But don’t let it ever be said that we don’t have empathy for fish at the Berry vet clinic. When we did our ‘Blinding Nemo’ end-of-fourth-year revue, someone made a Nemo suit which James wore to the fish markets at Pyrmont. He walked through the car park yelling, ‘Eating fish is murder.’ On the way back we went to McDonald’s and in the Drive Thru he was in the back of the ute, wearing this clownfish costume, trying to converse with the poor teenager serving us: ‘I can’t believe you serve fillet of fish here. Can you understand how that makes me feel, as a fish? I mean, put yourself in my flippers . . .’
One of the things I did remember from uni was how to anaesthetise a fish, because I thought that was really cool. You get the fish in a smallish tank and you put the anaesthetic in the water and the fish passes out from it. But how do you do surgery with the fish asleep in a tank? You can’t. You put the fish on a big sponge and place a tube in the fish’s mouth, pumping the anaesthetised water in so it flows out through its gills into the sponge. The water flows down into a receptacle and back to the tank. Then, when you want to wake the fish up you take the pump out of the anaesthetised tank and put it into a fresh-water one and pump that through instead. As the fish starts to wake you slip it into the fresh-water tank.
I thought that was awesome. So I was keen to give it a try – if the fish did have a tumour and if Alice and Bill wanted to try to save it. I gave them their options. Euthanasia, surgery or letting nature take its course. After tossing up the options they decided they’d keep an eye on it for now and wait until it got so bad it could no longer submerge itself at all. We’d decide what to do then.
I walked out thinking, ‘How can I charge for that?’ It was just a chat, but we have to charge for our time and knowledge. So I sent them a small bill because that’s what Geoff and Geoff were paying me for. I didn’t expect to hear from Alice and Bill again. I thought that when the time came, they’d just scoop it out with a net and leave it in the air to die. But we got a call about two months later and they asked to see me specifically – which tended to get up the Geoffs’ noses a bit. ‘Why are people asking to see the junior?’ they’d ask. Then they’d hear it was about a fish and they’d laugh and be glad I was the name on those people’s speed dials.
‘We think it’s time to put the fish to sleep,’ Bill said. ‘He can’t submerge at all any more. He’s constantly on the surface.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It’s fairly simple. You can just scoop him out and hit him on the head, or you can move him into a separate tank medicated with clove oil. The clove oil is a natural anaesthetic and he’ll peacefully go to sleep and not wake up.’
‘No, we don’t want to do that. We want you to come out and put him down but not that way. We want you to give him an injection because we don’t like the idea of him suffering.’
I turned up with a net and a 5-litre bucket with a lid. Only Bill was there to greet me this time and he led me back around to the pond. I caught the fish and took some of its pond water. The lump on the side of the fish had almost doubled in size since my last visit. On the way out the gate Bill told me that Alice had taken a turn for the worse and they were being forced to move to a facility where she could be cared for. He wanted to stay near her so they were selling the family home and moving to a retirement home. As I left I could see the redness in Bill’s eyes and the odd stray tear; the fish was one last connection to a more hopeful time, twenty-six years earlier.
I took the fish back to work, running the gauntlet of raised eyebrows and rolling eyes as I came back through with my heavy bucket. I scooped it out of the bucket and injected Lethabarb into its abdomen, placing it back into the bucket and watching it slow down till the life was gone. It was the most expensive goldfish in Berry after two house calls, a euthanasia and a burial, but it was also the best example of how compassionate people can be; that they would spend the time and the money to do this for an animal they said they had no bond with. It didn’t even have a name.
Alice and Bill had tied up a loose end and I never heard from them again.
RODEO CLOWNS
James
The grey gelding came down the race with its head erect and nostrils flaring. Its pupils were dilated and its eyes flashed anger, like the guy in the corner of the pub itching for a fight at 1 a.m. His name was Destroyer and this is what he was bred for: to buck humans into the middle of next week. Horses like this are worth a lot of money and are looked after accordingly.
