Pas de deux

by E. J. Noyes

  The barn cat, Poffertje—or Lil’ Pancake as Wren called him—sprinted through the open door and sprung onto my lap. He reminded me of Rasputin, the black and white stray who’d wandered tatty and bleeding into my barn seven years ago. I’d found him curled up in the corner of Dewey’s stall, being nosed by ever-curious Dew. Multiple veterinary visits later, and Rasputin returned to Dewey’s side.

  Rasputin was a blessing and curse. My world-class dressage horse loved “his” cat and I let them be because Rasputin helped Dewey turn off his overactive mind when he wasn’t working. But the flipside was that Dew fretted whenever we traveled without Rasputin. Case in point? The scratch on Dew’s nose. Dewey was trying to reconcile the fact that Poffertje was not Rasputin and despite being a barn cat, he did not like eleven hundred pounds of Warmblood horse nosing him, nibbling him, and sniffing in his face.

  Wren hopped up the steps moments after the cat had made his grand entrance. I pushed my empty plate back on the table, away from paws. “All settled?”

  She rummaged in the fridge. “Yep. Also, Mary wanted me to tell you that the new team veterinarian will be here midday-ish the day after tomorrow. There’ll be a meeting.”

  There was always a meeting. “Noted. Any word on David?”

  “Last I heard this morning was he’s stable but still unconscious.” She opened a can of Coke and took a sip. “They’re still not committing to whether he’s ever going to wake up.”

  My stomach fell. “Damn. That really sucks. Note to self, don’t ever have a massive heart attack.”

  “You’ve got that right. But the show must go on and all that.”

  “True. This new vet has some pretty big shoes to fill.” I smiled up at Wren. “But I’m sure they’ll be great.”

  Chapter Two

  Addie

  I was on my way back to the practice after hours of consults—a purchase examination for a very expensive showjumper, a mysterious lameness in a dressage horse, a first vaccination for an adorable foal, diversions for an emergency colic and then a leg wound—when my work phone rang. One percent chance of it being a colleague wanting to check something, ninety-nine percent chance I was not going back for a very late lunch.

  I tapped speaker. “This is Addie.”

  “Addie, it’s Janet. Emergency call over in Pahokee. Are you free?”

  Bingo. I should really open my own backyard psychic reading joint. “For you I am, any time, any place.”

  I could hear the smile in her voice. “Oh, you put that southern charm away, Doctor Gardner. It doesn’t work on me.”

  “Liar. I saw that piece of cake you put in the staff room with my name on it and a warning for others to keep away. Admit it, you’re sweet on me.”

  She laughed. “Maybe a little.”

  “I knew it! What’s the case?”

  “Gaping chest wound. The owner was downright hysterical but I managed to get a few details from her. Still, I’m not sure how accurate the information is. She says the mare has a massive flap of skin and maybe muscle torn off its chest, there’s a lot of blood and, I quote, grossness. Consult is at eight-twenty-one Mill Road.”

  I ran a quick mental inventory on the contents of the numerous drawers and boxes in the back of my work truck, which had inevitably dwindled during my calls, and decided I was equipped adequately. If it was more serious than the client had said, I’d just have them take the horse and its chest wound to our equine hospital. I executed a U-turn. “Okay, on my way now. Can you call the client and tell her I’ll be there in thirty minutes, max. Tell her to keep padded pressure on it if it’s bleeding and if the horse will allow it, otherwise just leave it alone.”

  “Will do. Client’s name is Charlotte. Eric vaccinated her horse a few weeks ago so she has an account with us.”

  There is a veterinary god. No need to collect payment after treatment. “Even better, thanks.”

  Pahokee lay outside the glitzy area of Wellington, Florida where I lived and worked. It never ceased to amaze that two completely different areas existed within thirty minutes of each other. Where Palm Beach and Wellington were monied, with enormous horse properties so immaculate that I would have happily lived in the barns, much of Pahokee was cropping land and the horse properties had only the most basic facilities. The area reminded me a little of my parents’ farm back in Arrington, Tennessee.

