Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

I told him I’d spayed a few dogs in Barraba, but I might have omitted some of the details of Bailey’s complications. Bob watched me perform probably my fourth or fifth spay and it all went smoothly. ‘You’re pretty good at that,’ he said. ‘Every spay and castrate that comes in this month, you do it. That’ll free me up. Any troubles, I’ll be around to help you, but I reckon you’ve got it.’

  I knew then that this was going to be a good rotation. Experience is everything. We’d spent four years stuffing our heads with theory. What we needed was to get our hands in and do it. Bob seemed perfectly aware of how our interests collided on this matter. No one there needed to learn how to spay a dog. I did. Perfect.

  The clinic was made up of Bob, his business partner Greg, and Ray, another vet. Greg was a tall, wiry guy with a hipster-style beard, long before hipsters existed. A former jackaroo, he was full of energy and really down to earth. Ray was a former ringleader of NROC who was now reformed into a hardworking vet, but still had a glint of larrikin in his eye.

  Inverell is almost 600 metres above sea level so it suffers bitterly cold winter nights and mornings, but it’s a long way north of Sydney so the days become spectacular and warm. It was on one such frigid morning that Bob came in cursing. ‘Bloody hell, we’ve got a calving way up past Warialda. Why couldn’t it have happened yesterday when we were up there?’ He had a branch clinic at Warialda, 60 kilometres away, which was open three days a week, so naturally Murphy’s Law demanded that the emergencies happened on the other days. We got in the car and drove.

  Bob was an entertaining character, studious and perhaps a little more arty than you usually find in scientific professions. On the drive he told me how he was only working because he had to support his ex-wives. He also told me about one time when he was driving through a particular town and started to get severe chest pains. ‘I knew I was having a heart attack but I wasn’t going to stop there. It’s full of hicks and inbreds. I kept driving, thinking “I don’t want to die in ******.” The fear of dying in that place kept me going and got me to hospital.’ Some people thought Bob was cranky, but I thought he was an endearing curmudgeon.

  The sun was shining warmly now and all was right with the world as we drove into Warialda and turned right, heading another 40 kilometres or so north towards the Queensland border.

  We got to the place and I saw that the crossbred cattle looked in fine condition and there was not a wire out of place on the farm. The farmer, Trevor Schmidt, a white-haired guy in his sixties came out of the beautiful leafy house-garden to meet us. He led us to the yards, which were clean and well set up – shaded by the shed built onto the side. You get a vibe about a place when you arrive, and the vibe here was that Trevor was immaculate and precise, almost obsessively so.

  The cow in question, an Angus-Hereford cross, had a mostly black body with a white face. She was loitering in the yard near the race. ‘I found her this morning,’ Trevor said. ‘She’s pretty crook. We keep them up near the house when they’re close to calving but the only reason I noticed her was that she wasn’t hanging out with the others. She was over on her own. There’s been nothing showing, and I haven’t seen her pushing, but she’s obviously been trying to calve for a while, going by the smell of her.’

  While we don’t tend to wear gloves with calvings, the odour emanating from this cow, even from a distance, was bad enough to prompt Bob to pull one on. He put his gloved hand in the cow, made a worried face and started shaking his head.

  He looked at me. ‘You better put your hand in here James and tell me what you think.’ He wasn’t going to tell me. It was all part of the education. I had to figure it out myself. The farmer was in on it too, waiting for my turn to be over before asking any further questions. So I pulled on a glove and did my best not to grimace too wildly as I tried to stick my hand in. I had seen and smelled a couple of rotten calvings before, but this was by far the worst. When a calf dies inside the mother, it starts to decompose. If you don’t get it out, the toxic overload eventually kills the mother as well. But the other thing about this one was that there was hardly enough space for me to squeeze my hand into the birth canal.

  ‘The cervix is closed down,’ I said. ‘I can feel the calf on the other side, but there’s no way we can get it out.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Bob said. ‘You can barely get a couple of fingers through, though your dainty little arms might fit, James.’ He laughed at his joke. ‘There’s nothing we can do to get this calf out the back.’

