He didn’t argue, and I made my apologies and scuttled off to see the cow. The farm was nearby but it took me a while to complete the job because the farmer was in the middle of milking. Most farmers milk their cows at about five in the morning and again twelve hours later at five in the evening. While this is the normal way of things, there is no special reason it has to be done so early in the morning, and Alan, who ran the herd single-handedly, was the type of bloke who liked a later start to his day. Consequently, he would still be in the milking parlour at nine in the evening, which is why he was still milking when I arrived.

  Once he had finished, and I had treated the cow, I washed up and headed back to the Fleece to hear the rest of Fred’s stories. The evening was nearly at a close and when I met up with Pete again he had a painful smile on his face and he confessed that he rather wished he had gone to see the cow after all. Pete is not a man who parts with his hard-earned cash readily and, after I had left, the main fundraising part of the evening began. This involved various rounds of bidding and a game where large amounts of money had to be pledged. As I said, Fred was a vigorous supporter of this animal charity and had done a good job of boosting their coffers, in large part thanks to Pete, who ended the evening with a somewhat lighter wallet than he had expected. As the archetypal Yorkshireman, an expensive evening out is never one of Pete’s favourites.

  The practice is very busy, so Pete and I rarely get time to work together on clinical cases. Obviously there are the hours that we spend on the business side of running the practice, but these are no substitute for the rewards of working on a challenging case with a colleague. However, when there is a colt to be castrated, Pete and I often join forces, as it is a procedure that we always do with two vets, one to supervise the anaesthetic and one to do the operation itself. Some veterinary surgeons castrate colts under sedation, using local anaesthesia only, which allows the horse to remain standing. This is much quicker and allows equine vets to do many in a morning. To do the procedure with the colt lying down under general anaesthesia is more involved, but we have always found it to be the best way to avoid complications. Under the right circumstances, it can be a rather relaxing hour. We try to do the operation on a clear, sunny day in spring, free from mud or flies that would contaminate the wound, and if the operation goes well and the horse recovers from its anaesthetic without event, you can imagine how pleasant it can be, sitting in a sunny field waiting for a sleepy horse to emerge from its slumbers.

  While castrating a colt is very straightforward if all goes according to plan, when things do not go smoothly, absolute disasters can occur. This is especially so if the animal has not been handled sufficiently, and is jumping and kicking while we are trying to inject it with sedatives, or if the colt has grown into a boisterous stallion. Heading out to do such a procedure is daunting.

  On one particular occasion, the job had been postponed several times, because Pete and I could not get there together and the farmer, who also kept show jumpers, was insistent that it should be done by the two of us. Pete is very experienced with horses. My usual role on this farm was castrating two-year-old bulls that had been missed by previous owners – not the best job either! The farmer’s insistence that only the two of us in combination should undertake the operation ought to have set some alarm bells ringing.

  We arrived on the farm in thick fog. The conditions were far from ideal for castrating a colt. It was damp in the air and very muddy underfoot but the farmer was not prepared to let this chance pass, and directed us to the paddock where our patient was waiting. The sight that met us as we rounded the corner made our hearts sink into our muddy boots. The field was covered in mud rather than grass, the air was thick with fog, and through the gloom we could just make out the form of an enormous horse, with its head stretched out as if it were trying to pull away from something. In the fog, it looked like a beast from a Greek legend. It was clearly a stallion with several years of growth and strength and not at all the benign yearling we had been expecting. The beast had been caught with a lasso, which was around its neck, with a long rope attached, about 20 metres away, to a JCB digger. Usually a horse being prepared for surgery would be standing in a stable, restrained with a head collar and a short lead rope, and held confidently by its competent owner. In this case the rope was very long and the thing on the non-horse end was only capable of keeping hold of the horse by virtue of its size and solidity. It seemed an impossible task to get anywhere near this wild creature. Every time we tried to pull it closer, the horse would charge around the JCB tangling us dangerously in the rope.

  To make the scene even more ridiculous, the radio in the JCB cabin had been left on, and the music drifting out of the open window was the Bob Marley song ‘Three Little Birds’, which blithely reassured us not to worry about a thing. We were not quite as confident as Bob was that every little thing was, in fact, gonna be all right.

  Slowly but surely, however, we managed to shorten the rope so the horse was close enough to handle. The next challenge was to inject it with the right dose of sedative. If we couldn’t do this, the rest of the procedure would be a disaster. I drew up a strong dose. Once this was in, the horse would become sleepy, but at this stage it was still very wild. It was also very, very cross at having been lassoed and pulled right up to the digger by its neck. I had to be accurate, quick and brave. Luckily, on this occasion, I was all three of these things. Once the horse was sedated, it was time to give the general anaesthetic, again by injection. This is another point at which things can go wrong. On one occasion I was castrating a colt with Tim. He had to climb on a stepladder to be able to inject the sedative into its vein. Despite appearing to be nicely sedated, just as I was about to give the anaesthetic, the sleepy horse looked up, bolted straight across the field and made its escape. Today, if the same thing happened, our horse would burst through the rickety fence and land in the slurry lagoon, which was right next to the operating area. We didn’t want that to happen. Thankfully the intravenous injection went in perfectly. After this, as the anaesthetic takes effect, the horse usually wobbles around for a minute or so, before becoming unconscious and sinking to the ground. This has to be carefully managed, to prevent injury to the animal or the handlers. The proximity of the slurry lagoon was still causing us real worry, as we needed to detach the horse from its JCB to allow it to go down safely.

