Vet Among the Pigeons

by Gillian Hick

  On it dragged – more putting this into petty cash, more writing this in and writing that off. If they can write things off like that, why can’t I just make it all up, I wondered idly to myself?

  The accountant, seeming oblivious to my mental anguish, was still enthusiastically wading through the file. Was I happy with this figure, or that total? he asked on a few occasions. Dumbly, I nodded, acutely aware that by the time he would get to the end of each lengthy explanation, I would have totally forgotten what we were discussing in the first place. Almost an hour into the meeting, while going through the tax allowances for purchasing surgical equipment, I almost felt that by the end of the lecture, I had some faint inkling of what he was talking about. As this was the first time during the session that this had happened, I asked what I hoped might be a semi-intelligent question, hoping to indicate some level of enthusiasm. He paused momentarily, looking surprised, as this was the first sentence I had uttered with more than monosyllables. Within seconds, I realised my mistake. Enthused by my tiny little flickering spark of potential interest, he was off, launching into a verbal explosion of molten lava which was no more use than dry ash by the time it got to my ears. It reminded me of the time I had started to spay a bitch helped by a student on her first day seeing practice. Enthused by her initial interest, I was happy to explain the surgical procedure in minute detail, pulling up a ligament or a uterine horn to demonstrate as I went along. It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later that I noticed she had gone a bit grey. I caught hold of her just as she slumped silently to the floor.

  As the accountant came to the end of his flow, I wondered, idly, what would happen if I passed out – would that get me out of the remainder of the meeting or would he just carry on over my semi-conscious body?

  Thankfully, at that moment the phone rang. Apologising for the interruption, I answered. It was Joe Hartigan, an eighty-suckler cow farmer from Roundwood. I had calved a cow for him early that morning before going to the surgery. He had just checked her to find she had since prolapsed her uterus, or as he put it himself, ‘put out her calf bed’.

  ‘When did she put it out?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well, I’m just up from the lunch and she was all right when I left so it can’t be out long now.’

  ‘Is she up or down?’ I further enquired.

  ‘She’s up at the moment, but she’s gone a bit staggery, like. I wouldn’t bet on her staying up for long.’

  Joe was one of that generation firmly convinced that you needed to shout on the phone to be heard all that distance away. As I held the mobile even further from my ear, I noticed that the figure-fumbling at the other side of the desk had ceased and that the accountant was casting an occasional curious glance in my direction, obviously able to hear every word.

  ‘Try and keep her up and keep it clean so she won’t do any damage to the calf bed,’ I advised him. ‘If you wouldn’t mind giving the office a ring, either Seamus or Arthur will be out to you in no time. I’m just tied up myself at the moment.’

  ‘Right so, I’ll do that then,’ he bellowed down the phone.

  Once the ringing in my ears had died down, the accountant tentatively asked, ‘How could a cow do damage to the bed of a calf?’

  ‘Well, if she goes down, it could tear or get dirty,’ I answered, grateful to be on to a more familiar topic.

  ‘But, isn’t the bed just made up of straw and that?’ he questioned, still clearly bewildered.

  Gently I explained to him that the calf bed to which the farmer was referring was, in fact, the bed of the calf inside the cow and not outside.

  His colour faded slightly, before he continued in a somewhat faint voice, ‘But how does the “thing”,’ he paused, as though unable to refer to it by name, ‘get out?’

  ‘If the cow forces too hard, particularly if she’s an older cow and has had a lot of calves or if it’s a very big calf, it’s easy for the whole uterus to pop out,’ I explained. ‘And, you see, once it’s out,’ I continued, warming to my topic, ‘the blood supply gets trapped, so if you don’t get it back in quickly you can be in trouble.’

  ‘And how big is this thing?’ he queried.

  ‘Well, when it comes out fresh it’s about this big,’ I told him holding my hands wide apart, ‘but, if that one’s left until tonight it could get this big,’ I assured him, throwing my hands very far apart to indicate the size of some of the engorged uteruses I have had the misfortune to try to replace.

  ‘And you just … push it back in … the hole it came out?’ he asked finally, having taken some moments to assimilate the information.

