Dogs and cats don’t care anyway.
She was what, 86? She always came in her old Fiat Punto, her husband driving, half-blind, totally deaf. Always enthusiastic when he shook my hand. He was 95. She was a famous dachshund breeder, and she always complained when she didn’t get her tea or her whisky on time. She was like something out of Monty Python. I miss her a lot.
When I’m tired, at the end of the day, I start speaking English to the wrong people. To the nurse. To my computer. On a prescription. To a very old French man with an unusual intonation because of his deafness (but he didn’t hear me, so he didn’t take offence).
They were quite young. They had a business in the UK, they lived here for eight years but in the end they left France, with their five children. They left their friends, and the beautiful watermill they’d totally rebuilt, because the tax on foreign incomes had gone up so high they couldn’t afford it. I miss them. I miss the way they used to come on the green motor-bike they loved to ride through the hills and along the rivers. I still remember the day I went to the mill to put down their labrador, the old lady they cherished so much.
Speaking English is often a bit of a game: finding the right word (or the right way to pronounce it when eyebrows knit in puzzlement), asking people, checking Google translate.
He drives trucks for British rock stars. He doesn’t earn much, and spends most of it on his animals. He’s always six months late paying his bills, he’s always six months late with everything. He comes to us from quite a long way off, because, he tells me (making me blush in the process), we care.
So I take care, every day, of British cats and dogs, or of French cats and dogs belonging to British people. Though ‘Englishness’ is something I shouldn’t assume too fast, I guess.
That day was a tough one. There they were, a gay couple with a tabby alley cat, and there I was, giving them a laborious explanation of my diagnosis. Either the cat had nothing but a minor virus, or else he had a condition that was fatal. Quite a difference, and I was trying to make an educated guess, wondering whether it was worth while doing more costly examinations. I gave them a very long talk in English; they listened without even a nod or a frown. Since they didn’t say anything, I finally began to wonder. Maybe I was wrong? Maybe I’d got the wrong accent? Maybe they were German, or some other nationality?
So I asked them:
‘You’re English, aren’t you?’
They answered, slowly, coolly, with a grin.
‘We’re Scots.’
They were Scots, and they had a peculiar sense of humour. When they left, I didn’t know if they were grateful for the consultation and explanations, or if they were simply laughing at me.
So now I don’t assume that people are English, and if I’m in doubt I ask if they are English-speaking. And every day I see English-speaking, or rather English-understanding, dogs and cats.
For the rituals of the Pet Travel Scheme, the visit we have to do for every dog, cat or ferret that’s about to cross the Channel.
For vaccinations.
For small wounds, or big ones.
For serious diseases, or simple colds.
I groom.
I pet.
I diagnose.
I care, the best I can.
A good death
Madame Devèze was 59 at the time. I’d always find her surrounded by her cows, pitchfork in hand. That day she looked imposing in the rays of the rising sun, with frost glittering on the straw in the animal stalls and the breath of her blonde cows rising in billowing clouds in the half-light of the cowshed.
I loved her big calloused hands and the way she had of buttonholing me whenever she had an argument with her son, a great strapping lad more interested in sowing, ploughing and making silage than in feeding and handling the cows.
Here, she was the farmer. The others – her husband with his pastis, her son with his tractor – were mere farmhands.
‘The men frighten the cows!’ she would explain.
She was the one who’d call me out for emergencies, who’d send her son to the surgery to collect the medication, who’d write the names of the drugs and products on a bit of card or a feed label, which he would clutch in his great paws and read with a look of amazement.
She’d always tell me that she wasn’t going to carry on until she was 65, that she only had another year to go, and that she’d make voluntary contributions for the rest of her pension, or not, in fact she didn’t really know, as she didn’t really know what she was entitled to. Like many other women in her position, she’d grown up on a farm and had taken over the work of the farm herself well before anyone took any interest in wives like her, wives who ran farms that were declared in their husband’s names. Who knew how they toiled away, who took into account their countless hours of work, their 80-hour weeks with no prospect of holidays, no trips away, no time off? Nowadays most elderly couples who want to be able keep their cows put the farm in the name of the wife, who hasn’t paid any contributions and so doesn’t have a pension.
And she’d be there, with her pitchfork, fretting over a lame cow or agonising about a calf that needed a transfusion.
‘So, Balteau, how are you today?’
Madame Devèze didn’t speak with the local accent; she had an unusual and unmistakable voice, and a curious way of speaking, as though she always suspected that people might be laughing at her, or trying to take her for a ride. A life spent staking out her patch.
‘Very well, Madame. And you?’
A handshake, a direct smile, no hidden agenda. Sunrise. A herd of cows. Good reasons to be up at dawn, or earlier.
‘Oh, well, OK, but I get a bit tired, the work’s never done, you know how it is’, she replied, gesturing with her pitchfork.
‘So I see. Couldn’t your son do that with his tractor?’
‘Not in among the cows!’
Of course not.
‘But I’ve got to the point where I’ve had enough, you know, and on top of that I get this wretched pain, tight across my chest and shooting up my left arm, it’s so annoying!’