  In days gone by, before the routine use of the safe and effective injectable anaesthetics we use today, Mr Sinclair and Pete would perform this procedure using the famous horse chloroform face-mask, which is still in the display cabinet at the practice, next to the ‘evil salve’. At that time it was Peter’s job, as the junior vet, to get the horse asleep. The canvas mask would be put over the horse’s face and nose, and chloroform, a liquid anaesthetic, would be poured onto an absorbent cloth or cotton wool, in the part of the mask nearest the horse’s nose. There was little regard paid to the correct dose; it was simply poured
in. Once the mask was filled, the horse would be left to wander around a large field, followed by vets and assistants with buckets of water and surgical equipment, waiting for it to fall over. Wherever it fell was the site to perform the operation and it could just as easily be a ditch or an orchard as a flat area of dry, grassy field.

  Luckily for us, our drugs had a quicker effect and, after staggering for a few moments, the horse went to ground half way between the digger and the lagoon, so this particular disaster was averted. After this, the surgery was actually the most straightforward part of the morning. We positioned the horse on its side with its uppermost leg pulled forwards to allow Peter to perform the castration. The main concern was that the anaesthetic was sufficiently deep to prevent this leg from twitching or kicking, as the first object it would have met would have been Pete’s head. As vets, we have to have quick reactions, but these were not needed today, as the job went perfectly from here. Each testicle was clamped off with special clamps called emasculators, applied to the cord to crush and cut it simultaneously. The blood vessels were ligated and the testicles removed. The only bit to remember during this procedure is to apply the clamps the right way up, otherwise the blood vessels are not clamped and the horse bleeds to death. This very much focuses the mind, but the adage we were taught at vet school, ‘nut-to-nut’, always helps – it reminds us that the nut on the clamp faces towards the nut on the horse!

  As the surgery was completed, everyone involved breathed a collective sigh of relief. It is always preferable for a horse to recover from general anaesthetic as slowly as possible. If it gets up too quickly, it can stumble around in its confused state. Ketamine is used as the anaesthetic and it can cause hallucinations if the pre-op sedative wears off too quickly – and who knows what hallucinations horses experience. Thus, the final part of the job is to supervise the recovery. Everything is not over until the patient is safely standing with slightly spread back legs, nibbling on grass, or in this case, peering optimistically at the mud. It took about twenty minutes for the patient to get up and, as the tension of the morning passed, we chatted amiably to the farmer, caught up on some gossip from the village, and thanked our lucky stars that the animal had avoided the slurry lagoon.

  10

  My Other Loves

  I loved my job in Thirsk. I loved the variety of the work, I loved the North Yorkshire Moors, and I loved being part of the practice. However, I had other loves in my life. My girlfriend, Anne, was working in a rural mixed practice in the Cotswolds. She too had found her ideal job, in a beautiful part of the country, doing the type of work she enjoyed. Perfect, except for the fact that we lived and worked about three and a half hours away from each other, both endlessly busy on call rotas. Most weekends one or other of us would be on call, so whoever was off would make the long Friday-night drive, either north or south, to keep the other one company. Looking back, we coped amazingly well with this situation but, after a couple of years of living separately, it was clear that a solution needed to be found. One of us would need to make a big sacrifice.

  The partners in the Cotswold practice didn’t want Anne to leave, and the senior partner, Mr Cook, was approaching retirement. We met them one Sunday evening in a lovely little pub in the village of Winchcombe, where Anne lived. After a brief discussion, they offered me a job. While I was sad to leave Thirsk, a place that had become home, this opportunity was the ideal chance to be with Anne. We could start to make a ‘normal’ life together after such a long period of being separated by distance and weekend duties. After a brilliant leaving party in the pub in Sutton-under-Whitestonecliffe and an even better meal at Ben’s house, we packed the car (it was literally packed, with the cat in her basket wedged up against the roof, surrounded by bags and boxes) and headed south.

  The other two loves in my life were the mountains and my mountain bike. Since a vet in rural practice was usually provided with a car and a house, by the age of twenty-seven my most valuable possession in the world was my Scott Expert racing mountain bike. This was securely fastened to the back of the car as we left Thirsk. I had a few months before my job in Winchcombe started, so I had arranged to join a trip biking across the Himalayas. I would be leaving the following weekend. My itinerary involved flying to Lhasa in Tibet, cycling across the Tibetan plateau – ‘the roof of the world’ – and tracing a path to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. In my thirst for the mountains, a visit to the Himalayas had been a long-time dream.

