by Dr. Jan Pol
“If you want to keep him healthy, you have to stop,” I said.
It was obvious that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. In fact, as he and his dog walked outside, the camera crew followed him all the way to his car as he explained the problem to his dog, muttering, “Dr. Pol’s trying to tell me you’re too fat and that I shouldn’t feed you. D’you hear that? You’re too fat . . .”
As usual, the dog did not say anything.
A World of Wondering
Early one evening a man came rushing into the clinic carrying a very sick dog. It was a beautiful animal; it must have weighed as much as 120 pounds. But this dog was totally lethargic, he had a very high fever, his breathing was strained, and he had a lot of fluid in his belly. “What in the world happened?” I asked.
“Don’t know, Doc,” he said. “He just got that way. I rushed him right over here, soon as I noticed it. Whattya think?”
“I don’t like it,” I told him. “I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with him, but it’s not good.” There wasn’t too much I could do at that time. “Let me keep him overnight. I’ll work with him, see what I can do.” I did the few things I could to make him more comfortable, then went home for some dinner. I went back to check on him a couple of hours later and he seemed to be resting a little better. But when I got to the clinic the next morning at seven thirty, the dog had died.
There was no obvious reason why this animal had died. I called the owner and told him what had happened. Then I asked his permission to do an autopsy. I wanted to know, I wanted to learn from this if I could. He gave me permission, and as soon as I opened him up I saw the cause right in front of me. The owner wasn’t going to like it, but I had to be honest with him. “Did you have a party recently?” I asked.
I already knew that answer. Of course he had. “And did you serve hors d’oeuvres?” Of course he had. I knew it because I’d found a six-inch-long wooden skewer in the dog’s stomach.
They had used skewers with sharp points for the cheese and whatever else, and when they were finished, these long sticks had been thrown in the garbage. These sticks had a strong food smell on them, so the dog did what dogs do: He dug into the garbage and swallowed the stick. The sharp point had gone through the intestinal wall and resulted in peritonitis. It was like a person having a ruptured appendix. If they had brought the dog in sooner, there are treatments that could have helped him, but by the time the symptoms became noticeable it was too late to save him.
Accidents happen all the time, and when they do, instead of calling 911, people call their vets. In a small town, the vet never really keeps office hours. If there’s a sick or an injured animal, I’m there. You have to be available anytime an animal needs care, and you can’t be squeamish. Sometimes you see things that you never even thought possible, things that can break your heart. One night a farmer called and asked me to come right out to his place: “I’ve got this cow with its foot cut off.”
When I got there he brought in the cow, and I could hear it coming; it sounded like someone walking on an old-fashioned wooden leg: Tonk, step, step, tonk, step, step. This poor animal came hobbling in walking right on her bone. But she was trying to make it. “What happened?” I asked.
The cow had been in a free stall, he told me. There are basically two types of stall: a tie stall, where the cow is tied up and can’t get out, or a free stall, in which cows can choose whichever stall they like in the barn to lie in while chewing their cuds. This cow had been in a free stall and got up and walked out to get something to eat while they were scraping the alley. The manure alley runs the length of the barn, and it’s where cows do their business. This farmer used to clean the alley by scraping up the manure in a metal bucket in front of a tractor. The problem was that eventually that bucket’s edges would get razor sharp from being pushed along the cement floor. It was like a big, sharp razor blade. What happened was that cow backed out of its free stall, slipped on the manure-covered floor, and kicked the bucket. If the tractor had been two feet farther away, nothing would have happened. Funny as that might sound, it wasn’t funny at all. The farmer barely even noticed it and kept scraping. When he finished, he went back to his other chores.
In the evening the cow came limping into the milking parlor to be milked. He heard her coming. That’s when he looked at her leg and discovered that the whole bottom of her foot had been sliced off. She was just walking on bone. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.
