Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  At the end of the first week there was a function called a keg. This one had the theme: Beer, Pies and Bull – ‘All the beer you can drink, all the pies you can eat and all the mechanical bull you can ride.’ At $10 a head, no poor student could refuse.

  It was held out the back of the main vet faculty, an old brick-and-sandstone building with gargoyles, Latin inscriptions, battlements and the stale smell of years of learning. Walking through the building to get to the courtyard out the back, you couldn’t miss the rich history. On the right was the original veterinary lecture theatre, the oldest such place in Australia. Then you walked down a hallway lined by dark wooden display cabinets filled with specimen jars and old instruments resembling medieval torture tools – horrible-looking things that would give you the shivers if you weren’t racing to get to the beer, pies and bull.

  The faculty had its own icebox for running a keg. It was as temperamental as a bear with a sore thumb and just two years later I would be initiated into the dark arts of operating that big white box with beer lines running through it. But at this innocent time of life, all such things were mystery and wonder.

  It had just gone dark, maybe about 9 p.m. The bull was bucking and thrusting in the ring and the boys had gathered on one side of the courtyard, not yet having imbibed enough to bring them back towards the girls. We were standing over by some permanent cement-slab tables when a bunch of older guys approached us. They were third years. So even though they were as nondescript as us in their T-shirts, shorts and hiking sandals, they were still accorded the great respect that went with their vast experience.

  There were about four of them and they encircled our little group of six. James was there, as well as four of our new acquaintances: Izzo, Graham, Joe and Mitch.

  ‘We’ve got a very important thing to talk about,’ the leader said in a serious but quiet voice, checking over his shoulder. ‘We’ve been watching you,’ he said, addressing all six of us with gravity. ‘You’ve been nominated to be a part of NROC.’ He pronounced it ‘en-rock’, and paused to let the magnitude of his offer sink in. ‘One of the oldest and most prestigious clubs at the University of Sydney. You need to follow us immediately. Bring your drinks if you want, but we all need to go now. Don’t tell anyone where you are going. Just follow us.’

  How could we not accept this distinguished offer? My head was spinning with excitement. Wow! It’s like Dead Poets Society. We formed into single file behind him and another guy, while two others fell in behind us. We were bookended as we wove our way out of the party, through the faculty, past the torture devices and preserved animal parts, and out to the front of the building. After walking through the ornate Grecian portico, we turned left into a garden that extended around the side. The path was narrow and dark. Holy moly, what are we doing here?

  ‘Where are we going?’ someone asked.

  ‘What exactly is Enrock?’ somebody else inquired, the concern evident in their voice.

  They got no answer.

  As we went around the side of the building, the noise of the party returned. We were only about 30 metres away from everyone else, but we were hidden and it was dark. The leader halted the nervous procession. ‘Rightio. NROC. It’s the oldest club in the university and you should realise what an honour it is to be chosen. Now get your clothes off.’

  ‘What?’

  The third years were suddenly all stripping. I had the sinking feeling that I’d just made the worst decision of my life.

  ‘What is this? You’ve got to be kidding,’ someone mumbled. I couldn’t see James’s face or that of any of the others in our group. I could just sense the fear. We were barely past remembering each other’s names and asking, ‘What school did you go to, again?’

  The leader was down to his underpants by this time. ‘NROC. It’s the Nudie Run Organising Committee. Start running!’

  We were bookended. If we were to get out of this, we’d have to push past a bunch of nude guys. That would be too weird. What was almost as weird was that we all simultaneously came to a spontaneous, unspoken agreement. We started tearing our clothes off. None of us had done anything like this before. Yet we were instantly united by our common lack of dignity.

  I was wearing hiking boots with laces that had to be unhooked, so I was slower than the others. I didn’t want to be the goose running through the crowd a minute after all the others had gone through.

  ‘Can you wait,’ I pleaded. ‘C’mon guys. Back me up here.’

