Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  A few weeks after the hamster incident, someone brought in another coughing rodent. Except this one was enormous, with a furry tail and great flapping ears.

  Fortunately, Olive was more au fait with my ignorance this time and let me know that it was a chinchilla.

  A chinchilla? Isn’t that a town in Queensland?

  I picked the rodent up to have a look and was immediately struck by how it had the most gorgeously soft fur I’d ever encountered. I would have stood there and luxuriated in its velvety silkiness, perhaps nestling it against my cheek, if it wasn’t for the fact that I could feel my eyes starting to bulge.

  My rabbit allergy had continued since childhood so I avoided those creatures as much as possible, but it was difficult as a vet, especially in the UK where there are so many pet rabbits. If I was at the Deganwy clinic where I was the only vet, rabbit avoidance was doubly difficult. But now I had found a new pointy-nosed foe. I realised I was also allergic to chinchillas. I set this one down and went out the back to pop some antihistamines. I came back to have another quick look and I realised the antihistamines weren’t enough. I felt my lungs constricting. I rushed out the back again to inhale feverishly on my Ventolin while I read the Manual of Exotic Pets. The client could hear me puffing away on the sprayer, sneezing and snotting as I read that the chinchilla was a rodent native to the high Andes, that it lived in groups called ‘herds’, and not surprisingly it was in danger of overhunting by the fur industry.

  I arrived at a diagnosis of enteritis and prescribed it some antibiotics, telling the owner (a Mrs Jones/Williams/Evans/Davis) that the chinchilla should improve quickly, and to return tomorrow, preferably when John was there, if it didn’t.

  I came back in and Olive noticed my red eyes and sneezing and the profuse discharge from my nose.

  ‘Are you allergic to these?’ she asked.

  ‘Judging by what’s going on, I don’t think the chinchilla and I are going to be friends.’

  The chinchilla’s fur is much finer than a rabbit’s, so my reaction was much more severe. After the consult I had to take myself off to the doctor who gave me some injections to calm my immune system down.

  It remains the only chinchilla I’ve ever seen, but I will never, ever forget how wonderfully soft that fur was.

  NIPPLE CRIPPLE

  Anthony

  ‘Who are you? Are you a vet?’ someone yelled down the phone.

  ‘Ye . . .’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m new here. Rebecca’s got a tick. I can’t get it off and now she won’t let me near her.’

  You can tell a lot about a person by the way they get you out of bed in the middle of the night. When reasonable people call you in the wee hours, they have usually put the call off until it is absolutely necessary. When they do finally phone, they are extremely apologetic for disturbing your sleep. It’s known as common courtesy. And we are only too happy to do everything we can to help them.

  ‘I’m sorry. Who is this?’ I asked, maintaining my best professional tone.

  ‘It’s a paralysis tick,’ the female voice shrieked. ‘It’ll kill her if we can’t get it out. I know this, I’ve been studying it on the internet. Now Rebecca won’t let me go near her. We can’t get it out. What can we do?’

  ‘Well, you should . . .’

  ‘Google says we should put metho on it but we can’t. Rebecca has run into the corner and she’s trying to bite us. What are the symptoms of paralysis tick? Does it make them go psychotic? Rebecca has turned psychotic.’

  You’re not kidding, I thought. You know what they say about pets resembling their owners.

  ‘She’s a beautiful dog normally. I read on the internet . . .’

  It was like the three apostles. Woken up in the middle of the night, a rude client and now Dr Google. She was a broken fire hydrant of words just gushing out. I tried to sneak out of bed, but this woman’s voice was so loud it was waking my partner. It was almost waking the neighbours. It’s bad enough for the partner to be woken by the phone ringing but she could have slipped back to sleep if there wasn’t so much commotion.

  In the darkness of my home I allowed myself a few eye rolls and the odd grimace as I held the phone out at half an arm’s length from my ear, wondering when it might be that I could return to the comfort of bed, but knowing that sleep was now unlikely.

