A Wander in Vetland

by John Hicks

  ~

  As nasty letters go, Buddy’s lacked subtlety. One of the most unpleasant letters I ever received was as a university student from the Dean of the Veterinary Faculty. I was never a brilliant student, but I was diligent. I worked very hard throughout my years of study. At the end of my fourth year I was relieved to have passed all my exams. Viv and I had been married for one year, and after I had worked through most of the summer vacation with a local vet, we decided to recharge our batteries and go on a walking holiday on the Isle of Mull. There we learned that camping in late summer amongst the midges in the Scottish Highlands is an experience to be avoided at all costs. New Zealand sandflies are positively benign by comparison. On the way home, tired and happy, I ran our car into the back of a long queue of vehicles. They were unexpectedly parked round a bend in the road beside the traffic-jammed banks of Loch Lomond. I set up a chain of nose to tail crashes. Inconvenient insurance claims ensued. When we finally arrived home to our flat we attacked the pile of mail awaiting us. There was a neatly typed letter from the Dean’s office:

  Dear Mr Hicks,

  I write to inform you that although you passed in the recent B.V.Sc. examination in Pharmacology this was only a marginal pass. You should attempt to achieve a higher standard of performance in future examinations.

  Yours sincerely etc.

  I had long forgotten this incident, but it recently came to light – the words preserved in a letter Viv had written to her mother. She’d added “John took it very much to heart” and that she’d torn it up, observing to her mother that I was the last person to need that sort of “encouragement”. Viv salved some of my hurt by pointing out that “Mr Hicks” and “Pharmacology” were filled in on a standard letterform, so I was not the sole recipient of this letter of admonishment. What was most surprising was that hitherto the Prof. had been a distant academic who had little or no contact with his students. He would no more have been able to put a face to my name than I were the Chinese artisan who carved the ivory tower from which he was pontificating. His letter had reduced me to my childhood, the school reports in which the master writes “could try harder” or “must learn to be less careless”: comments from loose canons which were sometimes perceptive, but frequently well wide of the mark.

  University days are claimed by many to be the happiest of their lives, but for me they were more or less a continuation of school. Since those all-important ‘O’ levels, which had set me on the path to becoming a vet, I had endured eight years of exams. I had one to go. I couldn’t wait to escape academia and start to earn my living as a “proper” vet. It was the practical stuff that filled my dreams – and those of most of my year mates. Not for us life behind a desk nor, even, a laboratory bench. It seemed a strange waste of a veterinary degree to pursue such goals; yet that, increasingly, seems to be where many of today’s veterinary graduates end up, if they stay in the profession at all, for they have been selected on academic ability alone.

  While I had struggled with the drier academic subjects in my veterinary course I revelled in the practical work and loved accompanying vets on their rounds. And when I qualified I rejoiced in the sheer variety of my work: the satisfaction of seeing the interlocking fragments of a jagged fracture drawn together by a well placed compression plate, the relief of finally flicking the head of a calf round so that it was aligned and ready to be delivered, the drama of toppling a large horse under anaesthesia. It’s hardly “raindrops on roses” or “warm woollen mittens” stuff, especially when you’ve been targeted by a nasty hind and the raindrops are a maelstrom of blows raining on your head; or you face the agony of a thousand cows lined up for pregnancy testing and the warm woollen mittens defy description. But why would the Prof. want to trade all that for life behind a Bunsen burner? Perhaps he didn’t apply himself sufficiently during his clinical years.

  Fortunately for me, that last year of the veterinary course was particularly interesting, and I can still vividly recall some of our more entertaining days in the field. Perhaps the Prof. had done me a favour. Mental vigour is required of the practising vet: acceptance and rebuttal, success and failure will be recurring themes throughout his working life. We win some, we lose some.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Win Some, Lose Some

  Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill

  Don and Jane were unusual immigrants. Don was a chirpy cockney, an irrepressible extrovert, the life and soul of any party. Although a born and bred city lad, his dream was to farm. In those days (1960s) most immigrants travelled to New Zealand by boat. On the long trip from England Don met Jane, a Scottish lass who shared his dream. Shortly after disembarking in Wellington, they were married. They worked on dairy farms, gaining experience. When we first knew them in Taranaki they were sharemilkers with a young family, starting to work up the ladder of increasing ownership until they could build up a herd of their own and, eventually, buy their own farm. For aspiring farmers, New Zealand was a land of opportunity.

  Apart from the odd farm visit, I met Don regularly at net practices and for Saturday afternoon cricket. He was the captain of a motley team comprising freezing workers, stock agents, a banker, several dairy farmers and Neil, an older man – purportedly the author of steamy novels. It was new territory for me, a joshing world of nicknames: of Maoris called “Albi” and red-haired Celts called “Blue”. Don was a born leader: perennially cheerful, a natural wit, master of repartee and a fair-minded sportsman, always offering encouragement to the younger players, never holding back on affectionate sarcasm for the slow and lumbering older members of his team. This was third grade stuff but, what we lacked in talent, we made up for in enthusiasm. There was no slackness in our team; we were keen, we played hard and we had fun. These were the same values Don and Jane applied to their working life. Viv and I became part of their circle of friends.

