Green Dream

by Robert Gollagher

  It was five-thirty before she got back to sleep.

  She worked the next day.

  Chapter 7

  Michael read Sally’s diary slowly. He had no idea of what being a vet was like, until he read the diary, other than the glamorous television shows which sometimes portrayed the profession as being an easy one. Sally’s life was far from easy. It seemed that the young vet never quite had time to recover from one stressful event before she was hit by another. Being a pilot was also a challenging life but Michael felt humbled by the fact that this young woman had, in many ways, been under far more stress than he. As a pilot, there was certainly tension, but there were rules – a minimum amount of sleep had to be had between flights. As a vet, Sally was under constant pressure, and she did not even have the luxury of uninterrupted sleep.

  Michael was also amazed that Sally put herself through all that for such a low wage. Although he was not a wealthy man, he had done very well for himself as a pilot. He almost thought that Sally must have been a little crazy to do it all, but then he knew from reading her diary that it was her dream to be a vet. He knew that Sally wanted to do what she loved. Michael loved flying, or at least, he did, before the accident. He had worked hard to become a pilot and he had revelled in flying the small charter aircraft that were his bread and butter. He never wanted to fly the big jets. To him, that wasn’t quite flying. Too many computers. Too much like driving a bus, although he knew pilots who loved huge, stable aircraft just as much as he loved the small, nimble ones, only for different reasons. But the point was that Michael had never been disappointed by his vocation. It was his dream to be a pilot, and when he became one, it was a dream come true. Michael wondered whether Sally’s dream only turned out to be a heartbreaking disappointment. And in that much, he felt for her.

  Wednesday, 31 May, 1995

  Dear Diary,

  I have been in practice two months now. I am coping with the stresses and my surgery is going really well. But I never realised how heavy it would all be. Today, I had an awful day. I thought my head would burst, from the pressure ...

  Sally rushed through the morning consultations as quickly as she could. She had no time to stop and talk to the people who came in, not even to notice what they really looked like. She would simply vaccinate their dogs, or ask them questions to find out what was wrong with their sick animals and then quickly administer the appropriate treatment. As usual, there were a lot of operations to do that day and she would not be getting a lunch break, although she would probably take five minutes to gobble down a sandwich once the bulk of the surgery was done, maybe by three or four o’clock, but until then she didn’t have a minute to spare. It was another hectic day.

  At last, morning consultations were over. They had run half an hour late. Now it was twelve-thirty. There were only three-and-a-half hours before Sally had to be finished surgery and ready for evening consults. She considered the operations which had to be done. There was a cat to castrate, and two to spay: that should be simple enough. Then there were two dogs for X-rays: easy, but time-consuming. Then an old Golden Retriever had to have a massive tumour removed from its neck, right in the vicinity of the carotid artery and jugular vein: that was going to be a difficult one, and it would take time. And lastly, there were two large dogs to spay, one of which was on heat: that one would not be a good idea to rush, in case she had problems with intraoperative bleeding. It was a daunting list for a new graduate, and one which would keep an experienced vet busy. Sally went over the list in her mind. She would do the cat spays first, then the cat castration, then the two dogs for X-rays while Michelle was setting up the surgery kit for the first dog spay. Then Sally would do the second dog spay, the one on heat, and try to eat a sandwich before doing the big tumour removal in the Golden Retriever.

  By the time she had done all the surgery except the Golden Retriever, Sally was feeling exhausted and stressed. She managed to eat while she scanned, rapidly, the pages of a surgery text to work out how she was going to approach the removal of the cancer from the dog’s neck without damaging the plethora of vital structures in the area: the jugular vein, the carotid artery, the salivary glands and their ducts, nerve branches. It wasn’t going to be easy, and she had never done a surgery like it before. Kellerman was nowhere to be seen. He was away on another fishing trip. Although she almost never worked on the same day as he, it would have been nice if she could at least telephone him for advice, but Kellerman had made it perfectly clear that he was not to be disturbed while he was away on one of his numerous day trips. Sally had learned that Kellerman had an unpredictable temper, and she never really felt that her job was safe, so she did her best never to annoy him. No, she would have to handle the surgery on her own. All these thoughts ran through her mind as she scrubbed up for surgery, carefully washing and scrubbing her hands with a povidine iodine antiseptic before putting on a pair of sterile latex surgical gloves.

