Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  Mr Jones Ty Coch lived with this splendour every day. For him it was just another morning, except with the inconvenience and cost of having the vet out.

  I was trying to clean up all my gear and squeeze it into the back of the Rover when Mr Jones called out to his wife in Welsh. The farmers would often slip back into their native tongue. She called something unintelligible back and then he turned to me. ‘You’ll be joining us for breakfast.’

  I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a command. ‘What . . . um. Yes. Yes.’

  ‘My wife is cooking it now.’

  So I finished the packing and hosed myself off. It was viciously cold despite the beautiful sunrise as I made my way across to the ancient whitewashed cottage with its tiny windows and amazing view.

  Mrs Jones, a rosy-cheeked, friendly woman of about sixty, soon presented a marvellous spread of bacon, eggs and black pudding with beautiful home-baked bread. It was getting towards 7 a.m. I was meant to be back at work so I ate quickly to assuage the guilt.

  ‘You’ve got to have another cup of tea, lad,’ Mrs Jones said.

  ‘I’ve got to get going. I don’t want to be late for John.’

  ‘John! Don’t you worry about John. He always has breakfast when he comes here and he takes hours. He’s always saying I can squeeze in one more before Caroline will miss me.’

  I had the extra cup with a slice of thickly buttered bread before returning to the Rover. In the short time I’d been driving it, I’d grown to hate this car. It was really just a rebadged Honda Civic, and it was amazing that in the simple act of changing its name they’d turned it into a junkyard dog of a car. It was faded maroon, had only one hubcap, the radio didn’t work, and it made a whirring noise when driving like it was being powered by propellers. I never knew which gear I was in, but generally if the gearstick was in my crotch I was probably in fifth. And with no compartment to separate dirty clothes and equipment from the driver’s cabin, it smelt like a dairy floor. Worst of all it broke down a lot. So every time I got into the Rover it was with a small sense of dread. But this day it sped me back to work like a Jaguar and I trotted in with my full belly and a rich sense of satisfaction.

  I told John and Caroline I’d been called out to a calving.

  ‘That’s fine,’ John said. ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Had to go out to Mr Jones Ty Coch.’

  ‘Oh yes. Which Mr Jones Ty Coch?’ John asked.

  We would have this problem all the time. For billing purposes, there were so many farmers with the same names I’d have to explain to John what he looked like, or if he spoke Welsh or English, or what his jokes were like, for John to deduce which of the Jones Ty Cochs I was talking about.

  I told him about the little white cottage and the stunning ocean view.

  ‘Oh yes, I know the one. Did you get breakfast?’

  ‘Yes, I did, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Is that why you’re late?’

  ‘It was a very nice meal, thank you very much. I ate it quickly though. I tried to escape as soon as I could but they said you always stayed for breakfast.’

  ‘Yes, they’re very gracious hosts.’

  Just then, Caroline, who had been off elsewhere, re-entered the conversation. ‘Who’s a gracious host?’ she asked.

  I began to explain: ‘After I’d done the caesarean, I –’

  ‘He couldn’t get the damned Rover started,’ John interrupted. ‘Mr Jones helped him get it going again. A very gracious old chap. Must get that thing serviced.’

  DOUBLE TROUBLE

  Anthony

  The red-and-white Poll Hereford cow frothed at the mouth. Her bulging eyes were fixed on us as she attempted to jump the high metal rails that enclosed her. She couldn’t make the height, and her legs tangled with the railings as she fell back. Flailing on the ground only momentarily, she rushed straight back to her feet to bellow and stare and snort at us before mounting another attack. She didn’t want to escape the yards. She wanted to hurt us.

  I’d only just got out of my car. A local shop owner named James Chatfield had rung me less than an hour earlier: ‘I’ve got a cow trying to calve but something’s wrong. I don’t have time to do it myself, so can you come and have a look? She’s a real nice quiet cow so she won’t give you any strife. Her name’s Maree. She’s the family pet.’