  I slowed to a crawl along a road that was more grass than asphalt, and peered at the letterboxes, most of which had no numbers. Situation normal when I was trying to find a new client and also rule eighty-one of Murphy’s Law of Vetting. I’d almost given up hope and was about to call Janet when someone sprinted from a driveway to my right about fifty feet away. The person flailing their arms above their head to catch my attention did just that.

  As I drove closer I realized it was a teenage boy making big THIS WAY gestures. He pointed at the Seth Ranger & Assoc. Veterinarians text and logo on the side of my truck, gave me a thumbs-up and directed me to an open gate and into a large field. I bounced over rutted, weedy ground to where a late-teens girl held a stocky chestnut mare with four neat white socks and a full blaze down its face. It also had a massive flap of skin and tissue that stretched almost the width of its chest and hung down at least eight inches. Nice.

  This was going to be good fun. I love suturing. No sarcasm. Suturing is an artform and I am a suturing Da Vinci. I pulled on a ball cap to keep wayward strands of hair from blowing in my face. “Heya, I’m Addie. You must be Charlotte? How’re you?”

  “Mhmm. I am. I’m okay. Thanks,” she added. Charlotte had a timid, mouse-like way about her and given the mare was standing still and appeared unfussed it seemed she was either shocky as hell, or quiet and well-mannered. Just how I liked them. Quiet and well-mannered, not shocky.

  I tugged the ends of the stethoscope slung around my neck. “And who’s this?”

  “Smartie.”

  I leaned closer to study the wound and was pleased to see Smartie didn’t appear to have staked herself up into the axilla which would make things more complicated. “Looks like Smartie got herself into some trouble.”

  “Yeah.” Charlotte was doing a very good job of not looking at the bloody, gaping flap of muscle and skin, but every now and then her eyes seemed to stray traitorously and her expression would turn to grossed-out.

  “Any idea what she might have gotten herself caught up on?”

  “No clue. I came out to ride her and there was…” A nervous swallow. “This.”

  Not knowing meant the likelihood of it happening again just increased by eighty percent. Murphy’s Law of Vetting rule one-oh-six. “Sure, okay. Give me a few minutes to get things set up and I’ll get this all fixed up for you.” I stroked the horse’s neck. “You’re going to feel a lot more comfortable, Smartie.”

  I left Charlotte talking quietly to her mare while I opened the truck canopy and fished out a clean pair of coveralls. While I squirmed into them, I gave Charlotte a rundown of what I planned. “I’ll sedate her to keep her nice and still while I work, then put some sutures in to close it up, but first I’ll have to give the wound a good clean to make sure there’s nothing nasty in there.”

  “She hates needles,” Charlotte blurted. “I’ve only had her for a few weeks. She’s my first horse. She bit the other vet and then struck me when we tried to give her her first tetanus vaccine.”

  Oh good. “So she’s not up to date with her tetanus?”

  “No, well I don’t really know.” Her face contorted and for a moment she seemed like she might cry. “The other vet said we should give her a full course because I didn’t know what vaccinations she got with the woman who owned her before. She still has two more needles to go but she might be up to date if her other owner was doing it. I just don’t know.”

  Wonderful.

  I dialed my compassion up a few degrees. Charlotte seemed like she was about to melt into a puddle of emotion so it was time for gentle voices and faces. “No problem, we’ll just have to use a
bit of Plan B and get creative. Do you have anywhere we can restrain her better?” I peered around the open, empty space. “A barn, or a solid fence?” Anywhere but in the middle of a field where eight hundred pounds of equine could pretty much do as she wanted.

  “No. We only moved here last month and we’re still getting everything set up.”

  Even better. “How is she with a twitch?”

  “I’ve never tried one with her. She’s really great, I swear, really gentle and sweet. She just really hates needles.”