  One evening Don phoned me urgently. “John, I’ve got a very sick calf.”

  I made a half-hearted protest. “Don, I’m not on duty. Have you tried the after-hours…?”

  “I’m sorry John, but this is something special, and I’d prefer a friend to deal with it.”

  He’d pressed the right buttons. We all like to be needed by those we love and respect. What else could I do but drop what I was doing and rush out to the farm?

  As we walked to the calf shed he filled me in on the details. “Sorry to drag you out John, but this is a very special calf.”

  “We really liked the look of Red Polls when we went back home,” he continued, referring to a recent visit he and Jane had made to Britain to catch up with their relatives. Red Polls are a rare breed of English cattle. “The closest we could get to them here was Danish Red. So we inseminated six of our Shorthorns with Danish Red semen this year. Unfortunately we only got one heifer calf, a beautiful wee thing and – beggar me – she would be the one that got the scours this morning.”

  “Did you give her any treatment, Don?”

  “I thought it was just a case of white scours. I gave her a sulpha tablet, but she was lying in a heap when I went to feed them tonight – just before I rang you. I think she’s a hopeless case, but we want to give her every chance.”

  Paradoxically, most vets enjoy getting their hands on what an owner considers to be a “hopeless case”. You are off the hook if your patient dies, but there is always the slight chance of pulling off a miracle and becoming a hero. But when I saw that calf lying motionless and sunken-eyed – deeply dehydrated – I, too, felt that this was a hopeless case.

  “Throw the book at her John. She could be the founding member of our new herd.”

  As a student I’d had the great fortune to see practice with George Rafferty, a vet in the Highlands of Scotland who was an advocate of blood transfusions for collapsed calves. He had developed a practical method for farm use – one that would make a human physician cringe – but farm animal practice is ever the art of compromise. For in
stance, there was no cross-matching of donor and recipient blood beforehand. In cattle, as in dogs, reactions to a first transfusion are rare and, unlike human medicine, the chance of a calf receiving a second one in its lifetime is extremely remote.

  Apart from restoring a collapsed circulation, transfused cow’s blood contains important antibodies against the diseases present on the farm. Given intravenously, these are mainlined directly into the calf’s system where they can act immediately. How many more people and animals would have survived through history if doctors and vets had mastered the secrets of transfusing blood into the body; as against all the harm they inflicted by blood letting out of it?

  First, we needed a compliant cow. Don walked one of the quietest members of his herd into the milking shed and, without her consent – as is the habit of vets – I tightened a cord round her neck and injected some local anaesthetic over one of the jugular veins this raised. These days vets travel fleam-less and, in the absence of a Masai warrior assistant (they bleed their cattle with a well aimed arrow), I opened her jugular with a scalpel and rotated the blade against the flow. A bright stream of blood splashed into my flask and I rocked it steadily, mixing it with some sodium citrate anticoagulant. It was critical that there were no clots. It was not long before our gentle donor, minus a few pints of blood and with a couple of stitches in her neck, was freed back into her paddock – perhaps to ruminate on the strangeness of mankind. Our patient, by contrast, seemed past caring. I was quite unable to locate her jugular vein, shrivelled as it was, beneath the tacky skin of her neck. She was in a state of circulatory collapse. I had to resort to cutting through the skin and dissecting down onto the thin blue streak her jugular had become. I eased a cannula into it and connected it to my flask of blood using the rubber tubing and a flutter valve I normally used for calcium solutions to treat cows with milk fever. But blood is thicker than calcium borogluconate; how very slowly that blood trickled in! It was easy to see why most busy practitioners, rushing around attending all those urgent calls in spring, had not adopted George Rafferty’s technique.

  Don was tiring of his job of holding up the flask. He fetched a pitchfork and propped it against the wall. We hung the flask off one of the tines. It formed an effective, if rustic, drip-stand. We concentrated on our patient, looking for any signs of improvement, willing her to respond. In that crude, dimly lit calf shed a scene of almost biblical intensity was unfolding. But, as the minutes ticked by, a miracle seemed less and less likely. Our calf lay still and, save for its feeble, irregular heart beat, to all intents and purposes, lifeless. We left the pen with half the blood still to run – abandoning our patient to her fate. A wee dram was called for, and we hadn’t the heart to check up on her when I left for home.

  The phone rang early the next morning. Don sounded perhaps more perky than usual, but it wasn’t his style to let on straight away. He started with the weather. “Oh! Don,” I interrupted, “If you’re passing the clinic sometime today, could you drop off…?” I was going to ask for the gear I’d left behind in the calf shed.

  “Hold on, hold on, you little beauty! You’ll never guess what’s happened to Viv.”

  “Viv?”

  “Yes, that’s what we’re calling the calf.”

  “The one we treated last night?”