  It was a sticky, hot February day. Aside from this family pet’s apparent mood swing, the first thing I noticed about her was the stench. This cow stank of death and she was being followed by a cloud of flies. If every fly on the South Coast wasn’t there, they mustn’t have got the memo. I thought it was probably septic shock. The calf had presumably died inside her and now the toxins from the putrefaction were playing havoc with her brain.

  James’s father-in-law, Bill, was there to help and our first task was to get this cow into the crush so we could get a look at her. We opened the required gates and I stood on top of the rails – on the outside – and waved my arms trying to look tall. She saw me and charged. I jumped back as she crashed into the fence. She spun around and ran at a gate, preparing to leap. Her body lifted and for a moment it looked like she was going to get over the 6-foot-high metal barrier, but her legs tangled on the rails and she hung there momentarily before falling onto her back. If she’d got out, she would’ve been gone. No barbed-wire fence could have held her snorting fury. She might not have hated me personally but she very clearly wanted me gone.

  You don’t herd these animals anywhere. You just open the gates you want them to go through and give them the merest suggestion of the direction they should go in. Then you stand back and hope. Eventually her crazy rampage took her down the race and we were able to catch her neck in the head crush. She thrashed around a bit, but she soon calmed down with the restraint. I donned a shoulder-length glove and swung the half-gate around that stopped her kicking backwards and went in to investigate. Sure enough, there was a calf inside her in the breech position; it had been coming for a long time and was rotten, rotten, rotten. Generally when you do a rotten calving, the flesh of the calf is decomposed to the texture of, say, cooked chicken. You pull on the flesh and it tears apart, like slow-cooked meat. It’s been in the oven at 37 degrees for three weeks, after all. But this calf had been there for so long even the bones had gone soft.

  A caesarean wasn’t an option because when they’re this rotten the uterus itself is starting to decay so as soon as you put a knife in it collapses and releases all the muck. Just the simple act of operating on this animal would likely kill it. Luckily I didn’t need to do a caesarean because the cervix, while not fully open, was wide enough for me to get two hands through. So I got cracking. It was stinking hot and I was wearing overalls, but at least I had the shade of a tree above. Bill was good for conversation but not a cow man. We chatted away about the cricket and the weather as I pulled the calf out one mushy piece at a time. Pretty soon my gloves had been shredded by the shards of bone.

  I got the back legs out okay, then got to work on the rib cage. Because it was coming out backwards, however, the ribs were facing the wrong way so they caught like barbs along the birth canal. I had to break every rib and pull them out one by one. It took a lot of strength doing it with my arm fully outstretched, just using the leverage from the wrist. I absorbed heat from the cow and the sun, and was sweating like I’d dipped my head in a bucket. I desperately wanted to wipe my brow and swat the flies away from my eyeballs but I couldn’t because of the fetid juices on my hands. I tried to keep up a pleasant banter with Bill but it was so hard.

  What am I doing? Why am I a vet? There are easier ways to make a living. Why didn’t James call me weeks ago? How did he not know something was wrong?

  I knew that James hadn’t known anything was wrong. I continued with the job and got on to breaking the spine because it wouldn’t come out either. I also snapped the shoulder blades. I got the front legs out all right, but the cervix had started to shrink even in the time I’d been there, and the head would
n’t come. Still inside the uterus, I had to cut the head in half with gili wire.

  After a bit of a wrestle, I got the last piece of skull out and tossed it onto the pile of soggy hair, putrid bones, flesh and skin just behind me. After an hour and half of the worst job I’d ever done, I managed a joke with Bill. ‘Hope it’s not twins.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ he said. ‘You’ll regret it.’

  I wasn’t worried. The calf was too big to be a twin. But any good vet will always put their hand back in at the end to check for spares and tears in the uterus. I was exhausted, but I inserted my hand, fished around for a bit, then called back to Bill. ‘How many legs can you count on the ground?’

  He got up and had a poke through the 2-foot-high and 4-foot-wide pile of rot.