  ‘Yeah, something like that,’ I agreed uncertainly, suddenly realising he wasn’t quite ready for a full-blown pathology lecture.

  ‘And you do that for a living?’ he stated.

  ‘And you do this for a living?’ I replied.

  There was silence for a few moments as we eyeballed each other – two aliens meeting in a hostile planet.

  The stand-off was interrupted as the mobile rang again. It was the same number as before. ‘Are you okay, Joe?’ I asked, remembering to hold the phone a good foot from my ear to prevent permanent damage.

  ‘Well, now, I’ve been trying to get Seamus but he isn’t answering his phone. I was wondering if ye could come out yourself.’

  In a flash it came to me that Arthur had had a late-night caesarean in Joe’s yard which had turned out badly, and since then, even though Arthur was in no way at fault, Joe was reluctant to have him out.

  ‘I can’t come out to you now, Joe,’ I replied, somewhat impatiently, knowing that the cow’s chances were worsening the longer we delayed and also knowing that Arthur was a more experienced vet than me anyway. ‘You’ll have to get Arthur. I’m in a meeting with my accountant in Dublin at the moment.’

  ‘You’re meetin’ the accountant!’ he roared. ‘Divil a bit o’ good them lads will do ye. Ye’d be better off putting the few bob in your own back pocket than in theirs.’

  I ended the call as quickly as I could but, although the accountant didn’t comment, I had to suppress the occasional giggle as we crawled tediously though the negligible fixed and current assets.

  By the time we got to page four of the accounts, I was starting to feel light-headed. I wasn’t used to sitting still for such a long period of time and I was getting fidgety. I nodded brightly at appropriate intervals, knowing that my only escape was when I could finally sign off along the dotted line on page six.

  Finally, it came to the end. Wearily, I scrawled my well-used signature along the indicated dotted line, more suited to signing cattle TB cards in the hundred than for a tidy little official document. The accountant signed his own name under mine, in fine flowing script. I couldn’t help noticing his fine-skinned hand and even nails in comparison to my own.

  Before bolting, I remembered that the accountant of the practice had asked me to ask him for some form to do with retention tax for TB testing. It sounded like such a vague, useless thing that I was sure the accountant would never have heard of it.

  After a few attempts trying to explain what I was supposed to be looking for, he brightened up and started to rummage through a well used file. ‘I have it here, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘Form P45 for PSWT deducted under Chapter 1 Part 19 of the 1997 Act’ – he rattled off the long title, like a mantra.

  I looked at him incredulously for a moment, and then the penny dropped. I broke into laughter, enjoying the chance to break the long tension. I was glad to see, despite it all, that he still had some vestige of a sense of humour.

  He looked back at me, puzzled for a moment, and then flicked open a page. ‘There it is,’ he declared. ‘Sorry, it’s Part 18, not 19. I haven’t looked at it for a while.’

  Horrified, I realised that he wasn’t joking. Turning my laugh into yet another cough, I nodded weakly as he offered to e-mail a copy to the practice accountant.

  On the way home, I rang Donal.

  ‘Well, how did it go?’ he asked sympat
hetically.

  ‘Oh, as expected,’ I replied. ‘Usual story. Made no money. Spent money we never had. Still more tax to pay and another few grand to pay him for the pleasure of his services.’

  Donal’s groan echoed mine down the phone.

  ‘I’ll get a take-away on the way home,’ I offered, feeling we needed some sort of consolation.

  ‘I’ll put some Bulmer’s in the fridge,’ he replied.

  ‘Had he anything useful to suggest,’ Donal asked later as we dished out the chicken curry and listened to Slug noisily crunching the last of the prawn crackers.

  ‘Well, apart from the fact that he thinks I should go for a career change altogether,’ I told him, giggling, as I relayed the story of Joe and his calf bed. ‘Other than that,’ I continued, ‘the usual stuff – buy stuff we don’t need to save tax even though we don’t have anything to buy it with. I think I’m supposed to go and lease a jeep or something and save loads of money.’