  I had been passionate about mountains for as long as I can remember, but my primary love was for climbing them rather than biking through them. I was a very active member of the university climbing club at Cambridge, the CUMC. It was one of the oldest climbing clubs in the country and one with an illustrious heritage. Alumni include the famous British climbers George Mallory, who climbed and was killed on Everest in 1924, and Al Rouse, who was killed on K2 in 1986. As climbers we all knew that danger was a constant presence, but we did everything possible to mitigate the risks. None of us in the CUMC actually thought we would ever be in peril. We felt invincible.

  I spent the summer of 1993 climbing in the French and Swiss Alps with friends. The first stop was Chamonix, a Mecca for alpine climbing. I was there with two friends from the university climbing club, Tom and Trish. We had climbed together many times in the wintery mountains of Scotland, around the crags of northern England and the steep sea cliffs of Devon. We wasted no time in getting to grips with the wonderful Frendo spur, which ascends the steep ridge up the Aiguille du Midi, the 3,800-metre spire that dominates the Chamonix valley. We set off from Chamonix and left our tents and supplies at a little lake called Lac Bleu near the base of the steep part of the ridge where the real climbing started. The weather was beautifully clear and the forecast was set fair, so without much concern or discussion, the three of us set off with bivvy bags, ropes, ice axes, ice screws, crampons and everything else we needed to climb this classic. So much for acclimatization – I had only got off the bus an hour previously.

  What followed was a series of endless clean and steep pitches of wonderful climbing, on the superb hard, pink granite of the Chamonix valley. It was simply a joy to climb on and we were soon at the top of the rock section and at the bottom of the ice that led up to the knife-sharp ridge connecting the Aiguille du Midi to the Aiguille du Plan. In winter this is the place for serious skiers to negotiate a descent towards the Vallée Blanche, having got to the top via the cable car. It is the highest vertical ascent for a cable car in the world. At this time, this ridge marked safety for the three of us. It is safer to climb ice and snow early in the morning when it has frozen solid. Late afternoon is a dangerous time to be in such places and we had no intention of climbing the next ice stage at five o’clock in the afternoon. Our plan was to bivouac below the icy section and do the hard, steep and exposed bit in the early hours of the morning. We found a great place to set up our bivouac, sheltered from rock fall, and flat so we didn’t need to fasten ourselves to the mountain by ropes, which made things slightly more comfortable. It was, however, very cold and without the comfort of a sleeping bag, let alone a tent, we didn’t get much sleep.

  Morning eventually arrived and, as the sun poked its head up over the Aiguilles Rouges, warmth returned to our limbs. We donned our crampons and climbed, roped together, for the next five hours, using an ice axe in each hand. I had the most experience climbing on ice, so I had to go first. The first of the ice sections was a steep and sharp icy ridge, which led to a final and very exposed snow and ice slope. We moved steadily up the ridge, placing ice screws at intervals. This took us to a steep rock buttress. We traversed underneath this, to the right, taking the opportunity to place safer belays in the rock, as we made our way along the route to the final slopes that led to the summit ridge. This became steeper and steeper. Below us, as I looked down between my legs to check on the progress of Trish and Tom, was an uninterrupted view to the Chamonix valley, three kilometres vertically below. Now would not be the time to mess up.
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  Eventually, we gained the summit ridge and were met by the strange and slightly disconcerting sight of tourists with cameras who had come up the Aiguille in the cable car. It had been a superb climb, executed to perfection. We celebrated with beers in the café at the summit, before joining the cable car back down. Our feeling of invincibility as climbers increased. We felt we could tackle anything.

  Trish returned to the UK soon after this climb but Tom and I did several other classic routes, managing to avoid rock fall on the Grépon and Blaitière, before packing up our kit and heading over the Zermatt – another magnet for climbers – to meet our friend Dave. He had been completing his geology fieldwork in the Alps over the previous month or so, and was desperate to get on with some actual climbing with his mates.

  Dave and his geology colleague had been camping in an idyllic alpine pasture with a stream running close by and snow-capped mountains in the background. My basic animal management skills were called upon almost immediately, because their little campsite had been beseiged by brown Swiss cows. They would invade the tents, and after a day of geology, Dave would return to see the ‘cow bastards’ (his term, not mine) had broken into his tent and eaten all his porridge. Things reached a head when one day they had eaten not only his food, but also his underpants. We soon managed to construct a barrier out of climbing rope, which worked for a time, as the cows thought it was an electric fence.

  Tom and Dave had been best friends since school, in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. I met them both in the CUMC, and got to know Dave during a week of winter ice climbing in a hut in the north of Scotland. He was dry, gruff, honest and said exactly what he thought – a typical Yorkshireman. He was also stocky, handsome and very strong. If he hadn’t devoted himself to climbing at university he would have easily filled his time entertaining a very long line of female admirers. Dave and Tom were both very good climbers and much better than I was. The previous summer they had both climbed the Bonatti Pillar on the Aiguille du Dru in Chamonix, one of the hard classics, and it was an epic climb. I hoped I would not be the weakest link in our team of three.