  They waited and after we’d all stripped down we dumped our clothes in a pile on the edge of the path. Naked, we moved down the dark dirt track to the lights, the music, the people. It was like being in a quiet, dark bubble observing the chaotic world outside. And then our wise elders took off . . . and we followed. The single line fanned out. I remember running. Faces looking at us, too shocked to register any expression. Just stunned. They weren’t laughing and they weren’t screaming.

  Just as we had never been on a nudie run before, our fellow first years had never seen one either. We sprinted. The adrenalin pumped. What am I doing here? I saw lecturers. Is this the end of my career before it even begins? I saw a knowing smile on one of their faces. They’ve seen this before.

  I ran hard – weaving, stepping, brushing past innocent bystanders. Straight at the cement tables. I’m going over this. In one leap I was there, my hands in the air in absolute exhilaration, and then I was back into the historic corridor, under the Grecian portico and out into the darkness of the garden. The quiet. But it was different now. Everyone was so charged up, so exhilarated. It was the most amazing thing. I tried to get my clothes back on but struggled with all the hilarity and high-fiving, and the realisation that: Gosh, these are probably going to be my mates. I’m in a different world now.

  Uni is a mind-altering experience.

  Despite the euphoria I returned, sheepish, to the keg. How is this going to be received? But as we entered I detected only laughter and hooting. Everybody was on board. No one was offended. That was a relief. I felt stone-cold sober.

  On Monday at lectures we couldn’t look each other in the face without giggling. Man, that dude is hairy. It was a great icebreaker.

  And that Monday was the day we got our hands on our first animals. Our course had been newly restructured, cutting out a lot of the biology and physics of first year so that we went straight into anatomy. We walked into the classroom and there were twenty dead greyhounds preserved in formalin lying on individual work stations. The sight was confronting and the smell added a few degrees of challenge. It was a combination of what I now know to be formaldehyde with a hint of what I already knew was rotting flesh. The blood gets drained from the dogs and the preservative formaldehyde is pumped in, but they can’t get it to all parts of the body so a little bit of flesh tends to rot. The dogs had been frozen but were now defrosted and damp.

  Greyhounds are such muscular, well-defined dogs that they are great for learning anatomy. But we were a bunch of kids. And we wouldn’t have been doing vet science if we didn’t love animals. Suddenly we were being asked to process all this death.

  Everyone had brought along their little dissection kit that we’d bought with our textbooks before the semester. The lecturer instructed us on how to attach the scalpel blade to the handle and where we were to make our first cut. I looked at the fawn-grey dog in front of me, damp and smelly with the colour drained away.

  It was easy to freak out. I could hear the hubbub of my classmates’ moans and scared giggles. It was a threshold moment. One guy put his scalpel down and walked out of the room and out of the course. We never saw him again.

  We were teamed in pairs and I was with a big guy called Pat who wore glasses and had a comb-over bowl haircut.

  ‘Do you want to make the first cut?’ Pat asked me.

  ‘No . . . do you?’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it. I’m not scared.’

  ‘Okay, you go for it,’ I said, admiring his nerve.


  But as he moved in to slice the animal over the shoulder (we were studying the front leg) I noticed that his hand was flapping like a fresh-caught fish.

  A POTENTIALLY LOVESICK PUPPY

  James

  In fourth year, all the vet students lived on campus out at Camden for half the year. It was like being on school camp for six months. It wasn’t cheap, but you got all the chips you could eat. It was the best time. You’d do lectures in the morning and then, say, pregnancy-test cows in the afternoon. Every night we’d be doing something together, whether that was touch footy, trivia, pouring cold water on girls in the shower, setting fire to beds, eating chips till your belly exploded or having cold water poured on you in the shower by the girls. There was always something happening. Anthony and I even invented a sandwich – the Toasted Bread Sandwich; two pieces of toast around another piece of bread with loads of butter. Beautiful.

