Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  He was a great mate and still is.

  We had a student intern, Emily, who came to work with us at the Berry clinic, so we offered her our spare room to stay in. The day she started she drove direct from Sydney in the morning, did the day’s work, and then headed to our place to settle in. I had touch footy and tennis that night so I wasn’t going home after work and neither were Izzo or Hef. I drew a map for Emily and told her that her bedroom was the last on the left at the end of the hall.

  ‘Great, can I have a key?’ she asked.

  ‘We don’t lock the house. We don’t even have a key. There’s only Turtle, but he’s a big pussycat.’

  ‘Oh, okay. All right. No problems.’ Being a city kid, she seemed a bit put off by that but trundled off gamely. She was asleep by the time I got home.

  Next morning I took myself off for a jog and didn’t see her again until we were back at the clinic, where she seemed to have an urgent need to tell me about something. But she appeared wary. Suspicious even. She waited until Trish and Geoff were around to back her up before coming out with it.

  ‘You and Izzo are fond of animals, are you?’ she said, half-smiling, half-frowning.

  ‘Well, yeah, we’re vets aren’t we? What’s up?’

  ‘When I arrived last night, I wasn’t sure which house it was, so I drove past a couple of times. I didn’t think it could be your place because, like, the front door was wide open. I could kind of understand you leaving the place unlocked but leaving the door wide open seemed a bit, like, seriously loose.’

  ‘I didn’t leave it open,’ I said. ‘It was probably Izzo. He is seriously loose.’

  ‘Well, anyway, I got my bags and came in. I still didn’t know if I had the right place, and as soon as I went through that door I really hoped I had the wrong address. There was horse shit all the way down the hallway. I’m like, “Oh my God, what have I got myself into here? What are these guys into?”’

  I looked at Trish and Geoff with an expression that said, ‘I don’t know what she’s talking about. She’s mad.’ And they looked at me with furrowed brows and almost embarrassed smiles as Emily continued her tale, skirting that fine line between telling a funny story and totally alienating her new boss and housemate whom she’d only known for a day. ‘I called out but there was no answer so I came down the hallway and got to the kitchen. Then I heard a noise coming from a bedroom. I was so scared. I wanted to, like, grab a knife but that would have been a bit weird, since I didn’t know whether or not I was the intruder. Anyway, I snuck up to the door and peeked around the corner and there, standing on the bed, was a Shetland pony . . . and it was eating a pack of Tim Tams.’

  I felt the laugh coming from deep down in my guts and was barely able to get the single word out: ‘Wally!’

  When I’d settled down sufficiently, I explained to Emily that Wally was the neighbour’s hopelessly obese pony that roamed the street unhindered by fences and was much loved by all. Wally had learnt that if he banged on doors hard enough with his little hooves they would often open. They would often break as well but that’s another story.

  Emily was warming up to her story now: ‘Well he was eating those Tim Tams one at a time, like he was having the best day of his life and he wanted it to last forever. When he saw me, he looked at me like, “Crap, you got me. I can’t lie to you, I’m not really meant to be here.”’

  She told us that she shooed Wally out and cleaned up the mess. Luckily for her – and my career – the poo was confined to the tiles in the hall so it cleaned up pretty easily.

  I rang Izzo at Gerringong and had him rolling on the floor when I told him. It took a while for his belly laughs to die down so I could ask him: ‘Mate, what were you doing with the Tim Tams in your bedroom anyway?’

  ‘I didn’t have them in my bedroom.’

  ‘Well, Wally was eating them standing on your bed.’

  ‘They were on top of the microwave.’ We realised that Wally had gone into the kitchen, identified the brown and white packet as a desirable food item, taken it off the microwave – which was well above his head height – and then identified Matt’s bed as a comfortable place to consume said food.

  ‘What I can’t get over is that I could have slept in that bed without realising a horse had recently been eating Tim Tams in it.’