  I gathered I was dealing with a couple who were newly moved to the area from Sydney. I suspected they had no children. Rebecca was obviously their proxy child. They’d heard about paralysis ticks and were worried. We worry about paralysis ticks too. If someone finds a paralysis tick on their dog in the middle of the night, we tell them to bring the dog straight in. Even if an animal appears fine, it can go downhill quickly, and the best treatment is early attention.

  Eventually the deluge of words subsided enough for me to get in a few questions.

  ‘Now, what’s your name?’

  ‘Miriam.’

  ‘Where on Rebecca’s body is the tick?’

  ‘On her belly.’

  ‘What colour is it?’

  ‘Black.’

  ‘Okay . . . um, look, paralysis ticks are white or light blue. If it’s black, it’s unlikely to be paralysis tick.’

  ‘No, I’m sure it’s a paralysis tick. How do you know it’s not?’

  Because I’m the vet, I thought. ‘Because of the colour.’ I said.

  I tried to explain but she wouldn’t believe me. There was no way I was going to talk her out of her diagnosis and her plan of treatment: that Rebecca needed to be in intensive care immediately.

  ‘It’s up to you. I’ll come in and see you at the clinic, but it’ll cost you over $100.’

  ‘That’s fine. We’re coming.’

  So over they came from Kangaroo Valley. It’s only a 25-minute drive, but it’s a difficult one; climbing 400 metres in altitude up over Berry Mountain, dodging wombats and negotiating steep hairpins, then repeating the process to descend 400 metres to Berry on the coastal plain. I was living a few hundred metres from the clinic, so I just had to stroll over and open the door.

  Miriam and her husband, Ben, came bustling through the door exactly twenty-five minutes after I’d put the phone down. Stick-thin with a dark fading beauty, Miriam wore black tights and a cashmere jumper. Ben looked every bit the retired banker in corduroy and thick white woollen pullover.

  Rebecca was a Chinese shar-pei, an animal bred as guard dogs with a face so ugly it could scare intruders away. Tolerating strangers was not part of the shar-pei’s make-up. Rebecca behaved just fine at first. Until Miriam put her on the table for me to look at.

  Rebecca snapped and growled and contorted the fleshy rolls of skin on her face to convince me that no way was I going anywhere near her torso. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. It took only a few seconds to diagnose the problem.

  ‘That’s a nipple,’ I said. ‘You’ve been trying to remove Rebecca’s nipple.’ I motioned them to the door, unsure if I should laugh or shout at them. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  ‘No, that’s not right,’ Miriam said. ‘Don’t you think I know what a nipple looks like?’

  ‘You see the one you’ve been trying to pull off? The one the dog will no longer allow you and your long fingernails anywhere near? Well, here, see the other nine identical ticks all lined up in nice symmetrical rows? They’re nipples.’

  Miriam would not, could not, suffer this. She was convinced the dog was psychotic. Maybe the mental state was being caused by toxins from a cancer, she said.

  I continued trying to convince her but then started to lose my cool. ‘If I tried to pull your nipple off I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t let me near you either.’

  ‘What if it is cancer?’ Miriam said.

  ‘I don’t think it’s cancer. I know it’s the dog’s nipple.’

  ‘How can you be sure it’s not cancer?’

  ‘Okay, the way we can be sure is that you bring the dog back tomorrow. I’ll surgically remove the remainder of the nipple.
We’ll take chest X-rays and ultrasounds and full blood tests and it’ll cost you about $1000.’

  ‘That sounds good. I’ll see you when the clinic opens,’ she said.

  At last I was able to usher them out the door and lock up. I had at least given them a small face-saving option. Of course they wouldn’t get the tests done. In the clarity of daylight they would realise their error and we’d all be left in peace. Sleep, however, was a distant memory for me that night. My exasperation had fired me up as much as if Miriam had come after my nipples instead. I tossed and turned, waiting for the first sign of light so I could get up.

  I turned up for work with a fog in my head like the clouds that linger up on Berry Mountain. But it all cleared spot on 9 a.m. when Miriam came through the door demanding action. ‘We’re ready for that cancer test,’ she screeched, standing in the middle of the waiting room. ‘If it is cancer, she’s not going to die, is she? Perhaps I should take her back to Sydney. Our vet there would know what to do. He has much more experience than you. How many dogs have you treated with cancer? You don’t look old enough to be a vet. Are you going to do the X-rays here or not? I don’t want Rebecca taken anywhere else for X-rays. I don’t know what I’d do if she died.’