  ‘Four,’ he said.

  I had a fifth leg in my hands. ‘Far out! It’s twins.’

  It was like reaching the top of a mountain only to see that the real peak was hundreds of metres above. My hands were cut and bruised, the muscles were stuffed. I had unspeakable gunk packed so far under my nails it felt like they were going to fall off. And I had to repeat the whole process.

  The second calf was smaller and facing in the correct direction but I still had to break bits of it off to bring it through the shrinking cervix. I finally got it out and gave the cow an enormous dose of penicillin – five times the standard dose. I gave her anti-inflammatory painkillers to reduce the pain and hold the shock in check. But there was still a major problem.

  You can’t imagine the cesspool of putrid garbage that was still inside Maree’s uterus. The amniotic fluid was now a soup of fur and blood and puss and guts. It seemed hopeless. How can this cow survive? She was already septic. I couldn’t scoop this stuff out.

  So I said to Bill, ‘Can you go and get a garden hose that reaches here and turn it on?’

  He got me a new green hose. I took off the nozzle and stuck it inside the cow, just letting the water run into the uterus. It took a while for Maree to fill up but eventually all the gunk started pouring out the birth canal. I let it run until the water went clear. It cleaned her out and cooled her down.

  Sure I was exhausted, I was covered from head to toe in putrescent muck and 300 bazillion flies, but there was that sense of achievement. I’d set out to do this job. I’d done it and given the cow the best possible chance of surviving.

  Yes, this is why I’m a vet.

  ‘Okay I think we’re done. Let’s let her go.’

  We opened the head bail and stepped well clear. The craziness that had possessed Maree seemed to have been exorcised. She wobbled out, tentative and unsteady, like you’d expect after such an ordeal, but calm. She turned and looked at me with an air of serenity, and for the first time I could see the lovely family pet that she was. Then she knelt shakily down on her front legs, followed by her back legs, bringing her belly to rest on the ground. She gave a huge sigh and went still.

  Worried, I snuck into the field and crept up behind her, because I still wasn’t certain all her demons had departed. As I approached, I saw no sign of movement, no breathing, and once I plucked up the courage to kneel down beside her, I felt no heartbeat.

  I lost it. I did my lolly. I screamed and yelled and kicked things and determined that there obviously was no God, but I was so tired my kicks were pretty limp – they barely knocked the bucket over. And my curses were fairly lame.

  Bill just stayed a safe distance from me. I think he thought I looked a bit like that cow prior to getting her into the crush. Eventually he herded me back towards the car, maybe opened the door and turned on the air-con, giving me the merest suggestion of the direction he wanted me to go, and quietly backed away.

  RESPIRATORY RODENTS

  James

  John and Caroline had a branch practice five minutes down the A55 at Deganwy, a beautiful harbour town with a castle on the hill. I’d been there a week and was settling in nicely thanks to the nurse, Olive, who was a friendly giant; tall with big curly black hair that looked just a little out of control. When she spoke she had the same soothing tone as the nurses when I was a kid telling me that everything was going to be fine.

  I was working my way through the morning consults, feeling hungry and very keen to get back to the excellent sandwich shop next door when Olive walked in. ‘Mrs Williams has got a wee patient for you. Some skin issues.’

  Mrs Williams was standing in the waiting room and holding a tiny box, about 20 by 20 centimetres, covered with a towel.

  Mmmmm, very small container. Wonder what it is?

  ‘Noticed some skin problems have we, Mrs Williams?’ I said in my jolly and confident medical voice.

  ‘Yes, he’s got a little bit of a rash and I think he might be a little raspy in his chest,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, I’ll have a little look and we’ll see what we find.’

  She took the towel off to reveal a small orange cage. It was all I could do not to scream out, ‘Holy rat poo! What is that?’ I’d never seen such a creature before. It was some type of rodent, but tiny; maybe 3 centimetres high and 4 centimetres long, with big ears and a little tail.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said. Unable to think of anything else to say, I channelled my inner Ben and repeated myself. ‘Yes, yes.’