She accompanied this description with a gesture that was both expansive and eloquent.
I blanched.
‘A pain that starts in your heart and travels up your arm? A feeling like you’re being crushed, or suffocated?’
‘Oh, yes, just like that.’
Her smile was disarming.
‘But – surely you must be joking. No?’
‘Why? It’s nothing serious, is it?’
Really?
‘The pain you’re describing is typical of the early signs of a heart attack, and here you are with your pitchfork, turning the hay all alone, in among the cows? You must leave all this and see a doctor straight away!’
‘Oh, well. That’s all I need! Never mind that, come and see this cow, she can’t seem to deliver her calf …’
I pulled on my gloves, protesting all the while.
‘And then you’ll go to the doctor, won’t you? As soon as I’ve seen to the cow?’
‘But it would be a good death, wouldn’t it? In the hay, in among the cows?’
‘It would be a completely idiotic death more like, at 59, in among all the muck and manure. And what is a good death, anyway?’
‘Oh well, I expect you’re right …’
She’d dropped the familiar tu now, and was using the more formal vous.
‘But there’s no need to worry, Balteau, I take my husband’s pills, I took some this morning, they gave me hot flushes but I’m all right now.’
‘You took … What exactly have you taken?’
‘Oh, trin something, tritin …?’
‘Trinitrine! Without a prescription? But you must be completely mad! You’ll be keeling over in the muck with your cows if you carry on with this nonsense! You shouldn’t mess around with drugs like that. They might be completely the wrong thing for you, I don’t know. And on top of that you’ve just told me you’ve had the symptoms of a heart attack!�
��
*
In point of fact, I don’t know much more about heart attacks than you can pick up from watching medical dramas on television. Animals don’t have heart attacks.
I spent another ten minutes arguing with her before I left. I was worried. After lunch I was on the verge of calling her doctor. Then I was called out on a few visits and it went clean out of my mind.
The next day I came into the waiting room to find one of the secretaries and a woman I didn’t know deep in conversation.
‘Imagine, she told the reception desk at the hospital …’
I barged in without a second thought.
‘What is it? Who’s in hospital?’
‘Oh doctor, did you not hear what happened to my sister?’
‘Her sister is Madame Devèze’, the secretary intervened.
‘Is she OK?’
‘She’s absolutely fine, she’s getting some rest, she went to the hospital because you gave her such a fright!’
‘No bad thing either.’
‘They’re keeping her in for a little while, she’s had all sorts of tests and they’ve started her on some drugs already …’
‘Have they now.’
‘But you’ll never guess what she told them at the hospital! When they asked her the name of the doctor who’d referred her, she told them it was you. Since they didn’t know you, they asked if you were a locum, and she said no, that you’d told her she should go and tell them that she’d been taking her husband’s pills. That you were her vet!’
The old cat
The elderly man sits in the waiting room, looking unobtrusive. He’s taken his cap off, and he’s placed a wicker basket on the bench beside him. He exchanges a few pleas-antries with our secretary, speaking very quietly, as though he’s worried about disturbing us.
In the consulting room, I’m putting the finishing touches to a hospitalisation form while at the same time listening attentively to the conversation that filters, only barely audibly, through the half-open door.
I don’t recognise him, although I know I’ve seen his cat before. Stranded with my form, I can’t consult the appointments book. So I listen. I listen as an old man tells his story, his and his cat’s. The cat is twenty years old. He nearly died five months ago, but I saved him. Two months ago the old man brought him in to have him put down. And then took him home again. This time he thinks the old tomcat won’t make it past Christmas. He’s resigned to it, he’s had him for longer than he ever thought he would, and he knows you can’t stop the advance of age and illness. He wants to bury his pet at the bottom of the garden.
I’ll play the innocent. Act as if I haven’t heard anything. A quick look at the elderly cat’s records and it all comes back to me. A nasty mammary tumour, cystic, enormous, that I’d punctured. Given the animal’s age I’d ruled out surgery from the outset, thinking that with this procedure and a few palliative drugs he could still have a few comfortable weeks ahead of him. When the old man brought the cat back, the cyst hadn’t formed again, but he had a bad case of gastro-enteritis. Nothing to do with the tumour, probably. He was dehydrated, slightly hypothermic, and he’d stopped eating, but I did tests to rule out kidney failure and tried a simple medical treatment. Which had worked perfectly.
And this time?
‘So, Monsieur, what’s wrong with the old boy?’
‘Oh. You know … it’s the end.’
He speaks as quietly as he did in the waiting room. I lower my voice a little. He’s not deaf. The old cat grumbles a bit, but consents to come on my lap. I’d started the consultation in my usual way, sitting on the examination table so as to encourage the animal out of its basket. Not holding or forcing it, just waiting for it to allow me to stroke it and to come to me naturally. It doesn’t always work, but this time it was all purrs, no hesitation, nothing more to be said.
