Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  ‘We need to get hold of him right away; this cow is in all sorts of trouble. We can’t save her and we can’t alleviate her pain; the only thing to do is to put her out of her misery.’

  I gave her an enormous dose of painkiller to try to make her a bit more comfortable, but I knew it would wear off quickly.

  The cow was in shock. She was standing but barely conscious – quiet and withdrawn and shaking. You could have pushed her over if you’d wanted. She’d lost a lot of blood and so was cold – the body shuts down at the the periphery. As she stood there unsteadily, she’d occasionally bump against the side of the rail on the bad side, then lurch away in pain and bash into the other side.

  Jack was trying his best but he didn’t know a lot about cows or pain or many other things. He was just under instructions not to kill things. I could have overridden him but you’re not the Stasi. You’re a private practice trying to manage a relationship with a client.

  ‘We’ll get a bloke to come and shoot her,’ Jack suggested. That might have been all right but I wasn’t confident it would actually happen. I suspected she might get left for a week ‘just to see how she goes’. Jack couldn’t see any big problem. As far as he was concerned, if she was still standing she couldn’t be that bad: stupid vet couldn’t stitch her up. Never mind; we’ll just see what happens.

  I felt that morally I couldn’t leave the farm with the animal still alive. It broke my heart to see the state she was in and I wanted it over as soon as possible. It took a frustratingly long time, but we eventually managed to get Jack’s brother on the line and I sent him a picture of the cow to prove my point.

  He gave immediate permission to put the cow out of its misery and apologised for his brother’s behaviour.

  SURGICAL CONDITIONS

  Anthony

  Bob McWhirter was the guy that you wished was your grandfather. Unfortunately, he was a never-married dairy farmer with no kids. When you visited Bob’s farm at the bottom of the escarpment, over a couple of shallow weirs, you smelled it before you saw it. The pungent mix of calf shit, rye grass, silage, milk powder and cow dung. Invariably, Bob would be standing outside his little dairy waiting for you. He only milked eighty cows, like they used to in the days before dairy deregulation. Stuck in the past, he did it the old way. He milked alone, got the cows in alone and lived alone. As a result, the area around the dairy was a pigsty. Mud and crap covered every surface. However, it was always a pleasure to visit Bob. The big smile you got when you arrived, the ‘Here’s Anthony,’ closely followed by the, ‘No beautiful students in tow today, mate. What’s wrong with you?’

  I had been called out this day to check a cow that was ‘not right’. Bob stood in front of me beaming. He was a thick-set bloke with wiry ginger hair growing from his head, neck and every orifice. He extended his meaty arms for a handshake, revealing fingers like bodybuilders carrying suitcases, and black skin cancers, ominous but ignored, growing over the exposed bits of his arm.

  ‘I’ve got a few others for you to take a look at while you’re here,’ he said, leading me through the slosh in his grey Slazenger trackies pulled up impossibly high over his faded blue flanno.

  The crush was set at the back of the dairy and you usually ended up shin-deep in the prior milking’s filth. Most dairy farmers wash out their entire yard, but Bob didn’t see the need to clean out anything that wasn’t in the food-producing area.

  Our clinic has been tending that dairy for over forty years, right back to George Bouris, and I’m told that my predecessors had never seen it clean either. Interestingly, we were billeting Japanese students recently and Sidney, my then fiancée, was tripping them around for the true Australian experience. With a great Aussie bloke who always gave you the time of day, and a herd of quiet dairy cows, what better place than Bob’s? That night I asked Sid what she thought of the place, expecting the worst. She said it was the cleanest dairy she had ever been to. I couldn’t believe it, but Geoff Manning confirmed it when he visited the farm the next day. Over all the years of battling infection on this farm, Geoff had never succeeded in rallying Bob to clean up. Send out a pretty blonde with a group of students, however, and you could cook off the floor.

  On this particular day, after pregnancy-testing four cows and dehorning a ‘killer’ steer I came to the cow in question – a leggy, thin old Friesian. You can generally tell the worth of a dairy cow by the size of her udder and how much body fat she is carrying. A quick glance at this one told me she wasn’t worth more than burger money. I took it gently though, knowing Bob was a compassionate soul. I asked him the standard questions: her age; stage of lactation; pregnancy status; prior year’s milk production; feed intake. And the answers weren’t positive.