  The usual thing to do with a rotten calf if you can’t pull it out whole is to cut it up inside the cow and then pull it out bit by bit, but with the closed cervix we couldn’t reach in to do that, and even if we could, the head wouldn’t fit out.

  Bob turned to the owner. ‘In essence, Trevor, nothing has reached into that pelvic canal to stimulate her to push, but the calf died some time ago and it’s been rotting away in there. You haven’t noticed her pushing because she hasn’t been pushing. The cervix would have been open a few days ago, but it’s well and truly closed down now. As far as she’s concerned, calving is finished.’

  So we stood there and looked her over while Bob thought about what to do. He eventually broke the silence. ‘Look, this cow’s pretty crook. There’s not much we can do. Your options are three: you can hope that this calf rots inside and you can pull it out in bits over the coming week or two; you can shoot her; or we can do a caesarean.’

  Trevor thought about this for a while. ‘She’s a good cow. She’s produced some good calves. What do you think her chances of surviving a caesarean are?’

  Bob shook his head and mumbled gruffly to himself. ‘To be honest, three-fifths of stuff all.’

  ‘And how much is it gunna cost?’ Trevor asked.

  ‘Well, it’s going to cost a few hundred dollars.’

  The farmer looked at the cow and looked at Bob. ‘She’s not gunna live is she?’

  ‘Probably not. From a business point of view, you’re probably throwing good money after bad.’

  ‘All right, that being the case, I think we’ll probably put her out of her misery.’

  Bob looked at me then looked at his watch. We stood there in silence a while longer. In the country, the length of time you can go without saying anything – and without getting uncomfortable about not saying anything – is a lot longer than in the city. So there we were, three blokes not saying much, until Bob broke the silence. ‘Look, there is one more option. James here has been hanging around for a month. He’s done a lot of this sort of work with me, but he’s never done one on his own, see. He’s almost graduated. So we can do you a deal. If James does the caesarean with me sitting over there telling him what to do, and if it lives, we’ll charge you fifty dollars, plus mileage. And if it dies we’ll just charge you the mileage for coming out here.’

  Trevor thought about it for a minute. ‘I don’t really have anything to lose in that scenario, do I?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘All right, we’ll give it a go.’

  ‘That’s good. That’s really good,’ Bob said. ‘Now if you can just piss off and leave us alone for the next hour or two that would be great. He doesn’t need you looking over his shoulder worrying about what he’s doing. You’re a busy man you’ve got plenty to get on with.’

  Trevor thanked us and went off to potter around in the machinery shed. Bob arranged a series of 44-gallon drums for me to use as instrument tables. He found a milk-crate-sized drum for himself to sit on. ‘There’s the cow, there’s the drugs and there’s the surgical instruments. You know what to do, so get going. Ask me when you need to ask me.’ He pulled out a newspaper and started to read.

  With the cow standing still in the crush, I opened up the rail on her left side, pulled out a scalpel and proceeded to use it like a cutthroat razor to shave a window about three inches wide by a foot long on the side of her. I prepped the skin with iodine to disinfect it. I put a local anaesthetic block into the gap between the vertebrae where I knew
the nerves that felt pain down that whole flank operated. I poked her with a needle because I wanted to make sure she couldn’t feel a thing. She didn’t flinch. I moved the needle and checked another part.

  ‘Stop poking the cow and get on with cutting it,’ Bob piped up over the top of the Inverell Times. ‘You know what you’re doing. Hurry up.’

  Here goes nothing. I sliced into the cow but nothing happened. So I sliced again, harder. They’re made from leather, these cows. Much tougher than dogs and cats. I made my way into the abdomen where I found a lot of fluid from the internal infection that she was carrying. I probed around and pretty quickly got my hands on the uterus where I could feel the calf’s back legs.

  I grabbed the legs through the thickness of the uterus and picked up the whole lot and dragged it all over closer to the opening, bringing the legs inside the uterus up and out through the hole. We’d had it stressed upon us at uni that it was crucial to get that uterus out before opening it up.

  I stabbed into the uterus, and all the fetid juices that had been stewing around the rotten carcass came welling up towards me. I cut along the uterus with my scissors, making a hole big enough for a calf to fit through, and then I let it fall down on the outside of the cow so the rest of the foul brew could drain away to the ground. If it had come out inside the cow it would have killed her. But something they hadn’t bothered to teach us at uni was to stand clear. All this disgusting gunk splattered my boots and overalls.

