The Accidental Veterinarian

by Philipp Schott

  But here’s the funny twist to the story: it is actually our own consciousness that we should be doubting.

  Our species developed language that allowed us to organize complex societies, create astonishing technologies and, ultimately, conquer the world. However, this language ability lies like a heavy blanket on top of our consciousness, often smothering it. What we call “thinking” is often just a garbled torrent of words inside our head. Usually these words are just pointless rehashes of old conversations, rehearsals for future conversations, looping snatches of song lyrics, half remembered to-do lists, etc. Honestly, what was the last truly useful thought you had? Chances are it popped up unbidden in a rare quiet moment rather than out of the churning river of internal chatter.

  Animals, on the other hand, do not have words. They do not plan conversations or construct lists of chores. They exist in a state of pure consciousness and pure awareness, with absolute focus and attention. Their minds are filled with what is right in front of them, right now. This is akin to what people who meditate attempt to achieve. Sure, memories and anticipations intrude for animals too, probably in the form of smell pictures, but far more than us they are present in the real world in real time, moment by moment, while we unconsciously drift along and then wonder where all the time went. Or wonder whether those last few traffic lights really were green.

  I gave Alf both a needle and a treat. And then I went back to trying to figure out the file while wondering whether my next appointment was set up and what that thing was that I forgot to say and then remembered and then forgot again.

  Alf was looking at the door.

  Part 4

  Peculiar Tales from Veterinary Practice

  Consider the Ostrich

  Now consider the epileptic ostrich.

  The three most common questions I am asked when someone finds out that I am a veterinarian are:

  What is the most unusual animal you have treated?

  How often do you get bit?

  Do you know why my aunt’s cat has a rash?

  We’ll ignore the third question, and I have already addressed the second, but the unusual animal question is actually worthy of a few commentaries, so let’s start with the earliest one of those.

  The first “unusual” animal I encountered in my career, aside from my girlfriend’s deranged cat, was an ostrich. This goes back to my fourth year of veterinary school in Saskatoon. I no longer recall the ostrich’s name, but for reasons that will become evident later, let’s call him Johnny. Johnny had been brought in for examination and treatment because he was having seizures.

  Now think about that for a moment.

  A fully grown ostrich like the one in question is eight feet tall and weighs 300 pounds. This is much bigger than me. This is much bigger than you (pardon the presumption). Moreover, he has legs that can reach 14 feet in a single stride, claws the size of railroad spikes and muscle power enough to disembowel you. Disembowelment: now there’s a hazard you don’t consider too often. At the best of times, an ostrich has a brain smaller than its eyeball, but when it is seizuring, even that tiny speck of intelligence shuts down, and something akin to blindfolded chainsaw juggling ensues.

  The professor told us to take off our lab coats before Johnny was brought in. “They like to peck at white things, like lab coat buttons,” she said.

  “Or like the whites of eyeballs,” I thought.

  Johnny was brought in by an assistant. We regarded him with nervous anticipation. He regarded us with . . . nothing. To our relief, Johnny did not appear to be in a disembowelling mood. His gaze was vacant and unfocused. The professor explained that they were medicating him to control his seizures and were still trying to work out the best dose. Consequently, one of his two functional brain cells was disabled.

  “Now watch this,” she said. The professor reached into her pocket and pulled out a marshmallow. Then she pulled a vial containing pills out of her other pocket, removed a pill and shoved it deep into the marshmallow. “Remember that they like to peck at white things?” She held the marshmallow out gingerly between her thumb and forefinger, and sure enough, with lightning speed, Johnny, who had seemed so stoned a moment before, lunged forward and gulped the marshmallow down in one impressively fluid motion. “And that, class, is how you medicate an ostrich.”

  I have had call to make use of this knowledge exactly zero times, but it is a cool thing to know. Johnny was led away again, and we shuffled off to go dissect something, each of us relieved not to have become an instructive ostrich attack statistic. Seriously. Ostriches are as dangerous as sharks. And sharks are rarely, if ever, brought into a veterinary clinic.

  Incidentally, the most famous ostrich attack ever was the one on Johnny Cash in 1981. True story. In his autobiography, Cash recounts how he was almost disembowelled (there’s that word again!) by his pet ostrich. He blames the incident for his subsequent addiction to painkillers. Yes, the world is a deeply weird place. You gotta love it.

  In closing, if you are ever attacked, heed the words of President Theodore Roosevelt: “If, when assailed by the ostrich, the man stands erect, he is in great danger. But by the simple expedient of lying down, he escapes all danger.” But lie on your stomach, Teddy.

  The Smallest Heart

  I had never before, and have never since, held in the palm of my hand something that felt simultaneously so powerful, yet so fragile. The hummingbird was hot, and it was fiercely alive, yet it could not move. The heat was astonishing. I knew that an animal with such a fast metabolism would have a high normal body temperature, but it was the first time I had felt anything like it. I stared at it, mesmerized by the jewelled green plumage on its wings, contrasting the shimmering purple-red of the throat. I could feel its small heart too, beating so quickly that it felt like the vibration of a tiny toy engine.