  We eventually moved out of Geoff’s place with my career still intact. I settled into a place in town. Turtle continued to be my constant companion. He used to come with me to the pub. We’d go running on the beach. He became quite well known around town. Sometimes people would come into the clinic and talk about their animals with absolute adoration. They would always qualify it with ‘You must hear this all the time’ and then go on about how Max/Molly/Rory was the best dog ever, never does anything wrong. Well Turtle was that dog. You only get one or two dogs like that in a lifetime and I got one straight off.

  One day I noticed him scraping his backside on the ground. Most people think this is a sign of worms, and it can be, but more often it signals trouble with the dog’s anal glands. They are two little scent glands that sit at the base of the rectum so that when the dog passes faeces, it leaves its signature scent on each parcel. When dogs smell each others’ bottoms, they’re smelling that scent. It’s like swapping business cards.

  But a lot of dogs have problems with their anal glands, probably because they are eating a more processed diet than they would have had in the wild. Fixing the gland is not complicated, but it is one of the more disgusting jobs a vet has to face. The secretion from the gland is the vilest substance you can imagine. It stinks its own world of salty foulness. It’s every bit as bad as a rotten calving except it’s distilled into this tiny bundle of intensity, ready to squirt at you at any moment.

  To clear the secretion and relieve the pain, you need to ‘digitally express’ the two anal glands, which means you put a glove on and stick your finger up the dog’s bottom. The secretion shoots out through the hole. You only do it with your mouth open once.

  Despite my many offers to teach clients to do it themselves, I haven’t had a taker yet.

  I figured that since I was a vet, I’d better get in and fix Turtle’s glands myself.

  Now, one of the great teachers at uni, Paul Hopwood, gave lectures like they were masterpieces; flowing from one subject to another, weaving his way through stories to make insanely boring subjects interesting. But he’d also single you out if he didn’t like you and make a fool of you in front of everyone by asking difficult questions. So you’d sit there in a high state of anxiety praying that you weren’t going to be picked on. I remember one day he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Australia’s finest, what is the first thing you will feel when you stick your finger into a dog’s bottom?’

  I was sitting there thinking, ‘Crikey, please don’t pick on me. Is it the internal rectal sheaf? Is it the colon? Faeces? Is it some muscle? It could be anything. Please don’t ask me.’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the first thing that you will feel when you stick your finger into a dog’s bottom is the dog’s jaws clamping around your wrist. Make sure someone is holding the dog’s head firmly.’

  I knew this, but not having anyone to hold Turtle’s head I figured I’d just tie him up. I secured his head to a rail in the backyard at home with a really short and tight rope. He could sway around with his bum but if I kept a hold of his tail it should be all right. So, in the privacy of my own backyard, I began the process of performing this completely legitimate veterinary procedure – with my mouth firmly closed because I’d already filled my lifetime quota of mouth-open anal gland expressions. With my finger up Turtle’s bottom I saw the balding dome of my new neighbour, Pete Godfrey, appear above the timber fence. Our eyes met. He looked at me and I looked at him.

  I could read the good family man’s thoughts.

  ‘Mate, I’m a vet. I promise you,’ I said. But it’s hard to talk with your mouth firmly shut.

  ‘Yeah . . . okay . . . ummm.’

 
; We smoothed things over, but I think Pete’s remained a little suspicious of me ever since.

  PARVOVIRUS AND PROLAPSES

  James

  The sun was shining and the heat was already building at 7 a.m. when I arrived to open the Manilla clinic. The smell hit me before I’d even got the key into the lock. And even if I was able to overlook what lay inside – as if I’d be able to – I’d never forget that stench. It was the smell of economic disadvantage. Three dogs with parvovirus.

  Barraba, Manilla and Bingara were triple-speed kinds of places. There were farms that were big, serious agricultural enterprises. Their sons had often returned from boarding schools and they also had three or four men working on them. One place had twenty stockmen running 11,000 breeding cattle. Then there were the smaller farmers who did it a lot tougher, working largely by themselves. Most of the properties around Manilla were soldier-settler kind of blocks – around 500 hectares. Big enough to offer a dream but small enough to consistently break hearts. You could run 150 or 200 cows on some of them but to make a good living you needed to run at least 300 breeders. A lot of those people scraped by, but they were on the edge.