There was nothing I could do for that animal. There was no way it could survive with that foot missing; she looked fine and the bleeding had stopped, but eventually that open wound would have got infected. I told the farmer to take her to slaughter while she was still healthy so he could get something for her.
An animal that can’t support its weight and move around can’t survive. Putting down that cow was the most humane thing we could do for her. But I treated a horse for a similar injury and he did fine. This could have been a much more terrible accident. An Amish farmer was giving his granddaughter a ride in the wagon for her birthday. Somehow the tongue got loose from the harness. The tongue is like the brake on a wagon, and without it, it’s difficult to stop. When this tongue broke loose, the wagon started running into the butts of the horses. In that situation I probably would have pulled hard on the reins to stop the horses, but the wagon might have run right into them; instead, trying to protect his horses, the farmer was trying to stop by making a wide circle going up a hill. Unfortunately, they went through this old metal fence and ran right into a pile of metal garbage. At least a third of the horse’s hoof had been ripped off. It was gone and I didn’t know how it could be repaired. After examining it I told the farmer I wasn’t too sure what we could do for him. “This is a sweet horse,” he told me. “He’s well broke, and if there’s something we can do . . .”
“We can try,” I told him. There was enough there for the horse to balance himself on. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll have to put him down, but let’s give it a try.”
As with every injury, you have to be concerned about stabilizing the animal, preventing further damage to the injured area, then stopping infection. Many animals survive the original accident but end up getting an infection and fighting for their lives. This damage wasn’t quite as severe as the injury to the cow, who had lost her whole foot, but it was a serious injury. There was nothing I could do to repair the damage; there wasn’t anything to work with. I cleaned out the wound and made it as sterile as possible, then wrapped it and gave the farmer a lot of medicine and good instructions for what to do with it. When I left I told the farmer, “Don’t give up; he’s got a lot going for him.” Within a few weeks the horse was walking. His hoof was flopping a bit; he probably had broken some tendons, but that would scar over. The most important thing was that the animal was able to put weight on his hoof.
When an injured animal comes into the clinic, you never know whether or not you’ll be able to save it. You know you have to make quick decisions and just hope that they end up being right. In a rural area it isn’t uncommon for us to see dogs that have been hit by cars. One of the most controversial episodes on the show started when a nice couple brought in their Boston terrier, which had been hit pretty hard. Mr. Pigglesworth was in bad shape. He had taken a big wallop in his head, he was all cut up and bleeding, one of his eyes was hanging out of its socket, and I suspected he had some internal injuries. The woman was crying—that’s something we have to deal with a lot—and asked me several times if he was going to be okay; that’s a question I usually don’t like to answer. I didn’t want to lie, so I gave her the best answer I could: “That’s what we’re here for.” Then I gave her a hug, which she needed badly, and went to work.
My son, Charles, was working with me. Each of our three kids, Kathy, Diane Jr., and Charles, had been helping out since we opened the practice in our garage. Kathy wanted to be a nurse and loved helping with the surgeries, even though she had to stand on
a bucket to reach high enough. Charles had been riding with me since he was four years old, so he knows how to be helpful. After giving the dog anesthesia, I took a series of X-rays to determine the extent of his internal injuries. Because of the visible head injuries, the owner was afraid he might have fractured his skull. I didn’t think so; the dog was walking fine. You walk, you’re not brain injured. That’s just common sense. The X-rays showed that he had a broken pelvis, which I could see would heal nicely by itself, and no head injury. That’s when I knew I could save this guy.
But there was no way I could save his eye. So I gently cut the tissue around it and removed it. That sounds a lot more gruesome than it really is; a lot of animals adjust very well to their physical limitations. When Charles asked me about it, I told him, “With one eye he still can see better than you with two.” Then I remembered Charles wears glasses, so I added, “Or four.”
After cleaning up his cuts and sewing up his eyelid we put him in a cage to recover. Within two hours he was sitting up and, except for that eye, looking pretty good. He looked at me out of his one eye as if to ask, So, Doc, what the heck am I doing in this cage?
