Vet Among the Pigeons

by Gillian Hick

  The leg was by now unrecognisable and far from the perfect limb it had once been. I flushed the open wound with the syringes that Arthur had left for me and began what should have been the simple task of suturing back in place the layers of muscle and skin. Although it was technically easy, my numbed fingers fumbled with the instruments as I rejoined the muscle masses. It seemed like the edges of skin would never be sutured. As I placed the last knot, despite my exhaustion, I felt a slight tremor of hope and elation that, despite all, I had succeeded in doing what, on a few occasions, looked like being hopeless.

  All that remained, now, was to cut the pin that protruded from the top of the limb.

  With the glimmer of hope that came from completion, I giggled as I recalled my trip to the local hardware store two days previously to purchase the bolt crops that I knew would be necessary to cut the stainless steel pin. Molly, as usual, was familiar with the case in progress having met Boris on her frequent trips to the surgery. She had nodded knowingly as I held her up to the x-ray viewer and showed her where we would put the pin into the shattered leg and cut off the bit sticking out at the top. In fairness to the man in the hardware shop, I could hardly blame him as he observed a heavily pregnant woman arriving, with toddler in hand, when he asked what my husband needed the heavy-duty bolt crops for. Before I managed to reply, Molly, with her usual enthusiasm for the job, informed him that I needed it ‘to cut the doggie’s leg off’. Somewhere in her two-year-old brain, the story had got jumbled. I’m quite sure that the man thought that I was some psychotic hormonal female who was going off to commit some heinous crime. It took two more hardware shops to locate the required instrument that would be strong enough to cut the nine-millimetre stainless steel pin.

  Somehow, the bolt crops seemed heavier now as I lifted them up to the level of the table before placing the jaws around the pin as close to the leg as possible. When I was finally happy with the placement, I braced myself to lever together the two jaws to cut the pin. My best efforts only left a scratch and I re-angled them again to get a better grip. Fifteen minutes later, I was still at it, but by now was standing on the operating table, one foot on either side of Boris, having decided that some extra height might give me a better chance. It was at that moment that Seamus chose to appear, irate from a stressful morning of awkward clients. Had I not been so tired, I might have laughed at the look of utter bewilderment as he observed me in full surgical garb, standing straddled over the prostrate body of the huge dog, brandishing my bolt crops. He watched and stared, until finally he begrudgingly asked, ‘Do want a hand or is that the way you usually do it?’ Too exhausted to care, I handed over my weapon and watched, as with one quick heave, he closed the jaws and the end of the pin shot off to the far corner of the room.

  Never a man of many words, he watched silently as I undraped the dog and cleaned the site. He busied himself around the office as I waited for Boris to wake up sufficiently to remove the endotracheal tube. Only then did he return and, without a word, lift Boris off the table and put him in the kennel that I had readied with thick bedding and a heat lamp.

  Unceremoniously I dumped my orthopaedic instruments into a sterilisation solution and cleared the worst of the mess while waiting for the kettle to boil. Because of the pain relief I had given him, Boris whimpered only slightly and recovered remarkably quickly from his lengthy anaesthetic. Wearily, I gulped a cup of tea and instantly felt nauseous as the milky liquid hit my stomach. I abandoned the remainder and went to adjust the flow rate on Boris’s fluids.

  I could never have imagined that one operation could take quite so much out of me and was relieved that I wasn’t on call that night. Arthur promised faithfully to keep an eye on Boris, so it was the next morning, after a surprisingly deep sleep, that I was able to see how Boris was coping with his amateur repair. The first thing I noticed was that he placed his foot, although tenderly, to the ground – so at least I had managed to avoid the sciatic nerve with the pin.

  Never having pinned a leg before, I was frustrated that I didn’t know what to expect and neither did anyone else in the practice. At least I was grateful that I wasn’t having to reassure an anxious owner that everything was going well and the recovery was as expected. Or was it? I really had no idea.