  It was fourth-year veterinary school and I was on the small animal medicine rotation when someone rushed in this ruby-throated hummingbird that they had found lying on their patio. He (it was a he — the purple-red throat told us that) was tiny and far too light to register on any of the scales, but we estimated him to be about four grams, which is the weight of eight to twelve raisins. Consequently, the physical examination was cursory at best. Two interns, one resident and about a dozen students took turns peering at him, holding him gently and remarking on how hot — and how beautiful — he was. The consensus was that he had run into a window and injured his head. Whether he was just badly stunned or properly paralyzed was unclear. What was clear was that he was going to die regardless if we didn’t feed him. When stressed, hummingbirds can starve to death in an hour because of their ridiculously high metabolic rates. I was given the task of feeding him and keeping him alive while the others busied themselves with the presumably more straightforward dogs and cats.

  I found a stool in a quiet corner of the exam room and sat down with my miniscule charge. I looked at him carefully again, testing his wings and his legs, hoping perhaps that I might find something the others had missed. But no, he seemed physically to be in perfect shape. His little black eyes shone at me, and I imagined his terror but felt helpless to do anything about it. I set him in a dark box while I rummaged about for some instruments and high-concentration dextrose (sugar) solution. A technician then held him for me while I offered the dextrose, dabbing it on the end of his beak, but he didn’t respond. He just kept staring at me. I then gently prised his long slender beak open and pulled his thin pink thread of a tongue out, which I had imagined would be rolled up inside like a window blind. (It wasn’t.) I dipped his tongue in the dextrose and then, suddenly, there was some rapid flicking. He was drinking! It was the first movement we had seen from him. When he appeared to be done, I took him back in my hand while considering what else we could do.

  The professor had been in her office when the hummingbird came in but was back now, and she came over to have a look at what we were doing. “Phili
pp, I hate to tell you this, but he’s going to die no matter what you do.” Her tone was kind, and I knew that she was probably right, but I somehow couldn’t square it with the manifest intensity of the life that was cupped in my hand. “But keep doing what you’re doing. Feed him every ten minutes or so. Keep him warm. And keep the cats away.” She smiled and went on to help the other students with their patients.

  I fed him three or four more times. Each time I opened the beak and carefully pulled out the tongue, and each time he drank vigorously for a few seconds and then stopped. The last time, his membranous grey third eyelids, which we had not seen before, suddenly came up, and that was it — he was dead. He was still hot, but the thrumming vibration of the heart had ceased, and he was limp.

  The other students came by and joked that I had killed him, asking how I could kill such a beautiful thing, and I laughed along with them, but I was sad. I didn’t cry, but I was very sad, and even today, almost three decades later, when I think about that hummingbird, it is with a mixture of wonder and sorrow.

  Spunky Swings Low

  Pity poor Spunky, the captive sugar glider. Pity his adorable big black eyes. Pity his cuddly soft grey fur. Pity his delightful cupped-handful size. Pity him because these features make him irresistible as a pet — a little plush toy come to vigorous life — and pity him because he does not want to be a pet. OK, “want” is a tricky concept in a creature with the brain the size of a chickpea. He is unlikely to be conscious of the fact that his kind lives in the forests of Australia, not the apartments of Canada, and he is unlikely to be conscious of the fact that his kind lives in large family groups of other sugar gliders, not in a household of enormous loud and smelly primates and possibly one or two four-legged predators. He is also unlikely to give much real thought to the problems inherent in wanting to be busy and noisy at night when the primates are sleeping, and then trying to sleep in the day when the primates are themselves busy and noisy. Even though he does not think about these things, there is no doubt that he would be far happier if he were ugly and were left alone to glide from eucalyptus tree to eucalyptus tree, with his family, at night.

  Further pity poor Spunky, for I have been asked to castrate him. As with many cute and fluffy creatures, Spunky does not know that “cute and fluffy” also means “passive and gentle” to his primate captors. In his mind, he is fierce, and he is tough, and he has had it with you and all your BS. Tiny, cuddly creatures with big baby eyes can still bite hard. And these ones in particular can swoop down on you from above. His owners were members of the online sugar glider community and had tried all the recommended behavioural and environmental modifications, but at the end of the day, Spunky was still too . . . spunky.

  The medical care of captive non-domesticated species can present the veterinarian with an ethical and moral quandary. My approach is to strongly discourage ownership of such animals but also to recognize that an animal like Spunky is now stuck with this situation as he cannot be released into the wild, so I have an obligation to do what I can to help make his life as pleasant as possible, under the circumstances. And on balance, in this case, it meant trying surgery.

  So Spunky was presented on the appointed day, and the nurses handled him gently, gave him pain medication and then carefully induced general anaesthesia, at which point I was called into the O.R. for the procedure. While I had given the ethical and moral dimensions of this some considerable thought, I hadn’t really done the same for the technical aspects. Neuters are, after all, really pretty similar from species to species.

  Pretty similar except in sugar gliders, as it happens. They are marsupials, and marsupials are strange. And before I get angry emails from Australia, I don’t mean strange in the pejorative sense. I mean it in the strict traditional sense of the word — unusual or surprising — as seen from the perspective of someone whose practice includes no marsupials at all. Except Spunky.

