Monsieur le Vet

by Sylvain Balteau

  ‘Hey, that’s your Beauceron! He’s got out!’

  One of my colleagues was just back from a visit. He was turning the ignition off when he caught sight of the old dog that was now returning our stares from the waste ground behind the surgery. My colleague laughed out loud. It hadn’t even occurred to me to tie Démon up. It took me 30 metres to catch up with him; he wouldn’t let me get close.

  My colleague was creased up: ‘Now you’ll have to call old Gimone!’

  He’d be happy, of course he would. But I felt a bit shabby all the same, because I hadn’t honoured the agreement I had with my client, because I’d lied to him, because … because the old boy had been at home crying since that morning. Since the day before, probably.

  There was a lump in my throat. I didn’t really know what I was going to say. I concocted a few phrases. The ringing tone stopped as someone picked up. A woman’s voice, very elderly.

  ‘Madame Gimone?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hello, this is Sylvain, the vet. I’m calling about … about something odd that’s happened. I’m calling because this morning your husband brought Démon in for me to put him down, and then he left again straight away, and now it turns out that, um … well, Démon’s got better, he’s just eaten, and he’s run around a bit.’

  ‘Wait, I’ll get my husband!’

  I’d said it all very quickly, so she wouldn’t have a chance to interrupt.

  ‘Roger, it’s the vet, he says Démon’s been running around, that he’s been eating!’

  I waited for a moment, feeling a bit emotional, a bit of an idiot, and rather pleased with myself.

  ‘Hello, yes?’

  ‘It’s Sylvain. I’m calling because … this morning, after you left, Julie told me that you wanted me to examine Démon, and I hadn’t done that, so I did, and, well, um, it’s not his cancer that’s the cause of the trouble, it’s his arthritis. He was in a lot of pain.’

  ‘Démon’s in pain?’

  ‘Not now, not much, I’ve given him some injections, and now he’s better – I mean I haven’t cured his cancer, but he’s feeling better, he’s managed to eat, and he even tried to run away.’

  ‘To run away? Démon?’

  Incredulity.

  ‘Errrm … yes, we’d forgotten to shut the doors, but I caught him. I had to run after him.’

  ‘He had to run after him!’ He was shouting now.

  Then he spoke into the receiver again:

  ‘And he’s eaten?’

  ‘Yes, he’s had a bowl of food, and a drink, and a pee, and, well, there you are, I’m very sorry, I didn’t want to call you earlier as I didn’t want to raise your hopes, just in case it didn’t work out.’

  ‘And he can come home?’

  ‘Yes, with some pills, yes. Because, well, he’s still got cancer, but it’s like it was before: since the bleeding stopped a year ago he could go on for another day, or another week, or another six months.’

  *

  Monsieur Gimone came back to collect his dog.

  He thanked me, in tears, grumbling as always about the cost of the medication, saying that living was no cheaper than dying.

  Then he shook my hand, holding it in his for a long time.

  *

  If it hadn’t been for the nurse, Démon would have been put to sleep.

  Pirate

  A woman of about 30 comes into the surgery. She looks confused and a little embarrassed.

  She’s elegantly dressed in a short skirt and blouse, her long hair is immaculately styled, and she’s carrying a shoebox.

  ‘Excuse me, I have an appointment for, um …’

  ‘Yes, for the rat? No problem, follow me.’

  I take the lid off the box and pick up the creature. A fine large variegated male, a nice old boy. I hold him under his shoulders, my thumb and first finger around his thorax, his back paws dangling. His long tail gyrates while his nose quivers on a level with mine. He makes vague efforts to get away by pushing with his front paws. One of his eyes is punctured. Blood has seeped under the socket and coagulated. He’s cleaned some of it away.

  ‘Um, I … It’s not my rat. It belongs to my neighbour’s son. He came round to my house just now with the creature in his hands. He’s eight. His father had told him that if he wanted to make it better he should take it to the woods and let it go.’

  *

  The bastard.