Fortunately, the new grad, Mark, and I weren’t there to ride him for eight seconds (there was no risk of that happening). We just wanted to stitch up the gash in his flank and leave quietly with no hoof prints in our skulls.
I had survived my first year at Barraba, growing in skill and confidence, and now Mark was here to experience what I’d been through the year before. But instead of calling Ben when he had a problem, he usually called me because I was a little less intimidating and talked in full sentences. So I’d dragged him along to this prime rodeo stud in the Horton Valley knowing that I’d probably need a hand, or at least someone to hold mine, as I dealt with these fearsome beasts.
We did a lot of work in the Horton Valley to the west of Barraba. It was prime agricultural land, and if you approached it from Barraba via the Trevallyn Road you dropped into a magnificent vista of rich, green fertile land – some of the most valuable in Australia. The valley was populated by big characters and by little ponies belonging to the children of some of the richest people in the country. There was also a strong rodeo community that centred around the little township of Upper Horton, which held a famous New Year’s Eve rodeo.
The people who owned the bucking Destroyer had him in the race, which was an effective restraint for now. But the thing about that was it signalled to him he was about to be ridden and that it was time to deal with these pesky humans. It was game on.
Working with rodeo people fills you with a sense of ineptitude in the bravery department. There is an element of the Wild West in how they talk, walk and act, and as much as I’d never pretend to do what they do, I still didn’t want to seem scared in front of them.
With Destroyer restrained, I managed to jam an 18-gauge needle into his rump muscle in more of a stabbing motion than with the controlled precision I’d normally demand, but the sedative got in. Once his ears started to droop and the fire started to leave his eyes, I was able to carefully and quickly get the anaesthetic into the jugular vein without getting my fingers crushed. They were huge doses because Destroyer was so keyed up. This was a pampered, valuable horse, but he didn’t return the love. Destroyer was pampered and valued precisely because he wasn’t friendly to humans – those that tried to ride him and, as it turned out, those who tried to stick needles into him.
Once the anaesthetic was in we let him out of the chute, just in time for him to fall to the ground and go to sleep. Usually that process is carefully stage-managed, the vet controlling the head rope to ensure as gentle a passage as possible to the ground, but with rodeo stock you stand well clear and let them sort it out for themselves. Destroyer teetered and went down, allowing us to get to work. It was all very routine in the end. We cleaned the unruly gash and pulled it together into a neat wound. And we made sure we used dissolvable sutures so we wouldn’t be called back to remove them.
Before we’d finished stitching him up, we got a call to go to a nearby property for a problem calving. So we changed out of our overalls and waited for Destroyer to wake up then headed off to the calving. It turned out to be caesarean so I let Mark do that one, and it went without a hitch.
Once again, before we’d had a chance to clean ourselves up my phone rang. This time it was a bloated bull, which again had defied Murphy’s Law by being located just a few kilometres down the road. So we changed out of our overalls and drove over.
The farmer, Jason McKay, came out to greet us. He was relatively young for a farmer, probably in his early thirties, with big red hands and a checked shirt that matched his blue eyes. ‘Yeah
, my bull’s looking like he’s ready to burst,’ Jason explained, taking off his Akubra to wipe his brow and revealing a bone-white forehead atop his otherwise red-brown face.
He led us towards the yards. ‘I only got him a few months ago. He’s worth a packet. I was just riding past him this morning when I noticed he wasn’t right.’
I didn’t have to look very hard to see that this was quite possibly the largest bull I’d ever laid eyes on. It was a South Devon. South Devons are already the largest of all the British breeds of cattle, but this deep-red bull was a big one of his type, and on top of that he was so impossibly bloated you couldn’t help thinking a pinprick might send him whirling through the sky like an unleashed party balloon.
Ruminants like cows and sheep have big fermenting vats as their first stomachs. If they eat too much clover or lucerne when they’re not used to it, it can send the whole process awry, bloating them until there’s so much pressure on their lungs they die from suffocation. I thought that might be the case here.