  This cow would normally not need a vet to prescribe truckacillin – a quick drive to the saleyards.

  ‘She is one of my favourites, mate,’ Bob said. ‘She’s one of the oldest cows on the property. She’s the last into the dairy each day so she’s a great plug.’ The ‘plug’ is the cow that pushes all the other cows up into the yard and the bails. She will walk all the way up the bail, no matter how many cows are in there, and hold the second last cow fast, allowing the milking clusters to be put on safely. They are a big asset on a dairy farm and most farmers are reluctant to lose them; especially one like Bob who didn’t have a worker to help him.

  ‘Okay, mate, let’s have a look,’ I said.

  The old head bail didn’t work so Bob had to hold her in place with brute force. Not a problem, but inconvenient all the same as I took her temperature, listened to her heart and chest and checked the integrity of her teeth.

  ‘Everything’s normal there,’ I said. ‘Let’s check her abdomen. How long since she last calved Bob?’

  ‘About 150 days.’

  ‘Okay.’ This made me think that she might have displaced her fourth stomach – the abomasum – and been carrying that problem around for a while. I listened to her right side, the death-sentence side. If I heard a pinging noise like a tap dripping into a steel bucket, it would indicate that her fourth stomach had moved to the right, become blocked and was filled with gas. On the right, this is usually fatal. Thankfully it was all clear. So I had to check that the abomasum hadn’t moved to the left, a serious but less severe problem. At a normal dairy, this involves a simple walk to the other side of the crush. But at Bob’s farm the left side of the crush wasn’t used very much. Except as a manure heap. Cows are prolific pooers. Most dairies have run-off areas, big drains and ponds to handle the enormous volume of crap. At Bob’s place, it had all been stored on the left side of the crush.

  I was glad I was wearing my full-size gumboots. I clambered over the top of the race and down the other side. When I tentatively put my foot down, it immediately began to sink. I had to get the other one down quick smart to avoid losing my boot. So that was it, I was stuck. Luckily, I was in the right spot to have a listen to the cow’s abdomen. I placed the bell of my trusty Littmann stethoscope against her abdomen and began the familiar routine of flicking the skin around the bell of the instrument. The normal sound is the dull thud of a finger on flesh. Unfortunately this time I heard the high-pitched ping – the sound of abnormal gas stuck in a stomach. Bugger! A left displacement of the abomasum.

  Lastly, I put my hand inside her rectum, felt down through the uterine wall and touched the calf, and sure enough the little bugger almost bit me. This cow wouldn’t be ready to calve for a while, but the calf was alive and healthy, and might be just like its mum – a big asset.

  The normal procedure would be to lock the cow in place, give it loads of local anaesthetic and a bit of sedation, cut a big hole in the cow’s right flank, pull the stomach back around and suture it in place. But the head bail didn’t work and the right side of the crush didn’t open. It was just an old piece of train track with lots of metal tubing.

  I explained the left abomasum displacement to Bob and it was all a bit new to him. ‘I’ve heard of places having it,’ he said, ‘b
ut we’ve never had one diagnosed here before.’

  I speculated that that might have been because no one else was foolish enough to climb over into the poo pile to listen. Anyway, Bob’s immediate reaction was that the cow was buggered and should be sold. Favourite or not, dairy farmers are good at putting sentimentality aside.

  ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘I reckon we can save her.’

  The idea of surgery was confronting to Bob and, under the circumstances, confronting to me too. I had done quite a lot of them; however, the procedure was still relatively new and a lot of our farmers were yet to be convinced of its worth. I had adopted the policy of doing the first one on each farm ‘at cost’ to demonstrate its effectiveness. Convincing Bob was a big challenge as well. He stood to make $500 just selling her for meat; if my operation failed he’d get nothing for her.

  ‘But she’s got a calf inside her and if it’s a heifer that’s a big plus for you,’ I said.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s give it a go.’