  ‘That might not be the worst thing to do,’ advised Donal. ‘At least you’d have a bit of comfort getting around the farms and that. Much safer driving with Molly in the car too,’ he added, warming to the idea.

  ‘Ah sure, the banger will go on for a while yet, ‘I replied, referring to the clapped-out Opel Corsa I had driven since I qualified. ‘Anyway, Slug wouldn’t be able to get in and out of a jeep with her dodgy legs.’

  The conversation was interrupted as the phone rang. I answered it tentatively, hoping not to have to go out to anything major while my brain was still fried.

  ‘Did you have a rough time?’ Arthur announced himself, knowing my aversion to accountants.

  ‘What do you think?’ I replied glumly.

  ‘Well. If it’s any consolation, my day wasn’t great either. I had to go out to old Joe Hartigan. He said you were out there this morning.’

  ‘Oh. That’s right. He was on to me too,’ I replied, not mentioning the fact that he didn’t want to get Arthur out.

  ‘Well, you know the last night I was out there that cow died after the section and he thinks I’m the worst in the world? Well, this time, the cow had prolapsed. Uterus didn’t look too bad, mind you. But the cow was down, very weak. In hindsight, she must have ruptured a blood vessel inside. I gave her the epidural and was rolling her around to get the hind legs back and didn’t she give one great big bellow and drop dead!’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE FILLY FOAL

  The first time I ever encountered the Murphy clan was on a cold morning in early spring on my way to Riverside Clinic. I had just driven past their halting site when I came across a heavy piebald cob making her way along the grass verge at a lazy trot. The rhythmic swaying of her tense abdomen confirmed that she was in foal. From her well-worn halter trailed a long length of blue rope, which I assumed had once served to tether her. I pulled in to watch, surprised to find the creature loose, and wondered what had spooked her. I hesitated for a moment and then, with the car wedged into the ditch, I flicked on the hazard lights and hopped out just ahead of the horse.

  ‘Whoa there,’ I called out reassuringly. As though oblivious to my presence, the mare trotted on until she was almost level with me.

  ‘Hike!’ I shouted, translating into horse-driving terms. She pulled up instantly and looked at me enquiringly.

  ‘What have you been up to?’ I asked her as I quickly checked over her to see that she had suffered no ill-effects from her adventure. Totally unperplexed by the change of plan, the mare happily followed me back in the direction she had come from. It wasn’t until then that I realised that she had travelled further than I thought and the halting site was by now a good half mile away. For a brief instant, thinking of the list of calls ahead of me, I was temped to hop up on her back and ‘jockey’ her home, but then thought better of it.

  From a fair distance before reaching the entrance to the halting site, I was clearly visible to the Murphy family through the sparse blackberry bushes that offered a hedge around the site. Several faces appeared around the caravans and one by one the clan gathered to watch as we approached. The mare, as though sensing that the adventure was over, dragged her feet reluctantly, so that I was forced to encourage her repeatedly with a gentle flick of the rope. The silence from the gathering crowd was broken only by my intermittent ‘Yup, mare’ at my reluctant companion as I had long since given up trying to encourage her to ‘Trot on.’ From the apprehensive looks on the Travellers’ faces, I glad that I was still on foot.

  Having made my way up the broad driveway, lined on either side with an array of modern caravans, I headed straight for the person who was obviously the boss man.

  ‘Good morning!’ I called out in what I hoped was a friendly voice. As there was no immediate reply, I continued, ‘I found this mare trotting up the road and thought she was probably one of yours.’

  ‘Aye, that there’s John-Joe’s cob,’ called out a young lad who looked no older than eight or nine. A frown from his mother silenced him.

  ‘Ah that’s fine, so,’ I replied, beginning to feel unnerved by the silence. ‘I’ll leave her with you, then,’ and I offered the frayed blue rope to a tall, but slightly wizened man, who had the look of being in charge. With a flick of his hand, he indicated another man, whom I assumed to be John-Joe.

  ‘Take the mare,’ he told him in a surprisingly deep voice, without taking his eyes off me.