  “Right, no problem. I’m not a big fan of needles either. Let’s try the twitch first and see how we go.” The two words I’d just heard—bit and struck—were not words I wanted to apply to me. I pulled the long tube with a rope loop at the end from its place of pride on the wall of the truck bay and tucked it into a leg pocket of my coveralls. Once I’d drawn up a combination of my favorite sedation cocktail for standing procedures and stuck the syringe into my left breast pocket I was set.

  The mare showed no sign of aggression when I moved to her shoulder and stroked her neck. I did a quick heart rate and breathing check to make sure she wasn’t going to keel over if I sedated her, then gestured to Charlotte. “Come stand over on this side with me.” I carefully took a handful of Smartie’s nose and slipped the twitch’s thin loop of rope over it, quickly twisting the handle until the rope tightened. The mare stretched her neck, almost yanking the twitch from my hand. “Keep hold of her.” I twisted the tube a few more times.

  Smartie snorted a snuffly kind of sigh which led Charlotte to ask panickingly, “Is she okay?”

  I grinned at her. “Perfectly. Just enjoying a shot of endorphins thanks to the pressure from the twitch. It’s like gettin’ a really good hug. On her nose.” After a few seconds Smartie dropped her head, her eyes glazing over. I wished a dose of endorphins for myself was as easy as squeezing my nose.

  Right, time to try the needle sedation. “I’ll need you to hold the twitch for me, just move a little so you’re standing behind me in case she decides to be grumpy.” I uncapped the needle, stuck the cap between my teeth so I wouldn’t lose it and pressed my thumb against the mare’s jugular. When she didn’t react, I slid the needle into the vein. Despite the natural twitch sedation, Smartie snaked her head toward us and when I grumbled at her to behave, she struck out with a foreleg, catching me on the thigh despite the fact I was well to the side. Conniving brat. That was going to bruise. I drew blood back into the syringe then pushed it forward again to administer sweet, sweet sedation.

  I removed the twitch and tossed it out of the way. The mare gave us both a Screw you look, despite the fact I was patting her for punching me in the leg. Charlotte offered a quiet, “I’m so sorry she got you.”

  “No problem. Kicks and bites are a job perk.” Kicks, bites, shoves, being stood on, being shit on, being covered in pus and all manner of fluids and then a hundred other unpleasant things I dealt with in my job. The pain in my thigh was just another in a long line of ouchies.

  The actual wound repair went smoothly and only took an hour and a half. I put in a drain to help with swelling and took advantage of the mare’s wobbly state of amenability to jab her with pain relief, tetanus antitoxin, her second tetanus vaccination which was almost due and an antibiotic.

  I filled a bag with syringes and needles, leaned against the side of the truck and wrote out the dosages, which I stuck to the bottles of penicillin and a tub of oral analgesic. Given the severity of the wound, I’d decided intramuscular antibiotic injections were a better course of action than oral antibiotics, but taking into account the mare’s aversion to needles, it was one of those there-is-no-good-decision decisions. “If you can build her a small run to keep her contained for a week or so that would be great. A stall would be even better if you know someone nearby who wouldn’t mind putting her up in one of theirs?”

  Charlotte nodded. “I’ll try.” After a beat she reminded me, “We’re just getting everything set up here.” Her embarrassment was as plain as day and I empathized because when I was a kid, I had the barest facilities and minimal gear for my borrowed horse.

  “Sounds good. Otherwise she might try to bust those stitches open playing Kentucky Derby horse in this lovely large field.” I smiled. “Just do whatever you can, that’s all you can do.”

  “Mhmm. Sure.”

  “Okay, here’s the penicillin.” God help whoever has to administer that. “Thirty milliliters injected into her muscle twice a day until it’s all gone. Can you get someone to help you?”

  Her eyes widened. “I think me and my brother and dad can deal with it. Can you show me again? I’ve done some muscle injections but not many.”

  I ran through the process a few times and told her some tips. “I’d stick to the neck but alternate sides after each injection. If she starts to get swollen or grumpy you could try her rump, but be careful in case her butt gets bouncy.” I’d been a second away from suggesting the other common injection site of the chest, when I remembered I’d just sutured a gaping wound in Smartie’s chest. One point to fatigue.

