by Gillian Hick
‘That lad that answered the phone last night was no use at all,’ boomed Jack O’Reilly over the phone at nine on the button one morning. ‘I asked him how much pen strep to give me bullock and he told me he had no idea. Not much good to me at all.’ We laughed to think of the poor guy sitting in his office getting entangled in a lengthy conversation with old Jack.
Unfortunately, our love affair with the paging system was to come to an abrupt end. At almost two o’clock on a freezing cold winter’s night, my pager beeped at the bedside. Slug snored on, not yet having identified the beeper as being a call. Fumbling over my bedside locker, I picked up the pager and read the message: Ring Mary Keogh. This was followed by a local number. Nothing more. No ‘urgent’. No details.
In my groggy state, I was a bit confused by the message. The name was not familiar to me. Usually, the people in the pager service would add some bit of detail like ‘cow calving’ or ‘dog hit by a car’. Before I had reached for the phone, the pager went off again, and then again – three messages in less than a minute. With a sense of dread, I realised that at this hour of night it had to be a calving or a colic or something that could not be dealt with by a reassuring phone call from the depths of the bed covers.
Having located the light switch, I scribbled down the number and before I had even dialled it, the message came through a fourth time. I’m never at my best when woken from a sleep, but four messages in a row were just a bit too much. Although this was some years after my night of hell with Serena, multiple calls still tended to cause me intense stress, and by the time my return call was answered, my blood pressure was rising.
‘Gillian here, from the vet’s,’ I said curtly. ‘What appears to be the problem?’
A voice even groggier than mine replied. ‘Sorry, who did you say you were?’
‘Gillian, one of the vets. You paged us four times. What is the problem?’
There was silence at the other end of the phone and then a mumbling and I could just about hear the muffled voice of a woman in the background.
‘Who is it, Larry? Who’s ringing at this hour of the night?’
More muffled sounds followed as I waited with increasing irritation, wondering what was going on. There was a pause before the man came back on the phone.
‘Eem, yes, my wife did ring all right. She was just wondering at what age we could have our puppy vaccinated?’
The mixed emotions of relief that I didn’t have to get out of bed and sheer outrage at someone ringing at two o’ clock in the morning to enquire about puppy vaccinations swirled through me.
‘You’re joking!’ I blurted out. ‘This is an emergency service, FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY!’ I had woken both Donal and Slug at this stage. ‘Ring the office in the morning,’ I snapped and just as I hung up I heard the man say, ‘Well, thanks for returning the call.’
I was so furious at having been woken up that, ironically, I couldn’t sleep. After about half an hour I got up and checked on Molly and Fiona, just for something to do, really. How I envied them their peaceful sleep – Molly, in characteristic head-under-the-covers mode, Fiona, fists tightly clenched as though concentrating on something really important. I’d say it was almost four before I nodded off into a fitful slumber.
The next morning, Arthur and Seamus were equally stunned when I relayed my tale. Melissa, the receptionist on duty, however, just started to grin as I got to the end of my story.
‘You mean to say,’ she asked, ‘you rang them at two o’ clock last night and ate them for asking about a vaccination?’
‘Well, what would you expect me to do?’ I asked, annoyed by her reaction.
‘Well, it’s just that the pager people rang first thing this morning,’ she told me. ‘They apologised profusely, but apparently there was some problem with the system and the pages were all delayed by twelve hours going out, and then they were all repeated three or four times from mid-afternoon onwards,’ she finished, her face breaking into a grin as she watched me absorb this information. The shock must have registered on my face as it occurred to me that a twelve-hour delay meant that the unfortunate Larry and Mary Keogh had, in all innocence, left one perfectly reasonable message during lunch hour and been rung back in the middle of the night by an irate, neurotic vet, giving them a lecture about emergency services and out of hours calls!
* * *
Maybe it is just that in the twilight hours my tolerance dies somewhat or maybe the clients themselves become bewitched and lose some of their sense of normality. In the early hours of one Saturday morning, I got a call from a client – in fact, not a client, but a friend of a client, or actually, a neighbour who knew the friend of a client. I’m not sure exactly. Being woken from my sleep before dawn left my senses less able to follow the intricate details of how the person on the other end of the phone had come to ring me. Anyway, what evolved after a minute or two of such explanations was that the person in question had found a hedgehog. Glancing at my clock, I noticed that it was a little past three in the morning. ‘You found a hedgehog?’ I repeated incredulously, wondering had it just hopped into her room and appeared under the bedclothes or was she, perhaps, on an impromptu camping trip. ‘Well, actually, I found him … or it could be a her – I’m not sure if it’s a girl – last Thursday,’ continued my newfound client. ‘I found him under the garden shed. I think he was attacked by a cat or something.’
Thankfully, her continuous chatter prevented me from having to formulate any sort of reply as I lay slumped against my pillow. Briefly my eyes closed, before I awoke again with a jerk hoping to find out why she was ringing me at three in the morning about a hedgehog. It seemed she was finally getting to the point: ‘… and it’s just that now he’s making this sort of funny snuffling, grunting noise and I don’t know what to do.’ There was silence as I lay, phone to ear, wondering why it had to be me.
