On another occasion, in very much the same place, I had another embarrassing moment. I was hurrying through the hills and had passed several cars. It was early afternoon and I have a terrible problem with sleepiness around 2.30pm, no matter what I am doing. Whether it be driving, sitting in lecture theatres, talking on the phone, doing consultations, whatever — I just get sleepy then. Well I obviously went to sleep. Next thing I woke up with a jolt, having failed to take a corner, and found myself sitting in the mud flats. Luckily recent roadworks allowed easy access off the road and the tide was out. Again I got some looks as the occupants of the cars I had overtaken only a short time previously went by.
Getting sleepy while driving is exceptionally dangerous and I now tend to pull to the side of the road and have a quick snooze. It’s amazing how a five-minute snooze regenerates one. There never seems to be any problem waking up because my snoring gets so loud it even overcomes my failing hearing. Unfortunately there’s the temptation to push on when your destination is only a few kilometres away. That’s when it gets really dangerous.
Once when only about two kilometres from my next job at Kekerengu, 50 minutes south of Blenheim, I ‘came to’ on the right-hand side of a notoriously dangerous stretch of road, facing a stream of oncoming traffic, the leading car only 50 metres away. I can remember to this day the look on their faces and the rude gestures they gave me. That woke me up. On more than one occasion, however, it has been the sound of gravel on the edge of the seal hitting the underside of the car that has woken me up. Nowadays the new rumble lines work really well.
I always carry a fire extinguisher in my vehicle and it’s come in handy. One day up an isolated country road, I came across a small transport truck with a four-wheeler on fire on the deck. The driver had earlier picked up the bike from the bike shop after it had been in for repairs and was taking it back to the farm. Here he was trying without much success to put it out with a sack and the tea from his Thermos. It really was an extinguisher job. Another time a bird’s nest beside the exhaust of a vineyard tractor was burning well and threatening to spread. The tractor driver and several onlookers were not having much joy getting at the fire, but none of them had anything they could use to put it out. Again it was a job for the little extinguisher.
Potentially the worst fire was in my own Holden ute, though, after I had arrived home one evening and parked it in the garage. Prior to leaving work I had filled it up with the following morning’s requirements, which included a metal tool box containing TB-testing equipment for deer. In it were clippers and oil as well as tuberculin and tuberculin syringes. The clippers were required to shave the hair off the sides of deer necks. The area would then be injected with a small amount of tuberculin. If a deer had TB, it would react with a swelling around the injection site, which could then be measured three days later. I had placed this metal box close to the 12-volt battery required to drive the clippers. During the drive home, the tool box had obviously slipped across the terminals of the battery. Not long after arriving home I went back outside for some reason, to find smoke billowing out of the garage. A quick check revealed flames leaping around inside the canopy. While I lost some equipment and it took months to get the contents of the fire extinguisher out of clothing and off everything, if I hadn’t come outside at that time I suspect I could have lost both the car and the garage. That was a very good lesson and has made me extra conscious of how I pack equipment into the hopper of the Pawnee.
Pete and I have had our share of accidents over the years. I once wrote off my Commodore ute when I ran into a dirty great bale wrapper taking up the whole of the narrow road on a blind rise, and another time I took out a cattle stop. I was running late getting to Weld’s Hill, a property at the end of a road off the Medway Valley. As a result I was perhaps exceeding a safe speed, and when I came over a sharp rise found the Holden Kingswood had lost a degree of traction on the shingle. Turning the wheel and applying brakes is a futile exercise when the wheels have lost contact with the earth. Unfortunately, just on the other side of the rise and around a bit of a corner was a cattle stop and when we did come back to earth I was not at all well lined up. I did a lot of damage to the cattle stop and car, and Roo, my bull terrier, was not impressed. He was asleep on the passenger seat and woke up with a start when he was propelled into the dashboard. I still remember the loud grunt he made and funny look he gave me.
Later that afternoon after finishing the ram testing, the Checkleys gave Roo and me a lift back into town. As with many country folk, dogs weren’t allowed inside the car but they made an exception for Roo. It took a little persuasion though, to convince them that putting up with his smell and a few of his hairs inside the car was preferable to what would happen to their boot or its contents if he was locked in there.
Pete also had to be driven home by a kindly farmer one night. At the end of a big week transferring frozen merino embryos imported from Australia into recipient ewes on a local stud, all the participants — stud manager, station owner, Australian embryologist, PJ, and a couple of shepherds — felt the need to celebrate their major undertaking. Whether it was the release of tension, exhaustion or dehydration, Pete is not too sure, but something caused him to lose control of his new Mitsubishi wagon. He is actually a very good driver but that night his skills did not prevent his wagon writing itself off on a power pole. It was actually going backwards at 140kmh when it hit the pole.
A large animal vet’s car or truck is a mobile clinic, office, communication centre, and sometimes racing car. The problem is they are all too often also where we relax between jobs, reflect on what we have just seen, or think about what we might find at the next farm. Our mind can be in cruise mode as far as driving is concerned, when it should really be concentrating on that very job.
FLANNELLED OAFS — PJ
Cricket is one of the great loves of my life.