  For her part, Rebecca had bounded in like they were having a fine old adventure. Any resentments from her nightmarish nipple cripple the night before had long since vanished. But Miriam insisted we subject the poor dog to the full palaver of tests.

  The pathologist’s report came back the next Friday saying that the tissue sample we had taken was in keeping with an inflamed nipple. I rang Miriam to give her the good news. She received it with no hint of an admission that she might have been a tad over-concerned. I couldn’t hold my tongue. ‘Next time you try to remove your dog’s nipple, could you do it on Mondays or Wednesdays when Geoff is on call? He’s very experienced. He’ll know what to do.’

  DAINTY HANDS MAKE LIGHT WORK

  James

  James Herriot wrote that for ten months of the year sheep are just white dots on green hillsides, but for the other two months they fill the vet’s life with work and wonder and disappointment as the lambs start to come. That isn’t true for Australian vets. To us, sheep are more like off-white dots on brown hillsides for the entire year. Despite there being tens of thousands of sheep around Barraba and Manilla, I rarely saw one in a veterinary capacity. It’s not financially viable for a farmer to call a vet for an animal that is worth about the same as the call-out fee.

  When I arrived at Abergele and John was showing me around, he took me out the back to a shed with a washing machine and other bits and pieces in it. Among them was a strange stainless-steel table with a half-crescent bend and railings down both sides.

  ‘What on earth is this?’ I’d asked, knowing that it must have some veterinary function.

  ‘It’s a sheep caesarean trolley.’

  ‘What?’

  John must have picked up my expression of ignorance. ‘What happens,’ he explained, ‘is that when they’re lambing and they have trouble, the farmer puts the sheep in their van and brings ’em in. If we can’t get them out, we do a caesarean on this table.’

  In my two years in Barraba I’d only done one sheep caesarean – on a prized dorper ewe. From my limited experience (did I mention that I won the HC Belschner Prize in Sheep and Wool at uni?) I knew sheep caesareans didn’t take long. Twenty-five minutes if you were quick.

  ‘Right, and what do we charge for this?’

  ‘About forty quid.’

  And so it was that as the earth started to warm through March and April – so that instead of being miserably cold it was just darned cold – the grass started to grow, the ground dried and the hillsides filled with white dots unleashed from the sheds. Among them were even smaller dots, the lambs experiencing the joy of frolicking and gambolling on grass so green that it was hard to look at. And along with the new lambs arriving, the sheep caesarean trolley became more than just another piece of gear cluttering the shed. The phone would ring in the middle of the night. It would be a crusty farmer slipping between English and Welsh waking me from my beautiful slumber, and once he’d ascertained I wasn’t English he’d tell me he was coming in with a ewe. I’d wander downstairs, pull my overalls over my pyjamas and wait for the van to pull up. He’d bring the sheep in, usually a Welsh breed called a Lleyn, often crossed with a Texel or Dorset breed. The Welsh farmers struggled to perform lambings that involved reaching inside the sheep. To a man, they had these enormous hands. No matter how small their stature, hanging on the end of their arms were huge fleshy paddles. I had the advantage of possessing dainty hands which were very useful for manipulating limbs inside a sheep.

  ‘Oh, laddy, if I had hands like that, lambing would be a breeze,’ they’d tell me.

  John was very happy to have me on board because he had Welsh farmer hands too. But, little hands or not, sometimes I just couldn’t get the lambs out. Often it would be twins or triplets all tangled up inside. There’s a very limited space within a ewe to get in and manipulate things around, so you often proceed to the caesarean.

  Sheep are fascinating. They run away from you, but if you catch a sheep and tip it over onto its bum, it doesn’t fight. It just gives up. They’re like: ‘Hey, I’m a prey animal. I’ve achieved my destiny. Come and eat me.’