  Bugger! I realised I’d done it again; talked my way into a difficult and problematic surgery. I had no way of fixing this cow into the race, and even if I could, I couldn’t access her right side. How on earth am I going to do this?

  Bob looked on, eager, yet suspicious of my motives.

  I decided the only thing for it would be to back the cow into the race, tie her head to the rail with a halter, her body to the rail with a rope and go for it standing knee-deep in shit. Imagine if human surgeons operated in such conditions.

  A mate from uni who went on to do medicine after graduating as a vet, told me he was once lectured on the technique for an epidural. He had done heaps on cows himself and was busy educating the med students within earshot. The professor called him out and asked what all of the discussion was about. My mate said simply that epidurals weren’t that hard. ‘You just lift her tail, wipe the shit off and give the injection.’ He was immediately ejected from the class, but it wasn’t because he was wrong.

  The faeces equation in this case was a little too stacked in death’s favour. Not only was the surgery site grossly contaminated, I was stuck in place. Even if I had wanted to move I couldn’t. My feet were suctioned into the mud and my surgery site had been pre-determined.

  This was coupled with Bob sitting atop the yards, smirking down at me while also bemoaning how much the cow was worth as meat. ‘Geoff’s never done this, you know.’

  What am I doing?

  I went through all the preliminary stuff – putting in epidurals, local blocks, shaving the hair, prepping the skin. I was ready to go.

  A good surgeon is sure of himself and doesn’t hesitate. Quick, bold strokes with the scalpel and an economy of energy are what make a good surgeon. And I was determined to be one. You have to push hard when you cut through all that boot leather. So I pushed hard and I was in with just two cuts: one through the skin and one through the three muscle layers that comprise the cow’s flank. The negative pressure whistled in my ears as air flowed in. I was happy with myself. It usually took ages for me to get into the abdomen. I put my hand into the cow, searching around for the misplaced stomach. Over the rope holding her in place, over the rumen, down the other side. I was shoulder deep in her guts with my feet stuck in mud and shit when I heard a groan – like a ghost with bellyache. And down she went.

  Of course she fell right in the deepest part of the mud, just in front of my toes. And of course she fell with her new wound deepest in the poo. She is stuffed. I am stuffed. There is no way out of this. Why me? The look on Bob’s face was unforgettable. To me it said, ‘I like you . . . you little shit, but you have buggered my cow and for that I won’t forgive you.’ The exasperation washed over me. Why was I trying these new ideas when I could have just diagnosed a terminal gastro problem and put her on the truck? Why did I try?

  But I was trying, and there was no backing out now. Bob went off to get the tractor. He took an eternity with me standing anchored in the manure. He came back with the hiplifters on the front and we managed to get the cow back on her feet to reveal a wound that was covered with faeces and sludge so gross that even the flies were avoiding it.

  ‘Will your hose reach the race?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, I reckon. I’ll go get it. And I’ll bring the .22 while I’m over there. That’ll save a lot of time.’

  I was inclined to agree. Blind Freddy could see that this cow was buggered, but I just couldn’t let it go. ‘Bob, I think we should keep going with the surgery. What have we got to lose?’

  ‘Nah, don’t worry about it,’ Bob said. ‘It’ll take too long and cost me even more.’

  ‘Don’t worry about the money, Bob. This one’s on the house.’

  I hosed out the wound and got my arms in and pulled the abomasum through and around. The cow stayed on her feet and everything seemed to go smoothly after that. I marinated that cow in penicillin: some in the abdomen before I stitched up the muscles; some in the muscles before I stitched up the hide; some in the wound. As I extricated my boots from their holes in the slop, I left Bob with strict instructions to give her twice daily injections for a week.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll try but I doubt she’ll be around that long,’ he said.

  ‘You’re probably right, but we’ve come this far. We might as well see.’

  The usually exuberant farewells from the grandpa I wished I had were fairly quiet that afternoon. Bob seemed pretty keen to be somewhere else, somewhere sensible. Me too. I left with my tail between my legs.

  I avoided the inevitable follow-up call for as long as I could. I just didn’t want to hear the bad news for which I would be entirely responsible. However, my love for Bob was too great. I just had to know how he was going and how long the cow had survived before the infection claimed her. Instead of picking up the phone, though, I decided to drop by one afternoon. Bob was obviously surprised to see me, but he was his usual happy self.