  The day of the surgery was my last week at work before going on maternity leave. On the Friday afternoon, with some difficulty I loaded Boris into the well-padded back seat of my car while Slug hauled herself into her customary position in the front seat. She sulked the whole way home, studiously ignoring our passenger. Molly was naturally delighted to have Boris, especially as his post-operative care consisted of several slow lead-walks a day – at just about at the speed of the average toddler. We became a common sight over the days that followed, Molly and Boris and me, pacing up and down the country roads. Despite the fact that Boris was putting some weight on his injured leg, the muscles continued to fade over the next few weeks, but he always enjoyed his walks and suffered no obvious pain.

  With my baby’s arrival well overdue and with Boris’s regular walks now setting off some increasingly regular contractions, I finally handed him over to Catherine in the local welfare group, along with a list of instructions. I may have been over-meticulous with my list, but I thought that I should cover every eventuality. Arthur had agreed to take any follow-up radiographs and whatever else might be needed. I knew from experience that Catherine was thorough, even to the extent of being over-cautious, and thought she would be the ideal person to take over his care, given the severity of Boris’s injuries.

  It wasn’t until the third phone call by lunchtime on the first morning that I was beginning to realise that Catherine was perhaps cautious to the extent of being over-zealous. By tea-time, I wished I had never handed him over, as it would have taken less time to care for him myself than field the barrage of phone calls relating to every aspect of his daily movements.

  Whether it was from Molly’s insistence that we carry on with the regular walks, with or without Boris, or the stress of answering the phone calls all day, it was only two days before I ended up in the local labour ward. In true form, Catherine rang while I was on the way in, concerned that Boris has taken a brief sniff at his leg before getting up, something she was quite sure he hadn’t done on any other occasion. I casually mentioned my destination and suggested, feeling incredibly guilty towards my unfortunate colleague, that she ring Arthur if she had any more queries.

  It came to a head in the labour ward when the phone rang for the third time; yes, it was Catherine, clearly distressed, trying to glean further snippets of information before I became unavailable. Niamh, the angel-faced but world-wearied midwife, grabbed the phone from me before I had a chance to answer. ‘For God’s sake, the woman is in labour. D’ye understand me? She’s trying to have a baby, if you’d just let her get on with it.’ With that she pressed end, switched off the phone and placed it on the nearest counter, well out of my reach, before returning to me with a menacing frown.

  ‘Are you sure that was her again?’ I muttered weakly, afraid to argue.

  ‘Well, sure, what harm if it wasn’t. I wasn’t telling lies when I said you’re supposed to be having a baby.’

  With the interruptions halted, baby Fiona arrived in due course, much to the delight of her now big sister. Molly was happy enough to substitute daily walks of Boris with walking ‘Nona’, as she proudly introduced her baby sister to anyone we met.

  I assumed it had been Catherine who had been ordered off the phone by the midwife as the silence from that front was deafening ever since. I was terrified to ring and enquire about Boris.

  As baby ‘Nona’ progressed from sleeping two hours at a go to twenty minutes at a go over the following weeks, it was in the back of my mind that it must be getting near time to radiograph Boris’s leg to see if the fracture was healing. But I was still afraid to ring, hoping that no news was good news.

  This time my luck was out. Arthur arrived at the house one day with the
sheepish look of a middle-aged bachelor visiting a woman with a new baby. I laughed to see him standing at the front door with a bunch of supermarket flowers and a beany baby tvoy still bearing the logo of the drugs company that had supplied a batch of vaccines!

  Molly, who had long since appointed herself as official receiver of Fiona’s presents, was more than happy with the offering and content to amuse Fiona with it.