  So we’d lay a sheep on the table with the farmer holding her head. We’d tie the legs and then loop the rope under the table and back over the sheep just in front of the back legs, then do the same across the front. I might sometimes sedate the sheep but usually not. We’d put a local in for pain but they wouldn’t need sedation. They’d just patiently wait to be eaten. I’d shave up the side, quickly prep it up, make my incision, go in and within minutes I’d be pulling out twins or triplets all knotted together. I’d stitch up the uterus, then the muscle, hand the farmer the lamb and the ewe, unzip my overalls and go back to bed.

  Sometimes, however, I’d look out and there’d be another two vans outside waiting. The number would vary between none and four in a single night on-call. It was an amazing process that just does not happen in Australia.

  I asked John why he charged so little for it.

  ‘Well sheep are worth about £100,’ he said. ‘If we charged any more, they wouldn’t come. We don’t make any money out of the operation but we provide it as a service. That way the farmers can justify having them and coming to us for their other problems.’

  It made sense and was a good lesson in community service. Lambing was also good fun and I can say I’ve done more sheep caesareans than most Aussie vets – all within a two-month window of my career. After that window closed, sheep went back to being mere white dots on green hills with even smaller dots chasing them around. The caesarean trolley went back to cluttering the shed – unless we were using it as a very fast way down the hill to the George and Dragon . . . but that’s another story.

  A GOOD JUDGE OF CHARACTER

  Anthony

  You get screamed down by the behaviourists if you start to say that dogs hate you. That is anthropomorphic, they’ll say. You’re giving human traits to animals. The current wisdom is that animals remember you, but it’s not hate they are expressing with their low growls and flashing teeth. It’s fear. In the same way, it is said that animals don’t defend people. People like to tell stories about how, when they were attacked, the dog jumped in to protect them, but apparently it’s not true. The dog responds out of fear.

  As a vet, you see a lot of animals and the majority are indifferent until you stick something in them. Sometimes, however, one will instantly despise you for no good reason, while others will take an immediate liking to you. When a client brings in an animal that takes a shine to you, you puff up your chest and tell the client their animal is a good judge of character. When they hate you, you scratch your head and comment that there’s no good reason for this.

  Which brings me to the story of Carol and her dogs. We’d come to call our Tuesday
rounds to Shoalhaven Heads ‘the widow run’. At the time, the Heads was a quiet little seaside town of mismatched houses and tranquil waters. Retired couples would move down from Sydney to the lovely holiday destination they’d enjoyed throughout their working lives. They sold in Sydney, bought in the Heads and used the leftover to live on. But the husbands had a tendency to die first, leaving the wives stuck there with the family pet, financially unable to return to Sydney. I’d go around and visit them – they really liked the company and I loved it too, getting out on the road in my Magna.

  I remember the heavy smoker Edna Meadows coughing in unison with her dog, whose fluffy coat had discoloured like a smoker’s moustache. The dog had emphysema. Edna had it too. There is good evidence to suggest that pets that live in smoking households have a much higher incidence of primary lung tumours. Passive smoking pets. Edna’s house was always full of smoke and each time I left I’d be coughing along with her and the dog. One time Edna locked herself out and I had to boost her up and through an open window. It was awkward, hoisting this 80-year-old woman with her skirt dangling over my head, but I saw it as part of the community service that we offered. I really did feel that my role out there was greater than just looking after animals.

  There was another client, Carol Doulman, who took an instant liking to me, and me to her. She had a mousy-tan silky terrier cross called Bubbles, which was all over me from the very first time I walked in the door. Carol thought I was the bee’s knees because the dog loved me, and he was clearly a good judge of character, she said, as he licked my face while I tried to get my nose away from his chronic bad breath. I should have corrected her on the character thing because it was to come back to haunt me.

  Despite Bubbles’ apparent energy on that very first visit, Carol said the dog was down and flat. When I managed to hold him still long enough to get the stethoscope to his chest I heard the whooshing of turbulent blood flow, like the sound of a skier sloshing down the hill, instead of the crisp ‘lub dub, lub dub’ that you want to hear. I diagnosed a heart valve insufficiency and later confirmed it with an ultrasound. Basically the heart valves wouldn’t shut properly. It is the most common heart disease in small dogs.