  By the time she was in the small operating room, making her first incision over the large, knobbly cancer which bulged under the skin of the Golden Retriever’s neck, Sally was fully focussed on the surgical task at hand. But her concentration was interrupted by constant phone calls from clients, which Michelle would answer and relay to Sally.

  “Sally, there’s a lady on the phone whose dog is seven weeks pregnant. It’s got diarrhoea. She wants to know if it could it be worms.”

  Sally answered all these questions at the same time as she was performing major surgery, since there was no time to stop. The clock in the operating theatre showed it was three-forty. Only twenty minutes remained before evening consultations were due to start. Sally doubted she could finish the surgery in that time, and she knew Kellerman hated it if clients were kept waiting. No doubt she would have to listen to one of his angry lectures when he returned from his latest fishing trip. She tried to concentrate.

  Right in the middle of the tumour she was dissecting was the massive jugular vein. Somewhere deeper was the carotid artery. If either of these vessels were ruptured during the surgery, the dog could bleed to death. Sally could probably control the bleeding, if something did go wrong, but it was a situation she didn’t want to get into. Unlike a human surgeon, Sally didn’t have an assistant, an anaesthetist, and a team of surgical nurses to help her. There was just Sally Johanssen. Whatever happened, Sally had to deal with on her own. It was going to take longer than twenty minutes.

  As Sally was carefully cutting out the cancer from around the jugular vein, Michelle walked into the operating theatre. “There’s a cat just arrived that’s been bitten by a snake. The people are panicking about it, they want to see you right away. And there’s two dogs coming down in five minutes that have taken snail bait. The lady says they’re twitching pretty badly.”

  Sally might as well have been slapped in the face, for how this news made her feel. She would have to leave the old Golden Retriever anaesthetised on the operating table while she rushed out the front and treated the snakebite cat. When the snail-bait dogs came in, she would have to treat them as well, which meant setting them up on drips, administering drugs, and making them vomit, before she could scrub up for surgery again and go back to the still-anaesthetised Golden Retriever and finish the surgery. It was a nightmare. Apart from the stress of it all, she would be very late starting evening consults. Sally felt vaguely like crying. She ripped off her gloves and spoke to Michelle. “Watch this dog very carefully, Michelle, and come and get me right away if there is any change in the anaesthetic. Don’t leave the operating room. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said the eighteen-year-old nurse, who really didn’t appreciate the seriousness of the situation. After all, she just did what she was told. It was Sally who had all the responsibility. If anything went wrong with either the Golden Retriever, the snakebite cat, or the snail-bait dogs soon to arrive, it would be Sally that the owners would blame, not Michelle.

  It was a long nightmare of an afternoon which Sally would not soon forget, and that night she spent
more than an hour recording it in her diary. It was only one of many similar days that she was unlucky enough to experience in her first few months in practice.

  In the end, Sally was nearly an hour late starting evening consultations. The surgery on the Golden Retriever had ended well, with most of the tumour removed and without any major complications. The little black cat which had been bitten by a snake survived, after being given antivenene, which was a lucky break for Sally since she knew that they often could die despite all the best treatment in the world. The two Blue Heelers which had eaten snail bait had come in drooling and with very severe tremors, but they had responded to Sally’s emergency treatment and were now stable. This was also fortunate since the more severe snail-bait cases could also sometimes die. Instead, for today at least, Sally was a hero in the eyes of the owners of those lucky animals, and it did make her feel good to know she had done some really good work that day.