From a young age with my elder brother bowling at me at terrifying speed on the front lawn, I was a hopeless cricket fanatic. The first sports book I read was The Urn Returns by AER Gilligan, a former England captain, writing about Len Hutton’s MCC team in Australia in 1954/1955. The great players of that team became my heroes. My father even took me to see them play against Otago in their short New Zealand tour post Australia when I was six, and I can still recall seeing Cowdrey and May bat together, and our own Bert Sutcliffe caught behind off the great Frank Tyson.
Later, as the first transistor radios arrived, I would listen all night to Ted Dexter’s team in Australia, or Bobby Simpson’s team in England, and when a relative sent me the 1962 Wisden Annual, I was in heaven. I devoured its 400 pages, and before long I could tell anyone silly enough to listen who had captained Warwickshire last year, the scores in the New South Wales versus Queensland match, who took the catches, and of course the score in every test match around the globe that year. In short, I am a cricket nut. The history, the grace, the legends and the tradition around the game still play a significant part in my life.
As a player, I was mustard keen, but only average or perhaps a little better than average. After school I played wherever I was — Dunedin, at Lincoln (hence the Wahine experience) on the West Coast, and in Palmerston North during the four years of my veterinary degree, and in many other parts of New Zealand.
When I came to Marlborough in 1979 I had a dilemma. Life had become serious. I was in a demanding job with a lot of nights and weekends on call, and I was a young father. Tom, our firstborn, was nearly a year old. How could I find time to play cricket, and importantly, to practise, because team practice is a critical element of team sport?
A solution soon emerged. The ebullient Paddy Dillon, a local farmer, was keen to put a team of cricketers into the second grade. He rang and organised a get together and a practice. We made two rules:
We would never practise.
If you didn’t want to play the next week, there was to be no pressure.
United Country was born, and persisted for nearly 20 years, with th
e two inviolable rules never broken, to my knowledge. We were a team of cricketers who were all a little older, had limited time, and were mostly associated with rural Marlborough. Some of my greatest friendships emerged from that group of men. We had a tremendous time, went camping as a group with our families, had annual dinners, and even won the competition a few times. We resisted pressure from the Marlborough Cricket Association to play in the senior grade because of the two rules.
At the time, I had to do one weekend in four on duty. In those days weekends on duty were usually pretty light. Dairy farming was not a large part of Marlborough’s farming scene, although we did service about 80 factory supply farms in Rai Valley, Mahakipawa and Koromiko, and three or four town supply farms on the plains. These were self-reliant people, and they didn’t call a vet unless it was really necessary, so once the spring calving season was over, we didn’t hear much from our dairy farm friends after hours.
There might be a horse call or two in a weekend, and sometimes dogs or cats to attend to, but this was before cell phones, personal computers, emails or even faxes. The world was slower, the pace gentler, the populace less demanding for instant service, instant gratification. People were more capable, more able to cope with minor crises, and more likely to fix minor problems themselves.
So even when on call in the weekends, I often played cricket on a Saturday. Our games, 50 overs per side, started at midday and were finished by about 6pm. Any duty calls came to our home phone and Ally, bless her, would take and screen them. If one needed urgent action, she would pack the kids (three by the time PA and I were in private practice) into the car and come down to the park where we were playing. I would see the old maroon Austin Westminster pull up, and I would realise that I was needed. It didn’t happen too oft en, sometimes once a game, sometimes not at all, although Ally remembers one afternoon with four calls when she was not best pleased.
For some calls, I could get Ally to ring back and arrange for them to meet at the clinic at 3pm or 6.30pm depending on the urgency. Farm calls generally meant immediate action because of the time involved to get there.
One Saturday in November, the team had assembled at Horton Park. We changed into our whites under the trees, and had a few hit-ups and catches. We were fielding first, and as we walked out to start the game I saw the familiar maroon car coming round the corner.
‘There’s a deer having trouble fawning,’ said Ally.
‘Who is it?’
‘Colin Wells.’
Oh hell. Colin farmed at Nopera in the Keneperu Sound, a good two and a half hours’ drive away.
‘He said he’d meet you at Te Mahia in his boat in an hour,’ Ally continued. This was better. Two hours’ travel (an hour each way), an hour to do the job, I’d be back in time for a bat mid-afternoon.
I took off through Renwick, north across the Wairau River to Havelock, then turned right on the winding road to Linkwater. Left here, over the hill to Mahau Sound, winding, winding on a gravel road and eventually to Te Mahia in the Keneperu. One hour exactly, and there was the ever-smiling Colin in his fizz boat at the jetty. In five minutes I had my kit packed in the boat and 10 minutes later we were unloaded and in his deer shed on the north side of the sound.
Colin and Mary Wells were real Sounds farmers, self-reliant, kindly and generous. They had sheep, beef and one of the first deer farms in the Sounds.
While Colin held the hind’s head in a narrow race, I lubricated my hand and gently inserted it past the protruding front legs of the fawn. It was large and the head and long neck were turned back. The natural position for fawns to be born is like a spring board diver, front legs and head extended forward, but this one wasn’t playing the game.