  “The very one. She was up and nuzzling my hand for a feed this morning! We couldn’t call her John. Anyway, it would probably go to your head, like the five wickets you took against Kaponga last summer. So we’ve named her in honour of your dear wife!”

  Poor Viv: she turned out to be an unproductive beast, and was culled a couple of years later. Farming is a business. Sentiment on a farm can only run so far. Danish Reds never caught on in New Zealand. A shame, really. There are few prettier sights than red cattle set against lush, green pasture. But this happy story is, in my mind, inextricably linked to a far darker and more puzzling one.

  When we left the district, we kept in touch with Don and Jane. Christmas letters told us of their progress. They had at last realised their dream and bought their own farm. A daughter was married. Don was branching into another business utilising his public speaking and motivational skills. Then the letters stopped. From an old colleague we learned that Don was dead. He’d been found hanging, by one of his children, in a shed. We, as the many other friends who loved his seemingly unquenchable spirit, cannot answer the sad questions that recur whenever we think of him.

  ~

  In some ways you could say that Big Dave is like Don, a cheerful, booming presence. He could easily have stepped, black-vested, out of a Barry Crump novel. A visit to his farm would, to misquote that parental favourite, almost certainly end in laughter. But when he rang me early one morning, it sounded serious.

  Dave is one of a line of horsemen: men who have horses in their blood and love their power, danger and mystery. In the 1980s quite a few Southland sheep farmers had a loose box or two, kept a few mares, and bred and raced trotters, pacers or gallopers. Their numbers have dwindled as sheep farming has become less profitable and farmers busier. They have less leisure time to indulge an expensive and time-consuming hobby. While Dave was always great company, with a laugh-a-minute sense of humour, I knew he had a healthy disdain for politicians and, I fancied, a detached sense of irony towards the veterinary profession. In his eyes, I imagined, we really were no better, nor worse than any of the other parasites clamouring for the farmers’ hard earned dollars. He certainly sounded as though he held no great expectations when he rang me about his valuable foal just as I was about to drive to work:

  “I wouldn’t have interrupted your beauty sleep if I felt I could have done something myself”, was his first salvo. “But this is a really valuable foal.” He strung off the name of the mother’s sire and dam, as horse people do. It could have been by Smegma out of Borborygmi, but it meant nothing to me, I have never followed the racing game. However, in those days we did see quite a few horses and I hoped I would be able to do something to raise Dave’s opinion of my noble calling. If he had set me a challenge he thought I was unequal to, I would show him!

  As I turned into the drive, I paused to wave as Wendy, his wife, pulled out on her way to work. I parked in the yard. The paint on the rotten weatherboards of the cold, dingy, farmhouse in which Dave and Wendy had raised their family was peeling into lank grass. Across the way, a brand new edifice had taken its place. Wendy’s protests had born fruit. She had finally cajoled Dave into making their living accommodation a priority over his beloved horses. The kitset home they had lovingly assembled, despite months of frustrating delays and setbacks, was now her pride and joy.

  It was a bitterly cold morning. The young foal lying in the mud at her mother’s feet was virtually comatose. Occasionally, a feeble spasm wracked her body. There was no helpful history. According to Dave she had been up and suckling last night. Mum, standing patiently by her sick foal, seemed fretful, but was otherwise fine. I checked her milk – there was plenty, so she hadn’t been suckled for a while. Perhaps the foal had succumbed to neonatal maladjustment syndrome, NMS, where foals, brain damaged at birth, suddenly become “barkers”, “dummies” or “wanderers”. With careful nursing they often recover. But our foal was cold, barely conscious and close to death. It seemed hopeless. If only Dave had lain in bed an extra hour! Sometimes it is a relief for a vet to arrive just after the patient has died. How much easier it is not to have to toss up whether to “give it a go” or declare the case “hopeless”! This time “hopeless” was realistic, but “hopeless” wouldn’t do. My patient still clung to life, however tenuously, and she was only of any value to Dave if she lived to race.

  I needed thinking time. I resorted to the old thermometer trick. It would be interesting to see just how cold she was.

  A minute passed and, even though I had shaken the thermometer right down before inserting it, it had not risen one iota. I hadn’t expected it to. Neither, I could see from the doubting look on his face, had Dave. But I had hatched
a plan. “Look Dave, I’m sorry, but the foal is severely hypothermic. She’s dying of exposure. There must be an underlying reason for her collapse, but the first thing we’re going to have to do is try and raise her body temperature.”

  “How do you intend to do that?”

  “Well…” I should have paused for longer, he who hesitates is sometimes very sensible; but an optimistic vision of success – of showing Dave just how wise he was to call on my services – flashed through my mind. “Look Dave, they are now treating hypothermia cases in people by total immersion in hot water. If we can raise her core temperature to something like normal, we might then stand a chance of finding out more about the underlying problem. We’ll just have to tackle it one step at a time.”

  As soon as the words left my mouth I realised I was committing myself to a time-consuming and probably futile intervention; a move I would likely regret. But I had offered hope. It was too late to retract, so I modified my confident pronouncement with a touch of realism. “It really is a long shot.”