‘Well,’ I replied, thinking as ably as I could at that hour of the morning, ‘I think that hedgehogs often make a snuffling, grunting noise. I wouldn’t be too concerned. But if you are, why not keep him warm and safe in a box tonight and bring him into the surgery in the morning?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, I’m afraid. I live in Kildare, you see. I just didn’t want to bother my own vet at this hour of the night but Martina said you wouldn’t mind me ringing you. There’s no way I could get down to you in Wicklow. Is there any chance you could do a call-out?’
At least that hedgehog was alive at the time and may possibly have benefited from my professional services, although, I am sorry to say, my ethical conscience was not enough to convince me to make that trip to Kildare the next day. I never did discover the fate of the snuffling, grunting hedgehog.
Another night, however, was really to stretch me to my limits. It’s not uncommon in the job to answer the phone to the sound of uncontrolled crying. All you can do is wait a few moments for the caller to identify themselves and give some clues so that you may offer some words of consolation or advice. After a few more, sobs, the strangled words came out. ‘He got hit by a car …’ followed by more raucous crying. Instantly I woke up, now fully alert after a mere two hours of sleep. The combination of a road traffic accident and a hysterical owner normally results in work, be it minor or major. After a few questions, I realised I was getting nowhere. ‘Can you put him in the car and bring him to the surgery?’ I offered, hoping to at least get to the animal in question. In between the muffled sobs, I barely distinguished the words ‘no car’ and ‘collect him’. Wearily, I realised that I was going to have to call out to collect the unfortunate animal, which would result in a lot of delay before getting it to the surgery for vital treatment. It was difficult to get directions from the lady herself and after a few minutes, I was passed over to an irate-sounding man who gruffly barked out directions to a housing estate some seven or eight miles away.
‘I’ll get to you as quickly as I can,’ I told him, jotting down the last of the directions. ‘In the meantime, keep him quiet and don’t
offer him anything to eat or drink.’ There was a brief silence before the less devoted owner questioned, ‘But how could he eat anything when he’s dead?’
‘He’s dead?’ I said, falteringly. Usually, the first few minutes of a phone call are taken up with discussion as to the clinical condition of the patient, but as the owner was so distraught I had by-passed that stage of the conversation and somehow missed this vital piece of information.
The silence on the other end of the line was unrewarding and again I repeated, ‘So, he’s dead?’
‘Well, I said he’s dead, didn’t I? How dead to you want him?’ at which a renewed wail broke out again in the background.
‘I’m afraid,’ I began, ‘that if he’s dead, then there isn’t much point in me calling for him. There’s really not a lot I can do.’
‘Well, I can’t have a dead dog in my garden. What am I meant to do with him?’
‘Of course we can arrange to have him taken care of in the morning,’ I continued, blissfully realising that I could stay in my bed for the moment. ‘There is really no need for me to take him away at this hour of the night.’
‘I didn’t say anything about taking him away,’ he bristled, clearly not pleased at my level of co-operation. ‘The wife wants him buried in the back garden.’
I was momentarily stunned as it gradually dawned on me that this unknown man wanted me to call out his house and bury his dog in his back garden in the middle of the night. I was quite sure that there was never any mention of this level of care in the Hippocratic oath we once took.
‘I’m afraid, Sir,’ I replied, ‘that really isn’t part of the service we provide. It’s not my job.’
‘Well, it sure as hell isn’t mine,’ he roared back down the phone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
NEW ARRIVALS
As soon as I palpated the solid, irregular mass deep in the cat’s abdomen, I knew Sophie was in trouble. It was a Wednesday night and out in the clinic in Ballyfermot all had been going too smoothly for comfort. Until now, the patients had had nothing more than itchy ears, mild stomach upsets or the need for a routine vaccination. It almost looked like we were going to get out in time for Gordon and Eamon to catch the second half of Ireland versus Portugal on the big screen. The tall lady carrying a makeshift cat basket was second from last in the queue and it was only a quarter-past eight. Having struggled to open the straps on the box, she carefully folded back the edges of the lid to reveal a pretty little tortoishell cat, quite miniscule in stature. As she gently unwrapped the blanket, it was immediately obvious that Sophie was a very sick cat. Her eyes had sunk deep in their sockets and the protruding third eyelids were caked in a thick yellowish discharge. Her coat was dull and rough to the touch and from her hind quarters there came the ominous smell of a putrid discharge that stained both her fur and the blanket. Apparently, Sophie had happily delivered a litter of two kittens four days previously and, despite her tiny frame and tender age, all seemed well. When she became more listless, Sandra, the owner, had assumed that she was just settling peacefully into her role of motherhood, but then Sophie went off her food. For two days she had eaten nothing and only with great coaxing would she accept some warmed milk. It was the previous morning that the foul-smelling discharge had started and the owner knew that something was seriously amiss. Although the Blue Cross clinics operate from a different location every night at various centres around the city, Sandra herself had no car and had been unable to organise transport until that evening.