  He’s not the first. One day a little girl of six came running in with her hamster, all on her own. The hamster was dying. I was obliged to have a consultation with a six-year-old child, explain to her that her hamster was certainly going to die, try all the same to save it because I couldn’t just let it die, talk to her about death. Tell her that we would give it an injection to stop the pain, and then let it slip away. Dither between hollow and inaccurate clichés – ‘It’ll go to sleep’ – and the blunt truth for which I would have to accept the consequences. Was it my job to explain to a six-year-old child that no, the vet couldn’t save her hamster, that he couldn’t even suggest anything except killing it? To explain to her about death?

  Anyway, so I made her a sweet little coffin for her hamster, from a small cardboard box for antibiotics.

  To make matters worse she insisted on paying, holding out her pocket money, a heap of small change. I told her that in this surgery it was grown-ups who paid. I wasn’t going to let her father off the hook.

  *

  As I listen to this woman, I’m shaking with anger. She notices, says she’s sorry. I tell her I’m sorry, quickly tell her the story of the little girl and the hamster.

  ‘You know I’m happy to pay, I mean it’s not my rat, he’s not even my son, but please don’t send the bill to his father …’

  *

  So I decide to do everything I can, which shouldn’t cost too much. A rat shouldn’t suffer too badly from losing an eye. Anyway, it seems blithely unconcerned, wriggling about and running up and down my arm, not exactly what you’d call disabled. She’ll come back for it tonight.

  We keep it, clean it up, put it in a gauze-lined cage to sleep, take time to give it a proper clean-up – and I’m not convinced that any of this is justified. Antibiotics. A dressing, a bandage over its eye and round its head. It looks like a pirate.

  As for the bill, she can pay as much or as little as she wants. Whatever. The rat will be just fine, anyway.

  Midnight

  The cow is jammed between a barrier and the wall of an old building off the cowshed where there’s a stone feeding trough and a gnarled wooden manger. A thick carpet of fresh straw, light from two big yellow bulbs. It’s warm, hot almost. Somewhere in one of the hay bales a kitten mews. The blonde cow has been straining for hours, but to no avail, a fine large cow that has seen other births and that shouldn’t need any help. What will I find this time? There’s no let-up between calvings, all of them different, constant, relentless and exhausting. There won’t be any rest for a few weeks yet, not until the season’s over.

  I’m inside the softness of a cow’s birth canal again, silent, too tired to talk. I might have made a bit of small talk on auto-pilot, but my head’s somewhere else, at the end of my arm, at the tips of my fingers as they explore the vagina and then the cervix, while the cow starts to strain again. I’m not really concentrating, just confident and relaxed. I enjoy calving on this farm. And in any case, with a pelvis like this it hardly matters what’s inside, it will emerge in the natural way. I’d put money on a uterine torsion, a twisting of the uterus that’s not uncommon in cows.

  I push my arm in deeper and turn my hand anti-clockwise until it’s resting on the calf ’s head, still enveloped in the placental membranes. It’s alive, I’ve got a good hold, this should be quick. The uterus, with its hundreds of litres of calf, mucus and damp membranes, suspended by two ligaments that are too lax, has spun on itself. The twisted uterus is constricting the birth passage and preventing the calf from passing through it, but by a stroke of luck the cervix seems t
o be dilated.

  The mother pants and pushes, twists her body and stamps her hooves; the farmer holds her tail while I lay my hand quite flat on the calf ’s neck. Its mother must weigh 700 kilos. Luckily I’m tall.

  It’s a knack you learn that becomes habitual, a powerful, continuous movement that culminates in a final push, using the combined strength of your arm and your back. Sometimes for a moment, as now, sometimes for ten minutes or so. With one last rocking movement the calf is facing down the birth canal, feet down and head between its front legs; I rupture the sac and allow the fluids to flow with the contractions. The cervix is well dilated, the canal is very wide, I’m guessing the calf ’s a female, a good size but not too big. She’ll pass through.