It was a common problem in the first few years of deer farming, as farmers came to terms with the hind’s feeding requirements. In the wild, constantly foraging for their food, the hind naturally limited the size of the foetus, but on a farm full of high energy spring grass, the fawn could grow very large and the hinds over-fat. The combination led to many cases of dystocia, difficult birth, and led to a lot of vet call-outs.
I cleaned my hands and reached for my kit. Filling a 2 ml syringe with local anaesthetic, I gently felt for the spot at the base of the tail and injected the drug into the epidural space. In five minutes, the tail and vulva were relaxed and flaccid. Now I should be able to get my hand in far enough to correct the angle of the neck and bring the head and the other foreleg out.
Alas, it wasn’t to be. The fawn was large, the hind very fat, and the birth canal diminished as a result.
‘It’s no good, Colin. We’ll have to do a caesarean,’ I volunteered.
Now Colin and Mary had to make a decision. A caesarean section would cost a lot. On the other hand, in those days, a hind had a value of up to $3000, a lot of money in the early 1980s, and a live fawn, close to $1000.
‘Well, you’re here, let’s do it,’ said Colin.
So there and then we did it. I sedated the hind heavily, lay her on her side, then clipped her left flank in a long vertical stripe. I washed and cleaned the area, injected local anaesthetic just anterior (toward the head) of my incision line, scrubbed my hands, draped the wound area, and made the first cut with sterilised instruments. In a few minutes we were into the abdomen. The glistening pink uterus was obvious. It was important to bring the uterus out through the incision in her flank, so that when I cut into it to extract the fawn, the fluids from inside the uterus could not flow into the abdomen. If they did, a fatal peritonitis would be the likely result.
Carefully I put both hands around the warm pink uterus, and gently manipulated it out through the hole. I laid more sterile drapes all around the area that the uterus would lie on, and when satisfied, I carefully incised the lower, gravity-dependent surface. A whoosh of amniotic fluid shot out and down onto the floor of the shed. Reaching into the uterus, I found the two hind feet, and protecting the uterus from their sharp edges, I gently pulled the little animal out, all long legs and long neck, and laid it beside the mother. Instantly it began to splutter and Mary cleaned its mouth and nose. It would live, a moment of pleasure and triumph. Then came the hard part. First the uterus had to be sewn up with a special suture pattern to invert the serosa, the external surface. And it had to be watertight so nothing would leak from it. Then after washing the now shrunken organ with warm sterile saline, I replaced it in the abdomen.
Three more suture layers were required, one for the peritoneum and the three muscle layers, one for the subcutaneous tissues, and one for the skin. By the time I had carefully and neatly completed all of that, the hind was stirring. Colin removed the jersey from around her eyes and we rubbed some of the fawn’s amniotic fluid around the mother’s nose, hoping that it would help her to accept her fawn. Sometimes after contact with man, they won’t, and the farmer is left with an orphan fawn to rear.
I picked up all my gear and the fluid-soaked drapes and retreated. Best to leave mother and fawn to sort out acceptance or not.
‘You need a cup of tea.’ Mary, kind Mary.
‘Thank you, Mary, but I’m in a bit of a hurry.’
Colin knew I was a cricketer, and a keen sportsman himself, understood the situation.
Back to the boat, we roared across the Keneperu Sound to Te Mahia and I hurried off back to Blenheim. The day was disappearing as I pulled up at Horton Park, but the teams were still on the field.
As I got out of my car, someone hit the ball and ran a single. Players on both sides shook hands and began to walk off the park. The match was over. I was too late.
It was a lesson. From that day on I rarely played if I was on call. It was too tough on Ally and frustrating for me. And it probably meant I gave less than brilliant service to our clients. These days, with clinics open seven days and a public which demands service to a much higher level than it did 30 years ago, it is simply impossible to play sport and be a vet on duty.
But they were great times, and I continued playing cricket for a lon
g time. I was 60 when I played my last game and I think I can claim the last Wahine-sinking injury. Our ex-Lincoln Wahine Survivors team went to Queenstown in 2008 and played in the International Golden Oldies tournament. We were really well past it, and it became embarrassing as we hobbled and shuffled around the field. In our final game at a beautiful ground in Clyde, I set off for a single. There was a bang as my Achilles tendon snapped. I knew my cricket career was finally over. These days I just watch, but I’m still just as passionate. It’s a beautiful game.
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINES — PA
In one weekend I became an expert acupuncturist. I had another string to my bow and I was anxious to use it.
I had spotted an advertisement for a basic course in Nelson on acupuncture for animals and as I had always wondered how this Chinese needle trick worked, I was interested to find out more. The weekend involved sticking needles into some long-suffering greyhounds, a bit of theory, something about yin and yan, and an acupuncture instruction book. The book had very good diagrams showing the specific acupuncture sites to place the needle for, say, a sore shoulder or an arthritic hip. It didn’t seem to matter what the problem was. I used the same acupuncture points for a recent sprain as I did for chronic arthritis. Equipment was minimal, just a packet or two of acupuncture needles.
Cock and Bull Stories Page 9