  And then there were the townies. When I arrived, Manilla was largely a welfare town. There were some rough people in the mix. It’s four and a half hours from Sydney with affordable farming land, so a lot of tree-change types were also moving in. They injected life and money into the town, a trend which has accelerated since, but a decade ago we were still seeing a lot of animal diseases you associate with poverty. The most obvious of those was parvovirus in dogs.

  Parvovirus is easily preventable with a vaccine, so it’s virtually unheard of in affluent areas, but in poorer places people don’t always follow the prompts. The victims are usually pups, about four to five months of age. They come in pale and flat. You lift their gums and there is no colour, but there’s a lot of drool and perhaps the residue of vomit. Where there should be a bubbly, inquisitive puppy, you have a still, floppy and cold animal. And then the diarrhoea starts. It’s got this awful odour because their intestinal lining is dying, rotting and coming away. It’s a lot like Ebola for dogs; they poo themselves to death and die from dehydration.

  It’s a really heartbreaking thing to treat because the disease is entirely preventable, and the people who can’t afford to get their dogs vaccinated also can’t afford to treat them. It takes a huge amount of nursing support in unpleasant conditions. I know of clinics where if you walk in the door with a parvo dog, they say: ‘If you want it treated, you’ve got to pay $1000 now, up front, otherwise we’ll have to put it down.’ Without treatment, they will almost always die.

  The outbreaks tend to happen in the warmer months. Often after rain. And so it was that we found ourselves in a late-summer outbreak with three puppies in care. When I opened up that morning I had to go around, gagging, opening every door in the shed, but I knew we would be stuck with the smell for weeks. We had to keep the pups isolated because parvovirus is highly contagious, so we’d built a big cage out in a corridor separate from the other dogs. Their poo drained straight into a hole at the bottom. I had to put a gown and gloves on for quarantine purposes before I could pick them up, wipe them clean and hose out the cage. The pups had a miserable hangdog look. But I knew if Suzanne and I could keep them alive for a week that they’d live.

  I disinfected everything and put them back in, knowing we’d be repeating the process soon enough. The dogs crapped on themselves all the time because they were so weak and couldn’t get away from it. Then they got skin irritations and scalding from the poo. Suzanne and I would both clean them up, but she took most of that burden because I had to maintain infection control in case I had to handle other puppies during the day. That was my story, anyway, and I stuck to it. In a clinic with a few vets, the person dealing with the parvo dog wouldn’t see any other puppies for the day, but we didn’t have that luxury.

  It grew hotter and smellier in the clinic and the warmth gave the odour an added pungency. I wasn’t too displeased to be called out to a prolapsed rectum. I drove upstream along the Namoi River and turned left over a shallow crossing.

  The farmer, Sean Reynolds, greeted me with a fluffy white Maltese faithfully at his heel.

  ‘How old’s the dog?’ I asked, worried about the risk of giving it parvovirus.

  ‘Lulu’s about nine,’ he said.

  ‘Should be fairly safe from parvo, then.’ The truth was that while I didn’t know Lulu’s exact age, I knew she had to be reasonably old because she was one of the most famous dogs in the district. A few years earlier, before my time, Sean had been out walking a sheep paddock with Lulu trotting about nearby when he heard a commotion behind him. He’d spun around to see Lulu being lifted into the air by giant dark wings. A wedge-tailed eagle had swooped in and picked up the dog, presumably mistaking her for a small lamb. He saw Lulu get carried away beyond the treeline, yacking and squealing.

  Sean rang the clinic, heartbroken, asking that if anybody notified us about a badly beaten-up dog, or if they saw one falling from the heavens, to call him.

