Trust Me, I'm a Vet: The Otter House Vets Series

by Cathy Woodman

  I watch as Emma picks up a scalpel and uses it to cut a line through the skin over the dog’s belly, then snips right through with forceps and scissors, releasing a gush of blood, a coil of gut and even more blood.

  ‘I’ll need more swabs,’ she says calmly.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘As many as we’ve got.’

  I rip open a couple of packets of gauze swabs and tip them out onto the instrument tray on the stand. Emma uses a fistful to dab at the blood. Sweat begins to form in beads across her forehead. I watch her bite her lower lip as she concentrates on finding the source of the bleeding. If anyone can save Robbie, she can.

  ‘What do you think?’ Emma sticks the end of a suction tube into the dog’s belly. I flick the switch.

  ‘That it doesn’t look like a good place to lose a contact lens,’ I say lightly, although deep down my confidence is waning the more the scene resembles something from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  ‘Ah, I’ve found it,’ Emma mutters. Her voice cuts through the sound of blood spattering around the inside of the suction bottle. ‘It’s the spleen – it’s ruptured.’

  A greasy, metallic scent fills my nostrils and my hands grow hot with panic. I watch the blood from Robbie’s belly trickling down Emma’s plastic apron and into her Crocs, while his pulse fades to a barely perceptible flicker beneath my fingers.

  ‘Emma, I can’t get a pulse.’ Using a stethoscope, I try for a heartbeat instead. It’s very faint, as if I’m listening to it with cotton wool stuffed in my ears. ‘I think we’re losing him.’

  ‘No, we aren’t,’ Emma says fiercely, and she’s right, we can’t let him die on us now.

  Recalling the look in Robbie’s half-blind eyes, and the sob that rose in Clive’s throat as he held him, I summon all my resources.

  ‘Come on, old boy, you’ll have to do better than this,’ I mutter as I cut the anaesthetic, leaving Robbie on oxygen alone to support his vital organs, and fix up a second drip to run in more fluid. I guess in an ideal world we’d have plumped for a blood transfusion, but there isn’t time for that. Gradually – it seems like hours, but it’s only minutes – Robbie’s pulse begins to strengthen. It isn’t great, but it’s probably as good as we’re going to get, considering the circumstances.

  Emma continues to operate, and a while later the dog’s spleen lies on an instrument tray – a dark and swollen mass, like offal on a butcher’s slab – bristling with every pair of artery forceps I could lay my hands on. To our relief, Robbie has come through, and is now snoring in one of the kennels.

  ‘I’ll make a start on the clearing up,’ I offer as Emma finishes writing up the notes and clips the board to the front of the kennel.

  ‘Oh no you won’t.’ Emma pulls off her gown. ‘You’ve done more than enough already. When I asked you down for the weekend, I didn’t intend you to end up working.’

  ‘It’s been a bit of a busman’s holiday,’ I admit, ‘but I don’t mind at all.’ I’m used to it. You never know when you’re going to be called upon – it’s a hazard of the job. I thought Emma was used to it too, but I’m not sure she’s coping with the demands of running her own solo practice and being on call 24/7.

  ‘I don’t know about you, but I could do with a gin and tonic after that,’ Emma says cheerfully as she grabs the phone. ‘We’ll have one with dinner later.’

  I catch sight of my reflection in the silvery-steel lining of the cage above Robbie’s kennel and run my fingers through my blonde hair, half listening as Emma talks through the list of potential post-op complications with Clive.

  ‘It’s still touch and go though,’ she adds at the end of the conversation. ‘I’ll call you again in an hour or so.’

  ‘Now, where were we?’ she says, as we settle on the sofa in the staffroom with a welcome cup of tea, leaving the door propped open so we can keep an eye on Robbie. ‘When do you have to leave Crossways?’

  ‘In a couple of weeks, when I’ve worked out my notice.’ Two weeks? The realisation that I’ll be leaving Crossways so soon, the place I’ve called home for the past five years, hits me in the chest. It’s my own fault though. I went and lost my job – OK, I jumped before I was pushed. I broke one of the cardinal rules of the workplace – never fall for a colleague, especially one who’s recently divorced. When it all went wrong, I decided I wasn’t staying to have my nose rubbed in it.