  The way it worked then, you did your final exams at the end of fourth year. Even though we still had a year until we graduated, that was to be spent doing practical work at vet clinics. So, having lived in each other’s pockets for six months, this was going to be the last hurrah. We were big on fancy dress, so we decided that each of our final exams should have a dress code. The horse exam had a horse theme, so someone brought in a saddle and did their exam sitting on that. Most of us just wore moleskins and RM Williams. The cow exam had a bogan theme. Pigs was cross-dressing. The less said about my outfit the better, but I can tell you that Anthony looked rather fetching in a short black miniskirt and a black midriff singlet with the words ‘Fashion Is A Virus’ printed on it. The final exam, birds, had a formal theme so it was all bow ties, tuxedos and ball gowns. We entered arm in arm, and I’m sure the elderly exam supervisors at the front of the room were pleased with the change from the day before. No one had ever taught us boys how to sit properly with miniskirts on.

  During all those years at uni, I worked in a hospital pushing beds and cleaning floors, and I also worked in a call centre as one of those annoying market-research types. So between third and fourth year I had saved enough pennies to travel to North America and work as a photographer, standing at the top of chairlifts at a ski resort. But you had to leave all that behind going into fifth year because of the requirement to do ten one-month long rotations through various clinics across the state. There was no time for paid work.

  The final year starts in December. It was a shock. We were used to 130 of us moving from class to class together then having luxurious three-month holidays. But no sooner had we finished those final exams than the class dispersed across the state, having to front up in respectable clothes to work.

  Both Anthony and I had chosen to do our first three months at the university’s own clinic at Camperdown in inner Sydney. So we got to ease ourselves into it. Unlike a lot of our fellow students, neither of us had ever worked in a vet clinic before. It was a huge shift just getting used to being on your feet twelve hours a day. Our bums had been hardened from sitting at uni, now we all complained about how much our feet hurt. Whenever we entered a room in a group, if there was only one chair we’d all go for it like a game of musical chairs. It took a good six weeks to get used to standing all day.

  There were a lot of students at Camperdown and relatively few animals, so it was an easy start. We got used to the hard floors, hard lights and the smell of antiseptic permeating every inch of those old walls. We’d all wear stethoscopes and lab coats, and I felt simultaneously kind of cool and like a big poser – hiding behind this medical façade with my pockets weighed down by pens, thermometers and other paraphernalia. A head full of knowledge and very little idea how to apply it.

  The clinic was like two clinics in one: an ordinary vet clinic for the people of the city’s inner west where we did the usual vaccinations, spays and broken bones; and a referral hospital where complex cases were sent to specialists, so we could find ourselves helping with complex pelvic fractures or spinal surgeries.

  The resident surgeon, Dr Geraldine Hunt, was a real character. Away from surgery she’d attend social functions and always enjoy a beer with her students. But in surgery what she said went and when she said jump we leapt. Geraldine was a pioneer of a type of liver operation called portosystemic shunt surgery. We got to see and help with a few of these, whereas most vets would be lucky to see one in their whole career. It was an intense spectacle of anaesthetic and surgical expertise that Geraldine made look easy, but it was always challenging for the assisting student. The student’s role was to retract the liver using an instrument that looked a lot like a metal kitchen spatula. There was always tension in the air and Geraldine was usually the only one talking, ‘That’s it. Hold the retractor there and don’t move!’ This would cause you to freeze, usually at a particularly taxing angle for your forearm. Fear of making a mistake would take over. I remember concentrating so hard on staying still that I forgot to breathe. I had to force myself to inhale, exhale, relax. Forty-five minutes is a long time to hold a pose but fear is a wonderful motivator.

  Another time, calm but firm, she asked, ‘Could you pass me the medium-curved Metzenbaum scissors?’ Before me was an extensive tray of instruments. Years of surgery pracs meant that I knew what everything was called, but in the heat of that moment all the instruments looked remarkably similar. A moment passed. I panicked and decided on a pair of scissors that might be them.