‘What type of pasture’s he been on?’ I asked.
‘Just ordinary old grass,’ Jason said. ‘Nothing different at all.’
Bloat happens for a few reasons. When it’s caused by what they’ve eaten, the gas is suspended in a froth throughout the rumen, making it difficult to release with a stomach tube, so you have to perform a rumenotomy. If something else has caused the bloat, like an obstruction, the gas sits on top of the rumen and so can be relieved with the tube. We needed to have a good look.
Mark and I changed back into our overalls. We set to work getting the bull into a position where we could examine him. This fellow would have struggled to fit up the race on a normal day. There was no way we could get him up there as he was now. So we coaxed him towards the race and got his head into the narrow passage, then shut a gate behind him leaving him somewhat restrained. Whether it was his exploding guts or his natural temperament, he remained placid.
We clambered over the rails and I hung over the gate to get to, his tail in relative safety to inject a sedative. Sedating cattle is always a double-edged sword because some are very sensitive to the sedative xylazine and can fall over. You’re always cautious about how much to give, but we needed this monster to be well restrained for what we were about to do to him.
Jason got a head collar on him, something he was probably used to, as he had been a show bull. He wasn’t overly distressed. We examined him closely and listened – there was almost no ruminal noise and when I pinged my finger against his belly I could hear a noise like a bouncing basketball. Sometimes you can hear this noise with a stethoscope and we use it to diagnose gas in certain areas in the abdomen. In this case Mark heard it from a few metres away – no stethoscope required.
The bull was still breathing okay and still calm. We thought it reasonable to try to pass a stomach tube in to see if we could release some gas. If it worked it would also be a simple way to get some anti-bloat oil into him and that might be the end of the story. With his head tied in the halter I was able to get a set of nose pliers – blunt instruments that pincer together in the nostrils – on him giving additional restraint of the head. I was standing in the race in front of the bull, a scary spot to be, but given how bloated he was I knew it was safer than it felt. There was no way he could squeeze through to where I was.
I put about half a metre of black irrigation pipe, commonly called polypipe, into his mouth and over his tongue to stop him biting the tube I was about to insert. Then I threaded the delicate tube through the pipe.
‘Geez, that’s a fairly serious weapon,’ mumbled Jason, clearly not a fan of observing medical procedures.
The tube passed easily down the bull’s throat and into his rumen but there was little of the hoped-for ‘whoosh’ of gas. Instead a strange coloured fluid dribbled out. I inspected it as it hit the dirt and noticed a little black ball about the size of a pea wedged into the end of the tube. Interesting. I got the ball out and had a closer look. It appeared to be plant matter but beyond that I couldn’t tell what it was. I had a closer look at the fluid in the dirt and saw three more little balls lying there.
‘This might be what he’s eaten,’ I said, showing them to Jason. ‘Do you know what it is?’
‘I got no idea. Never seen it before.’
The bull, meanwhile, was continuing to inflate. Normally bloat makes the left side of the animal bulge outwards, but when it gets really bad the bulge comes out the right side too. And this one was definitely starting to come out both sides. On top of that, we were seeing signs of distress in his breathing.
‘We’d better do a rumenotomy. What do you think, Mark?’
‘I think so.’ There was a hint of resignation in his voice; it was just on dusk and the end of a big day for both of us. Unfortunately there was no option but to suck it up and get on with the job.
A rumenotomy is basically a stab into the rumen to relieve the pressure. We use a trocar, which is essentially a metal tube with a pointy end and a handle. We had a little bit of time as this bull was still fairly stable, but we were out of light. Jason fetched us a torch and I asked him to shine it on the site as we shaved the skin and gave it a quick scrub, before instilling a bit of local. I made an incision to start with for a bit of a peek and shriek. Mark grasped the tissues and held them out so that nothing could spill into the abdominal cavity. Again, there was nothing in the way of a pleasing ‘whoosh’ of gas, but some fluid containing more of those mysterious black balls ran out. This is weird. What are these things? It was hard to see them because the torchlight was nowhere near where we were working.