  ‘I’m really sorry it didn’t work out, Maz.’ Emma takes off her theatre cap and ruffles her hair. ‘Mike seemed like such a nice guy.’

  ‘They always do at first,’ I say. Mike owns Crossways Vets in south-west London. Charismatic, successful and good-looking with the most amazing brown eyes. I really thought he was the one. He was clever and dedicated too, managing to mix working in a practice with some research work at the Royal Vet College, which might explain in part why his marriage fell apart.

  He’d been divorced for just a few months when I started work there, and I admired him for admitting the almost instant attraction between us, while wanting to hold back for his ex-wife’s sake. Perhaps that’s what made it so exciting, the frisson of Mike’s arm brushing against mine as he showed me the latest techniques for ligament repair in theatre, then the snatched kisses in the consulting room, before he announced to the rest of the staff that we were a couple. Funnily enough, they didn’t seem surprised.

  We moved in together and started making plans for me to buy into the partnership with him. We had four and a half blissful years together. Until he realised he was still in love with his ex-wife.

  ‘I’m going to find the next couple of weeks pretty humiliating, what with the nurses gossiping in the staffroom and Mike going around the practice singing like he’s James Blunt. He always sings when he’s happy . . .’ Robbie lets out a deep and noisy sigh from his kennel, matching my own sigh of regret. I try to shrug it off as I watch Emma top up Robbie’s pain relief with an injection, but I can’t – there’s nothing that can deal with the pain of rejection. ‘I’ll get over it,’ I say, the words rasping out of my throat. ‘My heart isn’t broken this time, just bruised.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ says Emma.

  ‘Mike wasn’t anything special,’ I reaffirm, but I know I’m lying to myself and Emma can tell too. ‘He had a hairy back – it was like nuzzling a shaggy dog.’ I wrinkle my nose at the thought. ‘And he was a bit of a geek. And he liked playing golf. And he was a faithless piece of sh—’ I stop abruptly. No point in getting wound up all over again. He isn’t worth it. ‘Men, they’re all the same,’ I say.

  ‘Ben excepted,’ Emma replies, glancing towards her wedding ring, a simple but weighty gold band, which she wears on a chain around her neck.

  ‘Ben excepted,’ I say contritely.

  ‘He’s my rock.’ Emma smiles, and I feel a twinge of envy that she’s been so lucky in love and I haven’t. ‘In fact, it’s partly for Ben’s sake that I’m asking this enormous favour of you. We’re planning to take six months out to travel – you know he’s got all those relations in Australia.’

  ‘Six months?’ That’s a lot longer than I expected, and I try not to let my dismay show. I was beginning to come round to the idea that, if I decided to work here in Emma’s place, I could treat it as a bit of a holiday, a couple of weeks in the country.

  ‘It’s doctor’s orders – Ben’s actually.’ Emma’s husband is a GP, which I guess comes in useful sometimes. ‘He says I’m stressed out, that I’ll have some kind of breakdown if I keep going as I am . . .’

  Her voice trails off and I realise that she’s been putting on a brave face since I arrived late last night. She does look completely shattered. I’ve been so wrapped up in my problems, so busy whingeing on about my break-up with Mike during our recent phone conversations that it didn’t occur to me that Emma was having a tough time too.

  ‘I haven’t been coping terribly well recently . . .’

  ‘When did you last have a day off?’ I ask.

  ‘Not since I opened
the practice.’

  ‘But that’s two – no, three and a half years ago. Emma! Why didn’t you ask for help sooner? I could have covered the odd weekend for you.’

  ‘I didn’t like to bother you – you were busy enough already.’

  ‘Not too busy to help a friend.’ I’ve known Emma for twelve years now and she’s always been there for me, always ready to help me out of a fix. ‘Do you remember when we first met? There can’t be many people who can say they met their best friend at vet school over a dead greyhound.’

  ‘I wonder if Professor Vincent is still stalking the Dissection Room, scaring the life out of first-year vet students.’ Emma smiles. ‘What did he used to call you? Gwyneth, wasn’t it? As in Gwyneth Paltrow. And I was Catherine Zeta Jones, which was rather flattering, I thought.’

  ‘I didn’t make a terribly good first impression, did I?’ I say, recalling how I’d been fiddling with the knot on the canvas roll holding my dissection kit when suddenly it came undone and my shiny new scalpels, forceps and scissors skittered across the floor to land at Professor Vincent’s feet.