  It wasn’t until the second cup of coffee that Arthur brought up the subject of Boris. He avoided my eye as he casually mentioned that he had had a phone call from Catherine one evening. Boris, it seemed, had been feeling well in himself and in his revived exuberant form decided to join Catherine when she went out to feed two yearlings she kept in her back field. I had given strict instructions that Boris was to have short but regular lead-walks only, as much from my lack of faith in my surgery as anything else. This day, however, she had let him off the lead and he had galloped the length of the field with the two frisky colts. Apparently, one of the colts had lashed out, catching Boris on his injured leg and Catherine had arrived at the surgery with Boris in a very distressed condition.

  Faltering slightly, Arthur went out to his van and returned with a radiograph, clearly labelled with the practice stamp and Boris’s name. I sat, stunned, looking at the perfect image of a leg with the pin snapped in two at the point of the fracture. The ends of the bone had overridden, and despite the evidence of a significant amount of healing callus at both ends, were now clearly fractured again.

  I looked from the radiograph to Arthur. His face said it all.

  ‘He’s gone isn’t he?’ I demanded.

  Arthur nodded.

  ‘Did you put him down?’ I asked, already knowing the answer.

  Although I would never know if the story about the horses was true or not or whether the pin had just snapped while Boris was sleeping peacefully in his kennel, I knew for sure that my first orthopaedic case had well and truly failed.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE WHITE STUFF

  Ireland was playing France in a friendly at Lansdowne Road and the rain howled around the Kylemore roundabout.

  ‘You know,’ I said to Eamon, ‘we just might get out early tonight.’

  ‘Ah, don’t say that,’ he replied with the superstition of a born and bred Dub. ‘Sure, you know we never get out on time.’ After a few seconds of silence he continued, with a glimpse of pure hope on his face, ‘But wouldn’t it be marvellous to get to see the second half?’ A look of desperate anticipation came from one who had served his time for over forty years of Blue Cross clinics that ran at prime football time, resulting in him missing more matches than he cared to remember.

  ‘Okay, a rush job it is,’ I declared and dispatched the first few drowned-rat-like dogs and their bedraggled owners in record time.

  ‘Another few just arrived,’ commented Eamon, peering out the steamed-up window. ‘No rush, though. Take your time,’ he added, after another hasty look at his watch.

  Sadly though, not everyone was interested in the match, nor bothered by the weather, ‘Ah sure, I had te do somethin’ te ge outa de house,’ declared one football widow who had chosen the night to request a thorough analysis of her dog’s chronic skin condition.

  ‘You’re marvellous, really, to take such good care of him,’ Eamon told her through gritted teeth as he helped her down the slippery steps, while Gordon grinned at me, mentally preparing himself to catching just the highlights.

  It was almost looking like it just might happen when there was a bit of commotion from the crowd. A taxi pulled up and out of it came a middle-aged man, staggering under the weight of a Golden Retriever-type dog. A rough bandage covered the dog’s forelimb and the deep crimson staining made the extent of his injury fairly obvious. Eamon hurried them through the waiting crowd, the unwritten triage system kicking in as effectively as in any Accident and Emergency department.

  ‘I’m glad yez was here tonight,’ gasped the man as he relieved his burden onto the consulting table. ‘De kids took him out for a walk. They never miss a day. Imagine bringin’ a dog out on a day like this,’ he said nodding towards the menacing sky. ‘Said he jumped into de river at the park and came out like dis – musta stood on a bit o’ glass or somethin’.’

  I let him talk as I assessed the dog’s condition. His gums were slightly pale and the heartbeat was rapid, although strong and regular. Gordon restrained the wet, shivering, blood-stained creature, hugging him closely, regardless of his own clothing, as I began to peel off the heavily sodden bandage through which blood was still dripping.

  ‘I dunno ’bout takin’ dat offa him, luv,’ the man cautioned me. ‘By God, der was blood everywhere. Lucky me mate ’as a taxi. I dunno who else wudda given me a lift.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I assured him, ‘I’ll just have a quick look to see how much damage has been done.’

  It took some time to unravel the layers of socks, a tie and some other unidentifiable material within which the leg was enclosed.