  As my companion was led off with a rally of ‘Yup, mare’ and ‘Gowan up’, the crowd gradually filtered away.

  Feeling in some way that I had offended them, I turned away and headed back down the driveway, conscious of scurrying feet and giggling children behind me.

  ‘Missis,’ called the deep voice from behind me. I turned back, not knowing what to expect. ‘Thank ye kindly, Missis. Thank ye,’ and he turned away.

  I had all but forgotten this brief incident when, a few weeks later, I got a call from the office just as I was heading off for lunch.

  ‘Paddy Murphy from the halting site was just on. He said he has a foal with a bad cut and they want you to call out as soon as you can.’

  ‘Me?’ I questioned in surprise as, until now, Seamus had always dealt with the Murphys. ‘But, sure, they don’t even know me.’

  ‘He was adamant they wanted you,’ she repeated. ‘He said something about you bringing back a horse of theirs.’

  I was amazed because, at the time, I didn’t think they knew who I was. The car had been parked some distance away and I had been wearing nothing more incriminating than an ordinary pair of jeans and the customary wax jacket.

  Although my stomach was feeling a little hollow, I was curious and decided to go straight out to see what was wrong with the foal.

  The same cluster of people was gathered, awaiting my arrival, this time on the small patch of grass at the back of the enclosure. My self-consciousness grew as the crowd parted to let my car by. I instantly recognised the same mare and beside her, a sturdy-looking foal. There was a subdued hum as I got out. But any awkwardness I felt vanished instantly the moment I saw the foal’s hind-leg. Although from the front nothing seemed amiss, the whole hind-quarter was stained deep red with blood, some congealed and caked on the hairy coat, but still with a trickle of fresh blood oozing from the wound. This time I didn’t notice the silence as I bent down beside the pretty filly foal to inspect the damage. The whole inner side of the leg was exposed as a vast skin flap hung uselessly away from the complex structures of muscles they had once covered. I followed the wound up to the top of the inner-leg and, right up where the leg met the belly, I could see that the foal had obviously become ensnared in some sort of wire. I guessed that it was barbed wire because of the macerated appearance of the deep, fleshy wound. A reasonable supply of blood was still oozing at a rate faster than I was comfortable with from a small foal.

  ‘This is bad news,’ I said softly to Paddy, who stood at my right-hand side.

  ‘Ah Jaysus, Mary and Joseph,’ implored one of the women from behind.
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br />   ‘Quiet, woman,’ he growled and I jumped, thinking he was talking to me.

  ‘Can ye fix it?’ he asked, as though it were that simple.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not,’ I replied, as much to myself as in answer. My mind was mentally running through the list of possible complications: blood loss, anaesthetic risk, tetanus, infection … I was down to contra-lateral laminitis when he interrupted me.

  ‘If ye can fix it, do it,’ he commanded.

  ‘Well, it’s not that simple,’ I began. ‘It would involve major work and a huge amount of aftercare. The whole job will end up costing more than the foal is worth and even with that, she might not make it. You might be better off putting her to sleep.’

  I could see I wasn’t convincing him, so I carried on, ‘Even with the best of care, there’s a high risk that she’ll get an infection or even –’

  ‘Listen te me now,’ he interrupted in a low voice, bending in towards me. ‘That there foal is worth more than money te me. If ye can fix it, then fix it.’

  With that, he turned away from me, preventing me from expanding any further on the possible outcome or risks. I thought resignedly of the nice consent form that I would usually print out for a job like this, listing all the risks and possible complications, and sighed deeply, bitterly regretting the day I had found the mare on the road and earned the confidence of the Travellers.

  With the combination of an extensive wound, a neonatal patient and a large crowd, I decided to return to the office for back-up. Having administered some intravenous antibiotics, a protective dose of anti-tetanus and some pain relief, I left with the promise to return as soon as possible.

  ‘Are you busy?’ I asked Seamus as I returned to the surgery with the benefit of a twenty-minute drive to plan my approach.

  ‘Well, by the looks of it, I’m going to be,’ he replied warily, eyeing the surgical and anaesthetic kits as I pulled them out of the back press.