  ‘You’re not coming in the car like that,’ Bob called out. ‘When you know what you’re doing, you won’t get that shit all over you. Look at you. You stink.’

  I grabbed the back legs and pulled them out of the uterus. The calf came away fairly easily and hit the ground with a thud, a thick fog of disgusting odour coming with it and bouncing back up into my nostrils. I hooked out the decomposing placental material from the uterus and dropped that to the ground too. Bob came straight over and dragged it away, thankfully, because it smelled a terrible shade of horrendous. Experience had told him to wear a few pairs of gloves so he would be able to continue reading the paper afterwards.

  ‘So now you’ve got to put it all back together,’ he said.

  My first job was to close the uterus and even though I’d tried to get everything out, there was no way I could get it completely clean, so future infection was almost a certainty.

  ‘Make sure you close that properly,’ Bob said, ‘Otherwise she’ll die and this will have all been a giant waste of everyone’s time.’

  There’s a special suture pattern where you turn the uterus in on itself to make a watertight seal. I did that but wasn’t certain it was going to seal, so I did another one over the top. I pushed it all back in and stitched up the muscle on her flank which is like sewing steak because that’s exactly what I was doing – bringing two great chunks of beef together and stitching them through with great long needles. It had looked so neat and ordered when I’d cut my way through it an hour or so earlier, but after me rummaging around in there, it was like a traffic accident. The different layers of muscle were all over the place and I had no idea which bits were meant to connect with which. Still, I connected each bit to something, then stitched up the skin which was like mending a belt.

  I was beat by this time but not as beat as the cow who’d stood there so calmly the whole time. I filled her with antibiotics and antiinflammatories, then poured water into her stomach through a tube – providing her with hydration and electrolytes – to give her the best chance I could. I sprayed her with a lot of fly repellent too, because the fly season was coming and we didn’t want them laying their eggs in her wound.

  Bob called Trevor over and explained that he had to give her an antibiotic injection every day for at least the next week. Trevor looked pretty happy about it all. I felt happy, too, that I’d given this cow the best possible chance of survival. On the drive back Bob wasn’t so happy about the smell I’d brought into the car on my boots, but I think he was pleased he’d been able to help a young bloke learn the job.

  ‘You make sure you ring him tomorrow and find out how she’s going. We’ve got to charge him if she makes it.’

  So the next day I got into work on another of those frigid mornings. I went straight to the phone to ring Trevor but there was a message waiting for me on the desk: ‘Trevor rang to say cow going well. Bright and happy and heaps better than yesterday.’

  I phoned him a few days later and his voice was ecstatic. ‘She’s perfect. Couldn’t be happier. Tell Bob to send me the bill.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be that confident she’s still going to make it,’ I said. ‘Infection might get her yet.’

  ‘You tell Bob I’ll pay. She’s lived long enough.’

  When I told Bob this he turned to me, shaking his head. ‘What an idiot. He should have just told us she died.’

  You had to love Bob.

  WHERE DID I COME FROM?

  Anthony

  All my peers were starting to panic, and I was inclined to join them. I was in my last rotation of the final year and I didn’t have a job yet. A few of my better organised classmates had teed up positions and that just made the rest of us feel like we’d been left on the shelf.

  So, with a week to go before graduation, I got my act into gear and put together a résumé. I’d once met a guy on a plane who owned a famous restaurant in Sydney called the Bathers’ Pavilion. He told me that you should always apply for the job that you want, not the one that is being offered. So I took his advice and called all the well-respected mixed-animal practices in the Shoalhaven district on the NSW South Coast. I definitely wanted to go into mixed practice – working on big farm animals plus small family pets – and I loved the South Coast. Jobs were hard to come by in Sydney, but it was easier in the country, especially for guys. Country practices lean towards males because there’s a perception that you need to be strong to do the job. There are plenty of smaller framed girls and guys who are fantastic large-animal vets, but the idea persists, particularly among farmers. There were only twenty-five males in our class of 130, and ten of those were overseas students. So there were only fifteen male vets looking for jobs in New South Wales. Whether the perception was right or wrong, guys were in demand.