  And sure enough, a neighbour soon turned up at the clinic with Lulu, who was carrying a few cuts and scratches but was otherwise unharmed. Presumably the wedgie got the shock of its life when the meek little lamb it had picked up for dinner suddenly sprouted canines and started using them.

  Sean showed me to the prolapsed cow. This one had a prolapsed rectum, where the colon turns itself inside out and protrudes out the rear of the cow. Now, the usual treatment for this would be to push it back in and do a purse-string stitch to tighten the anus, leaving the animal enough room to defecate but hopefully not enough for its bum to fall out again.

  Unfortunately, the cow in question here had been running around for a long time with this thing hanging out before Sean had noticed it. The exposed flesh had become filthy and started to die off in places. I didn’t think I could put it back inside her without risking serious side effects.

  So I called Ben and explained the situation. He thought about it for while. ‘Well, there is another technique you could use . . .’ and he proceeded to tell me of a method we certainly weren’t taught at university. It sounded so far-fetched I thought he was pulling my leg.

  ‘Are you for real?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. It’s a great technique. Great technique.’ As usual, he was very excited and I really had to trust his sincerity.

  So I went over to Sean and explained that I was about to make his cow a prosthetic backside and could he please find me a piece of polypipe. He looked at me like I was some kind of wild cowboy. But he came back with a metre of black irrigation pipe.

  I took a look. ‘Nah, can you maybe get us a slightly wider bit? Maybe two inches.’ He went off again with the famous dog never far behind. By the time he came back with the right-sized pipe, I’d given the cow an epidural and was ready to begin. The prolapse was protruding 15 centimetres out the back, so I cut off a 30-centimetre piece of pipe.

  Remembering Ben’s instructions, I drilled a couple of holes halfway along the pipe from one side to the other, but not directly through the middle – they were off to the side about one-third of the width.

  I took the pipe and eased it into the prolapsed rectum so that half of the pipe was inside the cow and half outside, but all of that outside portion was covered by the prolapsed rectal tissue. I picked up a needle and thread and stitched the pipe to the rectum through the pre-drilled holes, conveniently aligned just on the outside of the cow. I then rummaged through my box of goodies and pulled out some Penrose drain, which is a flat white piece of rubber tubing designed to drain wounds after surgery. It looks a bit like a tapeworm, and in a bush practice like ours we find it comes in very handy as a tourniquet. And that’s how I was going to use it here.

  I tied the Penrose drain as tight as I could around the pipe, hard up against the normal skin. A rubber tourniquet cuts off the blood supply to the tissue, so if you wanted to be technical about it you mig
ht call it a rectal prolapse amputation. It does its work over a week or two, amputating the external part and forming a scar, joining up the skin with the part of the rectum that used to be 15 centimetres inside the cow but which is now flush with the anus. Excuse the pun. So in effect, it performs the cutting and stitching procedure all by itself, meanwhile the cow is able to relieve itself through the pipe.

  ‘Couple of weeks later, no one would ever know it was there,’ Ben had said on the phone. ‘Never know. Never know it was there. Great technique. Great technique.’

  ‘But how do we remove it?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘You don’t. You put the stitches that attach it to the animal on the outside of the Penrose drain so that when the prolapse dies away, there is nothing holding it in place any more and it just falls out with the next defecation.’

  Now I could actually see it in place I could appreciate the true elegance of this solution: the pure genius of my predecessors in bush vetting.

  ‘How’s it going to shit?’ Sean wanted to know.

  ‘Out the polypipe. You’ve just got to feed it wet feed. I wouldn’t stand behind it though. I reckon it would have a lethal range.’

  He came out with a camera and started taking photos, though I think they all came out blurred. He was laughing too hard to hold the thing steady. Especially with the money shot when it pooed.

  RAMPAGING RAMBO

  Anthony

  The first job booked in for the Tuesday run out to Shoalhaven Heads was to euthanase an aggressive dog. That always raises the question of, ‘What’s it going to do to me when I’m trying to shuffle it off this mortal coil?’