  A golden rule of veterinary science is that when you don’t have the foggiest idea of what you’re doing, you reach for the stethoscope. I grabbed mine, hanging at my chest, and the creature pretty much disappeared as I put the metal disc to its body. I listened to its crazily fast heartbeat and nodded knowingly. ‘Yes, yes. Okay. This stethoscope is a little big. I might see if I’ve got a smaller one.’

  I excused myself from the consult room. The clinic was tiny and the paper-thin walls did not go all the way to the ceiling. So you could hear everything that was going on in the whole clinic. I could just about hear my diminutive patient breathing from the reception area. Olive was there doing some paperwork and I stood behind her waving like I was drowning.

  Fortunately she did not offer to give mouth to mouth but instead made a ‘What’s wrong?’ face.

  I made a scribbling motion with my hand and she handed me a pen and paper. I wrote, ‘What is that?’ and she looked at me with an uncomprehending tilt of the head.

  I drew an arrow to the consult room, and wrote, ‘What is that animal?’

  She took the pad and pen off me and wrote, ‘Hamster.’

  I realised that I’d never actually seen a hamster before. I furrowed my brow, screwed up my nose and whispered. ‘Aren’t hamsters guinea pig-sized?’

  ‘No. That’s a hamster, dear.’

  ‘Okay, yes. Yes . . . good . . . yes, yes.’

  Hamsters are illegal in Australia because of the risk of them going feral so they were not something that we were taught about extensively (read: at all) at university. I had to go and find the Manual of Exotic Pets, a book put out by the British Small Animal Veterinary Association. It was very straightforward, using simple language as though it was written specifically for young Australian vets who hadn’t the foggiest.

  ‘Just looking for that stethoscope, Mrs Williams,’ I called out while furiously scanning the index and flicking the pages. ‘Olive tells me there’s a small one here somewhere.’

  I read the hamster passage quickly. The book was gold. I made a presumptive diagnosis of a bacterial infection both of the skin and the respiratory tract. It seemed relatively early in the course of the disease so hopefully we could get him back on track, but it indicated that there were some imbalances in his body. As I quickly read up about it I found that hamsters have a lifespan of about two years. Now, when I asked Mrs Williams how old hers was I could figure out whether it was young, old or middle aged.

  I walked back in with a newfound confidence and a stethoscope that looked remarkably like the previous one. I listened to its pulse again. ‘Oh yes, that’s much clearer now. Yes, yes. I think he’s got an imbalance of the bacteria in the body, and it’s allowing the infection of the respi
ratory tract and the skin. It’s a relatively common condition and you’ve got to it fairly early, Mrs Williams, so hopefully he’ll respond to the therapy. We’ll need to treat him with antibiotics and we’ll expect him to get better in the next week, but we’re going to have to manage it going forward.’

  Mrs Williams was clearly impressed by my deep knowledge of hamster biology and pathology. The hamster got better and she probably thinks to this day that I knew what I was talking about. Indeed, I did my research and learnt that Mrs Williams had a dwarf Russian hamster. Who knew that there was more than one type? I locked that away in my head for future use and even now I always have a copy of the Manual of Exotic Pets at hand.

  Abergele was a much more intensive small-animal practice than I’d worked in before. We did a lot of complex medical management of cases. We treated diabetic and Cushingoid animals – those with an excess of cortisone in the body – and feline hyperthyroidism, in which older cats get a hormonal imbalance that leads to a ravenous appetite at the same time as weight loss. In Barraba, people had been reticent to treat and investigate these diseases, but in Britain we diagnosed them far more frequently. And the clients seemed far more determined to treat them as actively as possible. Even those from lower socio-economic groups seemed resolute in doing the very best for their pets.

  Suddenly, amid all these animal-loving Brits, my vow to the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons to place the welfare of animals above that of humans didn’t seem so odd. It wasn’t long before I had to face a case where I had to put the animal’s well-being above my own in order to treat it.