  My hands are on her cannon bones and I can feel her trembling, tiny spasms as though she were shaking her head. No time to lose. Gently, powerfully, I pull the little hooves towards the vulva, damp yellow and ivory against the slippery coat, with a sickly sweet smell. A little blood and a lot of amniotic fluid on my overalls and all down my arms. It’s fine, it’s warm, I feel good, so good, here, holding this newborn in position while the farmer runs to fetch the calving ropes that I wrap around her legs. It’s a good hold. He positions the calving jack, while I very slowly pass the neck of the uterus over the newborn’s head. The hooves have now emerged, and I suspend myself from the ropes, my body completely straight, my feet wedged in the straw between the cow’s hind legs. I imagine I’m holding the strings of a kite, effortlessly, my head 70 centimetres from the ground and nearly horizontal, pulling downwards and backwards, in time with the mother’s contractions.

  Above me, barely a metre away from my eyes, I can see the lips of the vulva spreading to reveal the tip of a tongue, then a wet nose and a muzzle covered in mucus, eyes, a forehead, ears … The farmer hurries to position the jack, but there’s no need, the calf is being drawn out by the traction of my weight, as I bend my legs a little to stop myself from falling over.

  Out come the shoulders, then the thorax. The farmer has left the jack in the straw and is getting ready to hold the calf ’s hind legs, while I kneel to receive the newborn. She breathes in, exhales a damp and mucous breath, and shakes her head as we hang her upside down to expel the last of the mucus. Her mother moans and lows, calls her and looks over her shoulder at these two bipeds tending to her calf.

  One last descent into the birth canal, empty now: a little blood, a cervix in perfect condition, a soft vagina with no tears, no damage to arteries. After a last look once we’ve cleaned up, I can go home to bed. The calf is already trying to stand up, her mother dribbles and froths as she licks her in a trance, watching us out of the corner of her eye while the farm dogs curl up on their straw bed behind the wall. An owl hoots. In the feeding trough the kitten mews again. The calves are nearly all asleep; two of them follow me with their great cow eyes. Time for bed.

  Barter

  It’s half past nine in the evening. I’m on call tonight and all over the weekend, and I’m flicking between the internet and a book that doesn’t look too promising. Basically I’m bored stiff, but not so bored that I’m actually hoping for a call. Which is going to happen anyway. I stare for ten seconds as the telephone rings and flashes, signalling that a call is being transferred.

  ‘Out-of-hours service, hello?’

  ‘Er … is that the vet?’

  ‘Yes it is …’

  ‘It’s my piglet, I’ve got a piglet, he’s a week old and I’ve had him for five days, I’ve just got home from work and he’s lying on the floor and there’s a cigarette crushed on the floor and he’s not good and I’ve given him mouth-to-mouth can you imagine I gave my piglet mouth-to-mouth and I massaged his heart and then he came round but he’s not at all good what shall I do I massaged him and there’s a cigarette all mashed up beside him and what shall I do can you come and see him?’

  ‘Ermmm …’

  ‘I’ve been feeding him with pig milk powder from the agricultural cooperative and in the beginning his mother fed him the bloke told me that he should have immunity but now I think he’s chewed up that cigarette and I’ve brought him round twice I’ve just put him in front of a little space heater to warm him up he’s frozen.’

  ‘OK, well if it’s as bad as that I’ll just have to come …’

  *

  I’m floundering, stumped, totally at sea. In fact the conversation went on much longer than that. All I managed to get in were a few ‘ums’ and ‘ers’, and the occasional ‘It’s not the cigarette.’

  I can’t work it out, but the guy is genuinely distraught. He doesn’t sound as though he has learning difficulties, but from the way he talks about his piglet I can tell he’s not used to dealing with pigs. And this piglet seems to enjoy a peculiar position, half farm animal, half pet. If this were a sick and motherless week-old piglet destined for the sausage factory, a farmer wouldn’t bother to do anything. The cost of a night call-out would be enough to buy five piglets, if not more.

  But if it’s a pet … I just can’t make it out. And he seems to want me to make a visit, without actually asking me to.

  I’m uncertain, I don’t want to upset him, he’s made an emergency call, I’ll go. But will he be able to pay for the call-out?

  ‘OK, well then, if it’s as bad as that, I’m on my way.’

  ‘But how much will it cost?’

  Bingo. I feel a bit embarrassed, but he’s broached the subject, so much the better.