After the segment was broadcast, another vet complained pretty loudly that I had done everything wrong: Supposedly I didn’t give the dog sufficient anesthesia or pain medication, the treatment area wasn’t sterile enough, and I didn’t intubate the dog, meaning I didn’t put a tube down his throat so he could breathe more easily.
When I heard about those complaints I just had to shake my head. I know that there are always people who are going to complain, but that dog had been seriously injured and could have died; instead he walked out of the clinic wagging his tail. Believe me, after all these years I know how much anesthetic is necessary, I know how the dog is going to react. I don’t get angry that often, but when a person accuses me of not caring about animals, that gets me angry. I’ve spent my whole life caring about animals. I can’t bear to see an animal mistreated in any way. One time, for example, when we were still living in the Thumb, Dr. Hentschl sent me out to a farm to do about a dozen pregnancy checks. I had never seen a farmer so mean to his cows. He was yelling, screaming at them at the top of his lungs, and hitting them. Finally I had enough. He was a lot bigger than me, but I didn’t care. I got in his face and I told him, “You don’t stop hitting these cows, I’m going to beat the tar out of you.” I darn well would have done it, too, if he hadn’t stopped. That was the last time I was there, because he had to sell his cows: He was mistreating them so they were not milking for him.
I would never hurt an animal, and no animal is more vulnerable than when it has been seriously injured. That Boston terrier was in shock, which complicated things, but the way he reacted to what I was doing told me that he wasn’t feeling pain. One thing I’ve learned is that animals react differently to pain than humans do. Another dog I treated had been hit by a car; his front leg was broken and dangling, but he had managed to run home. He was wagging his tail when the owners opened the door and saw he was hurt. I’d like to see a person come running home with her arm dangling and still have a smile on her face. Believe me, when Diane broke her wrist, she wasn’t smiling at all.
Anyone who complains about nonsterile conditions has never worked with animals in an emergency situation. How do you make a barn sterile when a cow’s insides are hanging out? That little dog had been ground into the dirt; his eye was hanging out. The treatment area wasn’t sterile, and it was impossible to make it completely sterile. I’ve treated a lot of dogs that have been hit by cars. One dog—I remember this guy very well—was brought in with his intestines hanging out. Can I make him perfectly clean with his intestines hanging out of him? Of course not. In that emergency situation I gave him the anesthetic, washed up everything as best as I could, found out where the hole was, and pushed the intestines back in. Then I gave him some antibiotics and some painkillers, and that was it. That dog did just fine.
People like that woman veterinarian who complained try to humanize animals. They want to give an animal the same level of treatment they would give to a human being. But they’re not human beings; they’re animals. You do what you can do to save their lives.
An associate, Dr. Kurt, was on call at about midnight one night when we got an emergency call. A hunter was bringing in his dog, which had been badly hurt. Dr. Kurt could hardly believe the dog was alive when he got there, telling me, “It look liked this dog had been in a battle with a can opener. From inside the back leg, all the way up the leg to the abdomen, this dog was just spread wide open.”
We have several clients who hunt for profit; they especially do a lot of varmint hunting. Most of them maintain a whole kennel of valuable hunting dogs. These are rough, tough men and you wouldn’t think they would show too much emotion, but they get closely attached to these dogs. This hunter told Dr. Kurt, “I don’t care what it costs. Whatever we need to do to put this dog back together, that’s what I want to do.”
“What happened?” Dr. Kurt asked him.
“This dog has a tendency to hunt really hard,” the owner told him. “She was chasing a raccoon and thought she could climb a tree. She actually managed somehow to get up in that tree about fifteen feet. The raccoon jumped from one tree to the next one. This dog thought she could do the same thing. When she did, a branch got her just behind her tendon.” The dog was impaled on a tree branch. It had taken a long time to get to her because they couldn’t find her. They heard her screeching but didn’t look up in the trees. By the time they got to her, she was badly hurt.