  But the angry client who had stormed out of the practice in disgust, after being kept waiting for an hour, claimed that Dr Kellerman had never kept him waiting and that the new vet was obviously no bloody good. Sally knew that Kellerman would not see her as a hero but as someone who should do her job and do it on time. He would criticise her for losing a client.

  And all of that paled in comparison to how Sally felt, physically. Fortunately, she had slept soundly the night before, except for an after-hours call at eleven, but, even so, she felt physically sick with stress and exhaustion. She was pleased to have saved the animals, but she was utterly wrecked herself. And there were still two hours of consulting to do, until the clinic closed at seven. She doubted she would finish until seven-thirty, looking at the full waiting room.

  The third consultation was Mr and Mrs Freeman, with Muffy, the little Maltese Terrier with liver trouble that Sally had seen a couple of months previously, when she had first started working.

  Sally called the elderly couple into the consulting room. “Freeman? Come through, please. Sorry I’m running late.”

  “That’s all right, dear,” said the old lady. She seemed able to tell that Sally was stressed. “We don’t mind waiting.”

  Sally smiled, and slowed down for a moment. “Thank you.”

  Mr Freeman spoke. “It’s Muffy, doctor. She hasn’t been eating well again and we’re a bit worried about her.”

  Sally looked at the little dog, which Mr Freeman had put on the examination table. It looked fairly well, for a dog with liver trouble, and when Sally checked it over she couldn’t find any major signs of illness other than the still-enlarged liver. “Well, her temperature is all right and she doesn’t look too bad. Has she been vomiting again?”

  “No. She just isn’t eating well,” said Mr Freeman.

  “She doesn’t seem herself,” his wife added.

  Sally thought she knew what the trouble would be. “Have you been sticking to the diet with her? She hasn’t been getting any tidbits, has she?”

  Mrs Freeman looked embarrassed. “Well, she does love her chocolate, and that diet you gave her, she seems to hate it.”

  “She eats it,” said Mr Freeman, “but then she just looks up at us, as if she wants more. She never seems satisfied. So ... um ... we let her have some chocolate, or a biscuit or two, and ... lately we’ve felt so sorry for her, we just put her back on her old diet.”

  Sally was relieved. This was easily fixed. “Ah hah,” she said slowly. “Look, I know it seems cruel, but her liver can’t handle too much protein, and a lot of fat isn’t good for her, either. That’s why we made up the special diet. It gives her all the nutrition she needs but it’s gentle on the liver.”

  “We know, doctor,” said Mrs Freeman. “It’s just that she used to love all her treats. The skin off a chicken, that was her favourite. And liver, she just loves liver. When I cook up some lamb’s fry for her, she jumps up and down with excitement. Can’t she have that any more?”

  “No. It’s just too much fat for her. If we’re not careful, she might start having trouble with her pancreas, too. I know it’s being a bit cruel to be kind, but you really do need to stick to the diet we wrote out for her.”

  “No more tidbits at all?” said Mr Freeman, pathetically.

  “I’m afraid not. It’s just not worth it. She might get sick.”

  “All right then, Sally,” said Mrs Freeman. “If you say so.”

  Sally looked at the dog. “Well, Muffy. You’re going back on a healthy diet, from now on, old girl. You’ll feel much better.”

  The little dog looked up at her happily.

  “Let me know if she’s not much better in a few days,” said Sally, as she led the old couple out to the waiting room. “But I think you’ll find that changing the diet will do the trick for now. She might need more treatment, later, but mostly I think she’s just been on food that’s too rich for her.”

  “Thank you,” said Mrs Freeman.

  “Thanks, Sally,” said her husband.

  “Bye,” said Sally. And then she turned and called in the next client. There was still a full waiting room to get through. She snapped back to full speed. There was still no time to waste.

  Sally was indeed half an hour late finishing consulting, as she thought she would be. By the time she had checked all the animals in hospital and medicated them, it was after eight. Sally’s eleven-hour day was over at last.