  So what was so strange? His scrotum. Spunky’s scrotum was strange. It dangled down between his hind legs on a long threadlike stalk like a teensy weensy little tetherball.

  Now consider this carefully for a moment. Here is a creature that glides from tree to tree in the dark, presumably dodging twigs and branches, his scrotum dangling free beneath him all the while. Doesn’t it strike you as problematic from an evolutionary perspective? Men reading this are feeling a little queasy now as they picture what must be a common mishap.

  In any case, there he was, deep asleep, and there I was, scalpel in hand. I glanced at my nurse. She shrugged. I looked back at Spunky’s scrotum and its breathtakingly long and narrow attachment. I will spare you the technical details, but ultimately, I had to abandon the normal approach, which involves a lot of careful dissection, transection and ligation, and instead . . . just lopped it off. I snipped the stalk, sewed it up and that was that. Ten minutes of pondering and ten seconds of actual surgery.

  Somehow simultaneously both the easiest and the hardest neuter I have ever performed.

  Fish of Death

  Or at least “Fish of Extreme Pain.”

  Soon after I graduated, I decided to try to develop a sideline in fish medicine as way to make myself more useful to the practice. Or at least less useless. The sensible among you will immediately see the logical flaws in trying to get people to bring their pet fish into the clinic. There are several such flaws. But my employers, bless them, were indulgent and patient with me. To give myself some credit, I was nothing if not enthusiastic. I made sure I had the best textbooks, and I set to work writing brochures on a variety of fish health subjects. And then I waited for patients . . . and waited . . .

  Until one day, the owner of a nearby pet shop came in carrying a large ice cream pail.

  “What have you got in the bucket, Edna?”

  “A fish! Actually, two of them.”

  Imagine my excitement. Just imagine it. I strode over to Edna and her bucket. Not walked, but strode. I peered into the bucket. Two fish indeed: a large, roughly eggplant-sized, colourful fish with bold orange and white stripes and long feather-like things sticking out all over it, and a small, roughly walnut-sized, dull brown–coloured fish. There were two really interesting things about this scene. The first was that the big fish was a lionfish. (More on why that’s really interesting in a moment.) The second was that the little fish was headfirst halfway into the lionfish’s mouth.

  “Edna, that’s a lionfish!”

  “Yes, it’s really expensive, and it’s choking on that stupid catfish!”

  Which fish was more stupid struck me as a debatable point. “I see . . .”

  “Can you get the catfish out?”

  “Um . . .”

  So this is where I should explain what’s really interesting about lionfish. Those cool-looking feathery things are actually sharp spines (easily sharp enough to slice exam gloves) and are covered in venom. The venom has an entertaining array of potential effects including, and I quote, “extreme pain, nausea, vomiting, fever, breathing difficulties, convulsions, dizziness, redness on the affected area, headache, numbness, paresthesia (pins and needles), heartburn, diarrhea and sweating. Rarely, such stings can cause temporary paralysis of the limbs, heart failure and even death.” Well, only “rarely” death, so that’s OK.

  “Well, can you?”

  “Um . . .”

  The lionfish actually looked distressed. The catfish was presumably even more distressed, but it was hard to tell.

  There was no way to grasp the lionfish without touching the venomous spines, and the standard aquarium wrangler’s net wouldn’t help, so, after a bit of pondering, I came up with an idea. I found two long pieces of wood — this was a while ago, so I don’t remember exactly, but they might have been leftover molding from a reno — and a large pair of surgical forceps. I wielded the wood pieces with my left hand like giant chopsticks to restrain the lionfish while carefully submerging my right hand with the forceps to firmly gras
p the tail of the catfish.

  Deep breath.

  Then I yanked.

  The catfish was free! However, I am sad to report that it did not live to enjoy its freedom. The catfish immediately succumbed to its injuries, or to the shock of the whole unpleasant event. But the lionfish survived. And I survived. A mortality rate of only 33%. Not bad for a novice fish vet.

  But that was pretty much the end of my short-lived career as a fish specialist.

  Years later we were in the Cayman Islands and met a local with a boat full of lionfish. It turns out that they are an invasive and aggressive species that is decimating native fish populations. The government there was paying a bounty on them. And they are steadily spreading northwards.

  Really? Anywhere?

  I had only been in practice for a year when a young woman who looked to be in her late teens came in with her cat, Loverboy. The first thing she said to me was that she only had 50 dollars that she had borrowed from a friend. She was living on her own on income assistance and could barely afford groceries. I told her that I could certainly examine Loverboy for that cost and that we could take it from there, depending on what I found.

  Loverboy was a black and white boy. He reminded me a little bit of my first cat, Mook. He purred constantly through the exam and kept butting his head against my hand. But he was very thin, and his gums were very pale. The owner reported that his appetite and energy had been gradually declining over the last few weeks. He was only three years old, and she was very worried. I asked if he went outside and she said no, not now that they lived in an apartment, but a year ago they had been in a house, and he had then.