A quick glance back towards Jason revealed a man who was clearly queasy at the sight of blood. He looked as pale as smoke.
‘You all right, mate?’ I asked.
‘Fine,’ he managed through gritted teeth. ‘I just can’t look at that shit. It’s messed up.’
‘Okay, just try and keep the light on this area. Lean it on the post and keep your weight on it, then you won’t have to look.’ I think that gave him something to focus on – not moving and certainly not looking.
I decided we’d better make a bigger hole to get a better look. This animal weighed more than a tonne – about the same as a Toyota Corolla. On a normal day, his rumen would have been about the size of a 44-gallon drum, but it was much bigger today with all the bloat. So carving into his side was no small matter. I cut my way in through the leathery hide, splitting the muscles with scissors and working my way down into the rumen. The harsh smell of putrefaction from that huge fermenting vat overcame the pleasant background aroma of grass clippings.
I was losing my light again. ‘Hey Jason. A bit to the left,’ I called out. ‘Yep. Up a bit and back to the right. That’s good.’
I still couldn’t see much so I dipped my hand in and scooped out a palmful of the fluid. My hand was covered with those pea-sized black balls. Crikey! What am I dealing with?
Mark continued to hold the rumen while I tacked it to the skin, allowing us easy access and freeing Mark up to take the torch from Jason because I knew he wasn’t up for what I had in mind. As Mark shone the light inside the rumen I saw that the balls weren’t just sitting on the top of the fluid; they were evenly suspended all the way through. The only explanation I could come up with was that, whatever they were, they had created a large ‘osmotic gradient’; sucking all this fluid out of the blood and tissues and into the stomach.
We didn’t know what they were but we were now pretty sure we’d found the cause of the problem. I just had to get them out of the rumen and we’d be right. I started scooping them by hand but I soon realised there was no way this would get them all out. The rumen was so big I couldn’t even reach the lower portions of it.
I grabbed some tubing, figuring I could siphon the fluid and balls out. I put one end of the tube into the rumen and was about to put the other end to my mouth when I noticed Jason’s painful grimace.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘We
’re setting up a siphon to get these balls out.’
‘Ahhh, I can’t look.’ He hid his eyes behind his forearm. This big fat dusty farmer with skin as leathery as his Akubra was like a kid watching a scary movie. I put the tube to my lips and sucked on it, being careful to get it out of my mouth before the gut contents hit me in the throat. It flowed well for a few seconds before the balls blocked it up. We tried again, but the tube kept blocking. This wasn’t going to work.
It looked like we had to go back to doing it by hand.
‘What are you doing now?’ Jason asked.
‘Fishing them out with our hands.’
‘Oh no. I can’t watch.’ His red complexion was glowing in the fading light.
Mark and I scooped away, vigorously at first, but there were thousands of the balls and we hardly made a dent. After about half an hour, Mark jacked up. ‘This is useless’, he said. ‘We’re never going to get them out.’
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I said. ‘But I don’t see that we’ve got any choice.’
We fell into defeated silence. ‘Have you got anything here on the farm that we might be able to use?’ I asked Jason.
‘I don’t know. Can’t look. Can’t look.’
The flash came to me gently, like a low-watt bulb being switched on.
‘Have you got a diesel pump?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. It’s not clean though.’
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s going inside his stomach. It’s not clean in there either. Have you seen how freaking dirty this is?’
‘No I haven’t. And I don’t intend to either.’
‘Can you just bring the pump over?’
A lot of farms store their diesel in 44-gallon drums. To get to it, they use pumps that have a solid metal pipe dropping to the bottom of the drum. Jason was having a good chuckle to himself as he brought over one such contraption that was powered by a wind-up handle. ‘You gunna put that in my bull?’
Village Vets Page 11