  ‘If I wanted Mayo scissors I would have asked for them. Try again.’ Most of Geraldine’s face was obscured by mask, hat and surgical attire, but her eyes said she was not impressed. Somewhere in there though, I think there was also a hint of enjoyment. She was a cat and I was her mouse.

  I composed myself and picked a different pair, glancing at another student who confirmed with her eyes that I was now on the right track.

  ‘Thank you,’ Geraldine said curtly. A silent sigh of relief came from everyone in the room.

  One day one of our classmates, Amanda, rushed into the treatment room, which acted as a bit of a hub for the clinic, where students would congregate to find interesting things to do. ‘Oh my God, I can’t go back out there,’ Amanda said. ‘Please, someone save me.’ It didn’t seem like anything was too badly wrong, though. She could hardly stop laughing.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘There’s a guy out there with a dog that’s got conjunctivitis. He kept asking me if it was contagious to humans.’ She paused here to ease her hyperventilation. ‘And I told him it shouldn’t be, and he asked me if I was sure that it wasn’t chlamydia. I told him that dogs didn’t get chlamydia. Cats did but it wasn’t the same as the human version of the sexually transmitted disease. And he goes, “Are you sure it’s not chlamydia?” “Positive.” “You see, like, ’cause I’ve got chlamydia myself and sometimes . . .”’

  Amanda stopped here and had to steady her breathing and wipe the tears from her eyes, ‘And he goes, “Sometimes the dog licks me down there you know, like, on my private parts, like, when I’m asleep.”’

  By this time Amanda had curled herself over on the floor and was having difficulty getting the story out. We listened, gobsmacked. But she really was refusing to go back out to see the client. ‘I’ll give $10 to anyone who goes out there to see him for me.’

  She got no takers. We were all laughing too hard.

  ‘Twenty bucks,’ she said. ‘I can’t go back out.’

  There were probably ten of us there and we all felt the need to take a walk along the corridor and peer through the crack in the partially open door to see this guy. He was about twenty-five, unshaven and rough looking. But he was showing a lot of affection towards the Staffordshire at his feet.

  ‘Please, I can’t go back there.’ Amanda begged.

  In the end, Heidi, a fierce South African clinician who was Amanda’s supervisor went out to complete the consult. When the man started to ask about chlamydia again, she said, ‘Stop! I’ve heard your story. It’s not chlamydia, but you do really need to stop the dog from doing that, an
d you should see a doctor about getting that sorted!’

  101 DEAF DALMATIANS

  Anthony

  The Dalmatian pups were cute as, with floppy ears, black spots, blue eyes and electrodes attached to their skulls. Their owner had brought them to the university clinic, wanting us to test their hearing. So we’d taken the cuddly bundles of spots to a quiet, bare room with dull lino flooring. We’d knocked them all out with a brief anaesthetic then hooked them up for what is called a BAER (Brainstem Auditory Evoked Response) test. You put the electrodes on their heads and earphones on their ears. A series of beeps is pulsed through the earphones, then, if the dog can hear, electrodes pick up the electrical response in the brain and show it on a graph like a heart-rate monitor. If the dog is deaf, there is no response and the graph flatlines.

  I was assisting the vet, Kate, with the procedure. She didn’t say much as we worked our way through the seven six-week-old pups. I was unfamiliar with the machine so the readings coming through meant nothing to me.

  Eventually the owner, a gruff, balding, middle-aged guy wearing a yellow pastel short-sleeved shirt, came back into the room and the puppies sparked up with their big doe eyes, looking for attention from their master.

  Kate didn’t bother with formalities. ‘They’re all deaf,’ she said. ‘All of them.’

  ‘Okay then.’ He turned on his heels and just walked out. I didn’t understand.

  I turned to Kate. ‘What’s that all about? Why isn’t he taking the puppies?’

  ‘They’re all to be put down.’

  ‘But you can’t put them down just because they’re deaf.’

  She gave me a look that said, ‘Yep, that’s what we have to do.’

  ‘We’ll find them a new home.’