  She was far too tired to cook. She got into her old Kingswood and drove to McDonalds, where she bought a couple of burgers at the drive-through window, then she brought the food home and collapsed on the bed in her tiny flat at the back of the clinic. She was feeling wound-up and stressed, but utter exhaustion soon brought her unconsciousness. She slept.

  The sleep was dreamless, a void.

  It was about half past one in the morning when the telephone went. Sally almost didn’t wake up for the call. When she asked the man what the problem was, she knew she was sunk. She couldn’t believe it.

  “My German Shepherd’s stomach seems to be all swollen up, and he’s really whimpering a lot. Is that something serious?”

  Sally knew it was probably very serious, and she said so. When the man and his dog arrived at the clinic, twenty minutes later, her worst fears were confirmed. It was a bloat, a life-threatening condition in which a dog’s stomach twists after getting overfilled with a big meal, then starts pushing on the diaphragm, interfering with the normal function of the heart and lungs. It was an emergency and the dog could die.

  Sally cursed Kellerman for being away. This was a major surgical case, unlike anything she had done before, and she would have called him if he had been in town. Instead, she called Heather Lorayne, and together they prepared the dog for emergency surgery after sending the owner home. It was a huge operation, a big laparotomy followed by untwisting the stomach, pumping out its contents as best as Sally could with the rudimentary equipment she had available, and then suturing the outer wall of the stomach to a rib to prevent it twisting again. Sally had to desperately scan through a surgery book to determine how to do this last procedure, known as a gastropexy. Sally knew perfectly well that these dogs could die just from the anaesthetic alone, far less the stress of a long surgery, so she was enormously relieved to see how well the surgery went. When she finally got Heather to help her carry the dog back to a cage, placing it gently on a folded blanket, it was after 4:00 am. Looking back, Sally had no idea where she found the energy to do the operation. She had barely been able to cope with the long day in itself, but this huge surgery in the middle of the night, on top of it all, was soul-destroying.

  The fact the she knew she had to be at work again in four hours almost made her want to cry. She just couldn’t take it.

  But she did get up, and she did take it, somehow.

  Sally was not a quitter.

  Chapter 8

  Michael thought about death often. It seemed almost to call him. After all, he knew that it was the ultimate destination, that it was always the final act in every play – in every life, dea
th was always there at the end. And there seemed so little for him to live for, now.

  It was more than just his guilt. It was more than the emptiness which was his life. It was death itself that he thought of. Death, which so many people were so afraid of. Death, which was supposed to be the ultimate terror. Yet, it was also death which so many religions held to be little more than a natural change, a right of passage, and not something to be thought of as the end. Did Michael think it was the end? He didn’t know. How could anyone know? But he knew one thing, and that was that death came to us all, it came to each of us, and it was, in that sense, just a part of life. To Michael, it did not seem a bad part. Not now. Not after what had happened.

  Why should he be afraid of death? He didn’t believe in stories of heaven and hell but he still thought that where Marie had gone, in death, would also be where he would go. At least in that much, it was the only way they would ever be together again. Michael almost laughed at allowing himself the thought – he was not so naive as to suppose that he and Marie would hold hands again, floating on some heavenly cloud, if he were to die. But he did suppose that perhaps death was a kind of perfect peace, a kind of state where everything was cancelled out, where there was nothing but a dreamless sleep. In that eternal sleep, in that peace, his bond to Marie might live on. These were the dangerous thoughts of a depressed man. But Michael didn’t care about the danger. He thought as he wished.

  Michael had read widely in his youth. He had read Shakespeare, and he had read poetry. He had almost forgotten about all those books. But now that he was alone in his life, memories of the books suddenly came flooding back to him. When you are happy, Michael thought, life is so sweet, but when tragedy strikes and you are left with nothing, it all seems to make no sense. If ever you had read a book that moved you, that is when you remember it. If ever an elderly relative had something wise to say to you, that is when you bring it back to mind. You try to understand.