  I ditched the pleasantries and got straight to the point. ‘How’s the cow?’

  ‘Great, mate. Last into the dairy as usual and her milk production has come right back up. She is a keeper, well done.’ The slap on the back couldn’t have felt sweeter. ‘I can’t understand why we haven’t done that operation more often.’

  ‘Yeah, me neither,’ I said.

  We now do Bob’s surgeries at his neighbour’s new yards.

  BREAKFAST FAR FROM TIFFANY’S

  James

  The phone rang in the middle of one of my first nights on call.

  ‘It’s Mr Jones Ty Coch. Sorry to wake you. I’ve got a calving. Can you come out?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m the Mr Jones at Ty Coch, the farm on the hill near Betws-Yn-Rhos.’

  My first problem was that there are only four names in Wales: Jones, Davis, Williams and Evans. And every second farmer with one of those four names lived on a farm called Ty Coch. At least he’d narrowed the field down. There would have only been half a dozen Jones Ty Cochs on a hill near Betws-Yn-Rhos.

  ‘So can you give me directions?’

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Australia.’

  I heard him relax. ‘Oookay, you go up the hill towards Llanfair and it’s on the left. So you go up there and you take the old road that takes you right to Llangernyw. When you reach the power station you take the real left turning there and go along for 3 miles, past the church on the right and then you will take a turning that will take you over the brook and up the other side of the glen and my farm is on the bryn to the right. That’s Mr Jones Ty Coch.’

  It was 4 a.m. I shivered out of bed, trying to write down the directions. How am I ever going to find this place? I drove out into the moonless night. A light mist hung in the air as I negotiated mazes around power stations and unseen brooks, churches and valleys. Being dark, I couldn’t even enjoy the scenery.

  Somehow I got there about 4.30 a.m. and Mr Jones, short and portly under a tweed cloth cap, walked out in
to the Rover’s single headlight beam to meet me. He shook my hand with his enormous rough paw and showed me to the barn where he had the cow called Bessy tied to a post. Most Australian cows would be having conniptions at such a restraint but British cows are used to being held like this. I put my hand in and tried for some time to sort out the calf inside her but it just wasn’t going to come. This cow needed a caesarean. No problems. Mr Jones was used to this. His cattle were of a thick-set European breed that often needed surgical intervention.

  ‘Do you have a crush?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing at all like that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where does John do this sort of thing when he comes here?’

  ‘We just tie them up right here.’

  ‘Okay Mr Jones, if it’s good enough for John. Let’s sort it out.’

  It was something I was to learn – that no one seemed to have good sturdy yards with crushes designed to handle boisterous cattle. If you were lucky, you might get half a race with a wiry gate that didn’t close properly, or you’d get Mr Jones Ty Coch’s set-up which was a post and a halter. So with Bessy attached to the post, Mr Jones tied an extra loop around her belly to secure her to the wall of the barn. She was somewhat immobilised but if we upset her she’d easily break free. I put in the anaesthetic, prepped her up and cut into her. All the while, there was a peanut gallery of cows watching from a higher slope. The barn was the size of two tennis courts. It was divided into different areas and all the cows were lined up along the dividers watching in total silence in the pre-dawn stillness. No birds sang outside. There was just me and Mr Jones, Bessy and her silent friends.

  The operation went well. Bessy stood there passively while I pulled a large live bull calf from her abdomen, which always brought a small sense of wonder, no matter how many times I delivered one. But that sense was about to be magnified ten-fold as I stitched Bessy up and looked over her back to see daylight starting to filter through ventilation gaps in the wall behind her. I’d arrived in darkness so had no idea where I was. But as the beautiful soft light started to wash over us, I realised that I was in fact on a wondrously beautiful hillside looking out across the Irish Sea. The creeping daylight revealed hedges and hills bisected by tumbledown stone fences. I absorbed all this over the top of the cow on which I’d just performed a successful operation in not-so-ideal conditions. It was absolutely glorious. Magical. And I didn’t need any reminders about why I loved this job and why I was here.