As Sophie was alone in the box, I assumed that the two kittens had not survived until Sandra dug deep in the pocket of her heavy overcoat and carefully pulled out two minute little creatures from what looked like a doll’s blanket. At four days old, the kittens were pitifully thin, although they appeared to be fairly robust as they nudged at Sandra’s outstretched hand, mewing piteously, desperate to procure some milk.
Running a hand along Sophie’s tiny frame, I gently squeezed her mammary gland and was not surprised to find little milk.
‘What is it? What do you think is wrong with her?’ asked Sandra with obvious concern.
‘I think she still has a kitten inside her,’ I replied as I gently probed the irregular mass in Sophie’s abdomen.
‘Oh, poor Sophie! What have I done to you?’ asked Sandra, placing a protective hand over the tiny creatures in her hand.
‘Can you do anything for her?’ she asked eventually, as I stood silently examining the cat while my mind went over the limited options available.
‘She needs to go on an intravenous drip tonight. She’s much too sick and dehydrated for surgery at the moment. Hopefully, she may improve overnight, enough to operate on her in the morning.’
I could tell that Sandra wasn’t really taking it all in. She glanced back at two young children who were waiting outside the tiny consulting area of the clinic.
‘Will she make it, do you think?’ she half-whispered to me.
‘She is a very sick cat, but I think if we can start treating her tonight and then get her through surgery, she would have a chance. Cats are amazingly tough creatures,’ I told her. I wondered, though, as I looked down at Sophie, who lay flat-out, oblivious to the consternation, her thin frame heaving with each laboured breath.
‘I don’t suppose you can do all that here, can you?’ asked Sandra finally, a pleading look in her eyes.
‘No. I’m afraid not. We really need to get her to the emergency hospital tonight.’
I knew as I said it that this just wasn’t going to be an option. Sandra was a regular at the clinic as she suffered from a permanent disability that left her unable to work. Tending to the needs of her growing children stretched her meagre budget way beyond capacity. She would never be able to cover expensive bills for the family pet as well.
At that stage, Eamon discreetly went out with the children to distract them while I, Sandra and Gordon tried to come up with an alternative.
‘How much would it cost me if we waited until the morning and I went to one of your referral clinics?’ asked Sandra. The Blue Cross scheme usually paid half of the bill, but even with the discount I knew the cost would still be too much. Equally, I didn’t think Sophie could wait until morning for treatment to begin if she was to have any chance of survival.
As I continued examining the fragile form on the blanket, I mentally re-ran Seamus’s not so subtle displeasure the last time I had brought a Blue Cross case home with me, but still, I rationalised to myself, it’s only a cat. It’s not going to cost too much.
Knowing that there really was no alternative, I soon had Sophie and her kittens wrapped warmly in a cat cage I usually carried in the car with me. Sandra had signed a makeshift consent form and I promised to ring her in the morning as soon as the surgery was completed.
In the short time that the consultation had taken, the last remaining person in the queue had been joined by at least a dozen more. Before the next client came in, I got the litre of fluids I had stocked in my car and placed them in a sinkful of warm water. By the time the clinic was finally over, the fluids had heated and almost cooled down again. Gordon held the tiny kittens and Eamon held Sophie while I clipped and scrubbed a vein to insert an intravenous cannula. Sophie barely even registered the sharp needle piercing her tough, dehydrated skin and I sighed with relief as the plastic insert glided smoothly into the vein. Having securely taped the cannula in place, I attached the giving set and adjusted it to the correct rate. I then placed Sophie back in the cat carrier, along with her kittens. With the box secured on the passenger seat by the safety belt, I hooked the bag of fluids from the handle over the window, thankful for the thoughtfulness of car manufacturers in having included such a convenient drip stand!
I usually dropped Eamon home after the clinic and this time he was relegated to the back seat as we headed back towards the city.
On the way home, I toyed briefly with the idea of bringing Sophie into the practice, but apart from having to make the detour late at
night, I realised that I had everything I needed for her in the boot of the car.
Slug was quite excited when I opened the door and she smelt the cat in the basket; even more so when she heard the snuffles and mews of the kittens. I set the basket up in the bathroom and while Donal boiled the kettle, I heated up a syringe of fluids for the kittens. Having swabbed their paper-thin abdomens with some antiseptic and then surgical spirit, I angled the needle through the skin and injected some heated glucose saline which would keep the kittens hydrated. In the morning, I would be able to get some kitten formula to add to the meagre ration they would receive from their mother.
Taking care to shut the bathroom door behind me, I took Slug out of temptation’s way and settled down in front of the fire with a steaming mug of hot chocolate before climbing wearily into bed, hoping to catch a few hours’ sleep before Fiona, now almost six months old, woke. She had developed a habit of waking up at wearyingly regular intervals with supposed colic throughout the night and I had long since given up on her ‘growing out’ of it. As usual, she first woke shortly after one in the morning and when she finally settled, I made my way down to check on the visitors, although there was not much that I could do for them at that stage. I repeated the procedure several times through the night, Slug snuffling enthusiastically behind me each time.