  I phoned all the practices from Nowra to Kiama. When I called the clinic in the little town of Berry, the owners said they didn’t have a job going but were happy for me to come in and meet them. Their names were Geoff and Geoff – Geoff Scarlett and Geoff Manning – and I knew of them by way of their reputation as the best cattle vets in the area.

  When they took me into the tea room to have a chat, it was perplexing. The two Geoffs were starkly contrasting personalities. Geoff Manning stood a foot shorter than Geoff Scarlett and didn’t have a lot to say. Geoff Scarlett, on the other hand, was very friendly and did all the talking. To add to my confusion, the head nurse, Jenny, was constantly interrupting from the doorway before eventually just sitting herself down to participate in proceedings. So while Geoff Scarlett conducted the interview that wasn’t an interview, Geoff Manning seemed vaguely irritated that he had been disturbed from reading the Herald and Jenny couldn’t contain her excitement that a new vet might be starting soon. She kept finishing Geoff Scarlett’s sentences, saying things like, ‘There is a great opportunity here for you, Anthony.’

  I walked out thinking how weird they were. I jumped in my car and drove to Sydney, where a mate needed help digging a basement for his uncle’s wine cellar. After an internship year with no paying job I needed the money. And at that stage it felt like digging holes might be my immediate future.

  It was only a few days before the phone rang, however. I walked out from all the dust and noise of the basement into the full blast of a hot summer’s day. Rushing to get my dust mask and ear protectors off while wiping my face with my cement-covered arm, I was finally able to take the call.

  ‘Anthony, it’s Geoff Scarlett from Berry here. Do you still want that job?’

  ‘What jo
b? There wasn’t a job,’ I said.

  ‘Well, there is now,’ he said. ‘Are you interested?’

  ‘Yes I am.’

  This was a dream position with the top vets in an area I’d virtually grown up in. I was elated. Berry is a beautiful little town tucked in under the rugged escarpment, less than ten minutes’ drive from the beach and only 20 minutes from our family farm. Geoff and I made plans for me to start in a few weeks’ time and it was as simple as that. I got back on the shovel.

  As it turned out, I received a couple more job offers. I was sorely tempted by one from Andrejs Medenis at Gerringong – a beautiful little town ten minutes from Berry, with deep-blue ocean to the east and deep-green dairy paddocks to the west. It truly was a magical spot to work in. And Andrejs was one of the reasons I had wanted to become a vet in the first place, because he was the vet for our farm at Foxground.

  Both my parents were doctors. Dad was a radiologist and Mum was a GP. Though we lived in Sydney, Dad was a frustrated farmer. He’d spent his childhood holidays at the farms of his relations at Narromine and later at Gloucester, leaving him with a hankering for the country and some cattle. When I was seven, Mum and Dad bought eighty acres at Foxground, a little valley just west of Gerringong. It had been a deer farm, and deer need tall fences. One of my first memories of it was working with a pair of bolt cutters to help Dad cut down the tall chicken-wire fences and get the place ready to run cattle.

  I used to love helping Dad. Wherever he was, I had to be. If he was working in the paddock, if he was on the tractor, whatever he was doing, I was there, boots on and ready to dig holes or mend fences. We did all our own work with the cows. We’d get Andrejs in for emergencies but Dad, Pa (my grandfather) and myself would do all the routine work like vaccinating, ear-tagging and marking. Pa was an old dairy farmer so he knew cattle.

  For all that farm experience, I still had a lot to learn about how things actually worked. I was a very naïve child. I remember one afternoon when I was about ten, we’d been fencing and the sun was going down. Dad had just let the bull in with the cows and he was leaning on the gate watching the stud mingle with his harem. So I leaned on the gate and watched what the bull did too. The bull’s name was Corby, he was a big poll Hereford with a wide chest and curly white hair on his forehead like a judge’s wig. He was named after a boxer from the olden days named Gentleman Jim Corbett who was known to be a very fair fighter. But when I saw Corby enter the paddock with the cows he seemed anything but gentleman-like as he sniffed around their rear ends and then jumped up on the back of one with his long pink willy hanging out.