  “What if we really can’t do it?”

  “We do offer an injection service for a set fee plus travel.” With nine more injections, it was going to get expensive fast. I told her just how expensive and watched her eyes widen.

  “You guys sure charge a lot.” It wasn’t accusatory, more disbelieving, but the words stung as they always did when someone complained about fees.

  I bit back my sigh. And my annoyance. “The prices are set by the owner of the practice.” Standard response, though in my head I was on a soapbox shouting to all who’d listen about the fact I was just a salaried employee.

  Just yesterday I’d had a new client call me a “Money hungry c-word.” Though of course, he’d actually said the c-word in all its disgraceful glory. I wished I could say it was rare and unusual, but it really wasn’t. I’d yet to make it through a workweek without someone dragging out the old money-hungry vet fallacy. If I made half as much money as people thought I did, I’d be living in the Bahamas, not busting my ass in rain, hail, and shine and then having clients complain about paying for my expertise.

  I love my job. I love my job. I love my job. And I do. Really. The animals were fine. It was the clients who were the problem.

  Charlotte’s nod was slow, and I could tell by her expression that they’d be attempting the injections themselves. “Okay. I’ll talk to my dad, but I think we’ll have to just do it ourselves.”

  I arranged my face back to relaxed and interested. “No problem. Just take it easy, try to keep her calm, and you could even bribe her with food if that helps. Or make up your own twitch with some plastic pipe and thin rope or baler twine.” Midway through talking my brain caught up, and I pulled out a tube that might make the process less stressful for all and added it to the bag containing the antibiotics and analgesic. “This is an oral sedative. Not quite as good as the injection I gave her but it should help. Give her that half an hour before you inject her, okay? And then there’s also some phenylbutazone paste for pain and inflammation which you administer orally. I’m told it’s pretty tasty so she should be fine. I’ve already given her some in an injection so she’s covered for today. Six milliliters twice a day for the first three days, then it’ll be just once a day for three days. I’ve written it all down.”

  “Okay, sure.” Her eyebrows scrunched down. “So is today day one or day zero?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Well if we’re starting tomorrow then do we count that as the first day?”

  This wasn’t the first time I’d had a medication scheduling conversation like this with a client. “There is no day zero. Day zero would be yesterday. We’ve started today. Day one.”

  Charlotte’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “But it’s the afternoon so it’s not a full day of medication. Is this day point-five then?”

  Now she was even confusing me. I held out my hand. “I’ll take that stuff back, please.” I
stripped the stickers from the bottles and wrote out new ones with the exact days, time of day and amounts in neat block writing instead of my usual perpetually hurried scrawl. There, no room for ambiguity. “Call the practice to schedule a time to have those sutures removed, and if it’s swollen, hot or is leaking gross stuff call us immediately.” I glanced at Charlotte who was trying to put the horse’s blanket on. Back to front. “Maybe leave the blanket off her, considering the chest strap will be right on that wound.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  I had a feeling a veterinarian was going to be back here within the week.

  Back at the practice I took fifteen minutes to restock my truck, then inhaled a sandwich as I typed up my clinical notes while they were fresh in my mind. I still had an assload of paperwork, including billing for yesterday and today, a horse coming in for dental work, and another for a forelimb X-ray series. Somewhere around all that I had to do handovers with my colleague. And there was zero wiggle room to put anything off because I was flying to the Netherlands in the morning to spend a week with the shortlisted horse and rider combinations vying for a spot on the US Olympic Dressage Team.

  No problem. I’d just have to bend the space-time continuum to get it all done.

  I stuck my head into the nurses’ office. “Does anyone know where Eric is?”

  “Hospital,” came a distracted voice.

  “Thanks.” I’d been caught out before so instead of making the trek to the barns, I picked up the phone and dialed the extension for the hospital. A tired voice answered, “This is the equine hospital. You’ve got Diana.”

  “Diana, it’s Addie. Is Eric down there?”