‘The tumour’s ruptured, some liquid has drained and there’s been some bleeding, but it wasn’t as big as the first time you know …’
The old gentleman holds his cap in his hands, kneading it and rotating it between his fingers. The joints of his fingers are white, white from gripping so hard, waiting for my verdict. He juts his chin forward, his tongue discreetly pushing his dentures up and down. I don’t say anything. I roll the cat over and stroke his front. The old tom relaxes, lets me tickle his chin. He has a nasty crater-shaped wound in the middle of his abdomen, near the navel. Three centimetres across, one or two deep, in the subcutaneous tissue. Around the wound the fur has been licked and licked until it lies flat. The wound is slack, or nearly, and there’s no blood. A few signs of granulation tissue, new tissue formed during the healing process, probably worn away by the constant licking.
The cat purrs, the old gentleman tells me about his ravenous appetite, how he loves being stroked, how he spends all his time snoozing beside the stove. I don’t say anything.
*
A long silence. The old gentleman is waiting for me to pass sentence, for me to say: ‘This time we’ll have to put him down.’
I take a deep breath. The old gentleman juts his chin out. His cap has stopped moving. His fingers are white, so very white.
‘Right. Two injections, a couple of tins of cat food, and he can go home. I’ll give you a bottle of antiseptic and him some antibiotics. He’ll be around to see in the new year.’
The old gentleman’s fingers are pink again. But he’s still gripping his cap. He lets out an ‘aaah’ of surprise and relief. I hold his cat out to him.
Merry Christmas.
Liberation
‘You see, her incontinence is getting worse and worse, doctor. Wherever she goes in the bar she leaves a trail of urine behind her, and it smells terrible and we spend all our time mopping it up, so we put her outside, but she’s ten now and …’
A great lump of a labrador, 40 kilos at least, suffering from spay incontinence that had started around a year after the operation. We’d tried every treatment, but in the end nothing had worked. Every now and then, her elderly owner would decide to have another go, and would agree to let us examine her again and prescribe something else. It never worked.
But putting her down because she was incontinent would be just plain stupid.
‘It’s my wife and daughter who have to clean up after her, I can’t expect them to go on like that … and it’s just getting worse.’
We were all in the consulting room. The labrador was stretched out on the table, while we stood round her with our arms folded. The old man was hoping that … that what?
That we’d agree to put her down?
That we’d find a miracle solution?
There would be no miracle. We knew what a nightmare it was keeping the café clean, with the dog wandering around between the customers as they had their lunch, the protests of the wife and the resignation of the husband.
In the end they left me to make the decision on my own, because it’s a miserable business, and because you can’t put a dog down just because she’s incontinent.
Or perhaps you can.
*
He’d gone away wearing the wooden expression of people who make it a matter of pride not to cry.
Not in front of me.
Every time I walked past their café over the following week I felt a twinge of remorse for the dog that would always be stretched out in the middle of the road, dozing in the sunshine. You’d always have to swerve to avoid her.
Then one day I bumped into the old man’s daughter in the village. She came straight over to me. And shook my hand.
‘Had you heard my father died last week? On Wednesday?’
No, I hadn’t. I offered her my condolences. I didn’t know what to say. I’d seen him only two days earlier, on the Monday. I’m not old enough to be used to my clients dying.
She explained that he’d had a bad heart for many years. That he’d died peacefully.
That he hadn’t been in any pain.
That once his dog had been put down, he’d been
free to go.
That it had been a liberation.
Work experience
If you want to be a vet, you need to start asking the right questions in your early teens. For me the decision was already made. I was already en route and admiring the view. That’s why nowadays I take a lot of trouble with my school students on work experience: I don’t just show them the job, I show them the whole job. Warts and all. I sketch out scenarios, invite them to think about issues that at that age went completely over my head. Who else will tell these kids that even if they make the grade they might be on the wrong track?
Now I’ve honed a tried-and-tested speech for my work experience students. And I have a lot of them. We always have an initial meeting, a short interview of sorts, more like a briefing. They often come with their parents, but I much prefer the ones who call the surgery themselves rather than hiding behind mum or dad. I sit them down in one of the consulting rooms, usually in the evening around half past six. Since I imposed this more formal structure, I don’t have a problem with the ‘My Little Pony’-type work experience kids. Or not so much.
Work experience is usually a teenager’s first encounter with the world of work. These fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds want to be vets, or at least to see what it’s like. Or at the very least they want to avoid doing their work experience in a supermarket or office.
*
‘All doors will be open to you, or nearly all: I’ll come back to that. The aim of this work experience is to introduce you to the vet’s profession, as it says in your agreement. You won’t be allowed to actually do very much, but you can watch and be there. We’ll try to explain as much as possible to you, during and after appointments. And on the drive between visits, always a good time.
‘I know you think being a vet is a dream job. And yes, we vaccinate litters of puppies and kittens, we mend broken paws, we do dressings and injections. But we also clear up the mess after dogs with gastro-enteritis, we watch as animals get old and ill, we’re there to put them down. Being a vet is a fantastic job, but it’s a tough one too.
Monsieur le Vet Page 4