  ‘You did a good job with the bandage, anyway,’ I congratulated him, wondering to myself when the layers would come to an end. Finally, I pulled off the last bloodsoaked pad but just as quickly clamped it back on again as a jet of blood shot out from the wound, liberally spraying the drugs cabinet that stood behind us.

  ‘Oh! You’re right. It is a bad one,’ I agreed, frantically wondering what to do next within the confines of our mobile clinic. This was no case to be sent home with a few tablets and referred on to the local vets in the morning. ‘I think we’ll have to send you in to the emergency clinic with him,’ I told the concerned owner. ‘The cut itself, as much as I saw of it, doesn’t look too bad but he has severed a blood vessel and that’s going to need to be operated on tonight.’

  While I worked on rebandaging the wound tightly enough to control the bleeding, Gordon explained about the emergency clinic. ‘The Dublin vets don’t do their own out-of-hours work anymore. They are all covered by a central on-call clinic. But you’d better bring you wallet with you,’ he joked.

  At that, the man looked genuinely downcast. ‘Are yez talking much?’ he asked. ‘I did me back in last year – had an accident on the building site. Missus does wha’ she can, but we’ve the three young wans at home. Even if I had the money, I couldn’t afford te spend it on the dog, much an all as ’e’s one of us.’

  It was a dilemma. To control the bleeding, the bandage needed to be on very tight, effectively cutting off the blood supply to the limb. By morning, when the vets at the local veterinary clinics would be available to treat the dog at a discounted rate through the Blue Cross, the limb, deprived overnight of blood supply, would be dead.

  I could see the anguish in the owner’s face as he considered his options. The dog lay quietly, a little too quietly, silken head resting on Gordon’s shoulder as we contemplated his fate.

  ‘Is there nowhere else at all open tonight?’ implored the man as much to himself as anyone.

  Subconsciously, both Eamon and Gordon turned their eyes towards me. With a sense of doom that had nothing to do with the certainty that I was going to miss the match, I reluctantly muttered, ‘Well, unless you can make your way down to Wicklow …’

  ‘Wicklow?’ He jumped at it instantly. ‘What’s down in Wicklow?’

  ‘Oh, a much better class of a practice, altogether,’ grinned Gordon. ‘All the better vets are based in Wicklow!’

  ‘And do you think they’d take him?’ asked the client hopefully.

  ‘Well, ask her yourself,’ replied Gordon, nodding at me.

  Before we moved on to the next patient, Harry had directions to the practice and we had exchanged mobile numbers. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I get finished here and you can meet me down at the clinic,’ I told him.

  Off he went to try to borrow a car for the journey as his taxi friend had long since left. Despite the delay, we finished not long after eight, a minor miracle for the clinic. Eamon and Gordon were sure to catch at least the
second half of the match.

  With the usual weariness that hits at the end of any day, I was beginning to regret my offer. I rang Harry to tell him I was on my way, but he told me that he still didn’t have a car organised. Had there been any other option, I would have switched off my phone and headed home, but I just couldn’t abandon this poor dog.

  Donal wasn’t too happy when I rang to tell him I’d be late. ‘Do you know this guy at all?’ he asked, sounding concerned. ‘What are you going to do with him while you’re operating?’

  To be honest, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. ‘Well, he’ll just have to go home. He can collect the dog in the morning,’ I replied, suddenly none to keen to have this total stranger waiting with me late at night in the surgery.

  ‘What did Seamus think?’ he asked, as usual way ahead of me in terms of practicalities.

  ‘Sure, we’ll see what he says in the morning,’ I replied, to tired to worry about it.

  I was almost half-way home when Harry finally rang me back. ‘I’m sorry, luv, but I’m on me way now. Had te borrow de taxi offa me mate. Was waiting for ’im to come back from a run te de airport. Sure, I’ll not be long after ye.’ His mate was obviously a generous type. I hoped there weren’t a few speeding points clocked up on Harry’s licence – he arrived at the surgery while I was still setting up.