Dr. Kurt started cleaning and sewing, cleaning and sewing. There wasn’t too much else he could do. The treatment was expensive, but fortunately it was successful. That dog was in and out of the clinic several times in the next few weeks. She ended up with a nasty scar, but within another month she was out hunting again.
I know my own limitations. After all this time, I’d better. I know what I can do and when an animal needs more help than I can provide. The McConnells were among my very first clients when we moved to Michigan. I’ve been treating their animals all these years. John McConnell’s main business was the slaughterhouse, but he also had some cows, and his wife, Diane, had just a few very valuable quarter horses. One of them was an expensive stallion she’d brought to Michigan from out west. During a big storm, this horse was hiding in a little lean-to type of shack, and the wind blew the shack over. Exactly how it hit him we never knew—accidents happen—but the timbers caught him square on the right shoulder. The McConnells called me early in the morning and asked me to come over quick. I ran over there and took one look and thought, Oh my gosh. The falling shed had almost cut the neck band, the strong tendons that hold up the horse’s head, right above his shoulders. There was a hole there at least six inches deep, there were some bones broken, and it looked like several spines of his vertebrae had broken off. I had never seen that kind of wound. I did what I could right there; I flushed out the wound as well as possible and took out some pieces of broken bone and hair. Then I said, “Unh-uh. This is too much for us to handle here. You need to take this guy to Michigan State, where they have much better facilities.” We put the horse on antibiotics and painkillers and they took him there.
They treated him there for more than two weeks, and he survived. He had a divot in his neck and he walked a little funny, but he could still breed. The McConnells are the kind of solid people who support the whole neighborhood, and the most help I could give them was to admit that I could do only so much.
Horses have a tendency to heal really well. Unlike dogs, for example, horses don’t chew on their sutures; they let their bodies heal. I’ve worked on some really ugly wounds. I remember one horse that went through a high-tensile wire fence and got a spiral cut on one side from the shoulder almost all the way down to the hoof. In that situation all you can do is suture, suture, suture. I gave that horse a tranquilizer—actually, a combination of three tranquilizers—and just
kept sewing. One way of preventing infection is to continually hose off the wound with cold water for three or four days; that’ll wash out a lot of bacteria and reduce the swelling. It works.
It’s amazing how tough horses are. I’ve seen horses injured by running into something, and the owner doesn’t even know it because the horse doesn’t show any distress. It comes when it’s called, it eats, and everything is normal—until the owner notices a wide-open gash. The horse doesn’t care: Food’s here, I’m eating. I work at the fairgrounds in Mount Pleasant when we have some kind of competition. I was there one time and I got a call that one of the horses had tried to crawl underneath the trailer door and ended up with a big hole in his butt. It was right on top. It was an angled cut with each side about six inches long, and underneath some of the meat was gone. I gave him a tranquilizer, pulled everything together, and started suturing. Then the owner tells me that the competition was starting in two hours and he still wanted to participate. Two hours. “Well,” I told him, “I think you’re going to be all right.” And two hours later the tranquilizer had worn off and he went into the ring with that horse and won first prize. It was so exciting they could have made a movie out of it.
Most of the time people don’t care how an animal’s injury or a wound looks after it heals, as long as it heals. But once I had a show horse that hooked his nostril on something and ripped it open. A flap of skin from his nose was just hanging there. Normally that wasn’t a big deal and would have been an easy fix, but this was a real expensive show horse. And this competition was like Miss America for horses, which meant that the entries couldn’t have even small blemishes. The owner wanted me to suture the skin back into place. I told him, “No, that won’t work; there’s no blood supply left in there. But I can fix it.”
I never thought I’d end up being a plastic surgeon for horses. I cut the ripped piece off and sutured the skin from the inside. Good as new. After it healed, no one could tell it had lost skin on that nostril.