  ‘About 50 euros … but …’

  Silence.

  ‘50 euros? But I haven’t got 50 euros!’

  He’s not saying, ‘but that’s daylight robbery’ or ‘but that’s too much’. No, he’s saying, ‘but I haven’t got 50 euros’.

  ‘Leave it, I’m on my way, we’ll sort it out. I’ll be there in ten minutes at the outside.’

  He lives not far from my house. What would I have done if he’d been 40 kilometres away?

  He lives on an old farm that’s he’s in the middle of doing up. He apologises for the mess. He takes me up to the first floor, into a small bathroom where a space heater is blowing hot air. Lying under a blanket, in the full blast of the hot air, is a pink piglet with black markings. It’s so sweet. On the way up, the guy tells me that a friend gave it to him because its mother had crushed the rest of the litter.

  The piglet is dying. Its breathing is laboured, its heartbeat is far too slow, and it’s so hypothermic that its temperature doesn’t even register on the thermometer. Its skin is lightly mottled with violet. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, I just know that it’s going to die. That it would probably already be dead if the bearded bloke kneeling beside me hadn’t made such desperate efforts to bring it back to life. I tell him. He punches the ground with his fist, wants to know why. I’d struggle to find an explanation for him.

  He appears to have done everything right, but the piglet won’t survive. I suggest we should help it on its way, inject it with a large dose of anaesthetic. To make it quicker.

  He comes out to the car with me, and we talk in the darkness of the farmyard, lit by the courtesy light in the back of the car, while I fill the syringe. I’d known this was why I was here.

  As I get ready to inject the anaesthetic, he stops me.

  ‘It’s my piglet. I want to.’

  He sounds firm, determined. And sad.

  Very simply, I show him how to do an intramuscular injection.

  He doesn’t hesitate for a second.

  The little piglet’s emerald-green eyes roll back in its cartoon-like snout.

  *

  ‘What do I owe you, doctor?’

  Look, my friend, you don’t owe me a thing. I came to put your piglet down because I’m experienced enough – or cynical enough – to know that there was nothing else I could do. To make sure it didn’t suffer, to make sure I wouldn’t have to leave you on your own with a dying newborn.

  I don’t say this, but I dodge the question, tell him to leave it.

  He wo
n’t have it, of course. So we carry on chatting under the stars, about the sheep that he’s just been to collect, the pigs that he’d like to breed, that sort of thing. And then I set off home, taking with me two slices of inedible cake (sorry) and an old stool. Because there was no way I could say no.

  He was shaking.

  Sunday

  It’s Sunday. I’m on call, trailing my mobile with me wherever I go, even to the toilet, but I’m at home. I’ve been on call for two days non-stop. My last afternoon off was Thursday, my next one will be Tuesday. The days have been busy, the nights not so bad.

  It’s half past seven in the morning and I’m in bed. The phone rings. Top volume, action stations. A woman’s voice. Young.

  ‘Out-of-hours service, hello?’

  ‘Oh doctor it’s awful, my guinea pig’s got a tick, I’m so frightened!’

  What?!

  ‘Right. Ermm, that’s not really serious. You’ll just have to remove it.’

  ‘But how??? There are the children!’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Well then … Hold on a minute, I’ll take your number. I’ll call you back when I’m at the surgery.’

  I stagger off to get a pen and paper, write down her number.

  ‘Merci docteur!’

  Half past seven and now I’m wide awake. I could have told her where to get off. I didn’t even think of it. On week-day mornings people never wake me up with such dumb questions. Only on Sundays and holidays. Later on, when I go to the clinic to check on my surgery cases, I’ll get her in with her guinea pig and its tick. Show her how to remove it, sell her a tick remover, not even charge her the out-of-hours rate. Still, what a halfwit.

  I let my dogs out, have breakfast, down a coffee, log on to Twitter. I’ll go to the surgery early, I’ve got some serious cases in the kennels, not that they’re urgent, but here on my own I’m going round in circles, getting stressed out. I read a bit – my beloved Veterinary Internal Medicine by Stephen Ettinger – take none of it in, pick up my keys, pull the door to behind me.