  ‘There was one person you impressed,’ Emma says, getting up from the sofa.

  ‘Oh, don’t.’ I know exactly who she’s talking about. Ian Michelson. Sandy blond with hazel eyes and a few freckles across the bridge of his nose, good-looking and clean-cut with a brilliant smile and glasses, he shared our greyhound. When our gloved fingers touched, very briefly, across the dog’s brindle chest, my heart skipped a beat and I fell for him. We went out together for almost six years. He was my first boyfriend, my first love, my first heartbreak.

  I watch Emma walk across to look at Robbie. She checks on his wound and covers him with a blanket to keep him warm.

  Emma has stuck by me and helped me through the difficult times – when I thought I was too cack-handed to be a vet, and when I ran out of money and nearly had to abandon my studies halfway through the course – which is why I’m going to do this for her. Even if I do have to spend six months stuck in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest Starbucks. I owe her.

  Chapter Two

  Country Ways

  Mike doesn’t have the courage to say goodbye, but that’s the kind of man he is. I glance back in the rear-view mirror when I stop at the traffic lights a few yards down the road from Crossways. The figures of the people in the waiting room are silhouetted against the windows, and as far as I know, Mike is hiding behind the blinds in his consulting room.

  From the group who came out to wave goodbye – some of the staff and the chap from the corner shop who’s also one of my favourite clients – only Janine, the ex-wife who hounded me out, is left. Having turned up at the practice today on the excuse that her dog needed its booster, she stands on the pavement with her arms hugged around her chest – with glee, I imagine, that she’s seen me safely off the premises and out of temptation’s way. But she needn’t worry: to be honest, the way I feel at the moment, I can’t imagine being tempted by any man again. Ever.

  If you put me in a room with Jude Law, Daniel Craig and Brad Pitt right now, would my heart beat a little faster? I doubt it.

  When the lights change, I put my foot down and I’m off, joining the queue of traffic leaving the capital.

  There isn’t much room for luggage – I’ve sent most of my belongings ahead by courier – but I’ve stuffed a couple of clinical waste bags of clothes and books in the passenger footwell. At least one of my contemporaries from vet school is driving about in an Aston Martin with a personalised number plate, something like K9 VET, and others have monster gas guzzlers. But I love my sporty red coupé, even though it’s rather impractical for a vet.

  On the seat next to me is the box containing my farewell present from Crossways: a brand new stethoscope, with the card all my colleagues had signed, reminding me not to leave it lying around in men’s bedrooms, which is what happened to the last one. (I was helping a client – a C-list celeb, it turned out, who’d once been on Big Brother – to catch his cat, which had taken one look at me and scarpered under the bed. Really.)

  I drive on, with mixed feelings of regret and inadequacy for not realising what Mike was up to when he was ‘helping’ Janine out by walking their dog, a dippy Irish setter with a penchant for swallowing pebbles. I thought it was fair enough that he did his bit since they shared joint custody. Naive or what?

  Eventually I enter the county of Devon, where the radio retunes itself, latching on to a local station which is playing some middle-of-the-road pop harking back to the eighties, and the weather changes from sunshine and showers to a steady drizzle. At the turning for Talyton St George the road narrows into a country lane with dense hedges on either side, and I run into the back of a traffic jam of all things, a queue of three or four cars behind a herd of black-and-white cows and a tractor with a sticker in the window reading ‘British Beef’.

  I glance at my watch and my blood pressure starts to rise, like the steam from the cows’ backsides as they wander along, stopping on and off to take a mouthful of grass or release a spattering of muck onto the road. I swap from the radio to the CD player. Take That start singing ‘Patience’, and I realise I’m going to have to get used to the slower pace of life down here.

  Finally, I reach Talyton itself, passing through Market Square where red, white and blue bunting flutters between the elaborately styled Victorian lamp posts to tempt tourists to stop at the Copper Kettle or Lupins the gift shop before they continue on their way to the coast. I turn into Fore Street, and there it is, my destination and home for six months, Otter House Veterinary Clinic.

  I leave my luggage in the car and dash through the rain to take shelter inside, where I find a woman behind the desk in Reception, dressed not in blue to match the decor, as you might expect, but in an orange, flower-power smock. When she looks up from a pile of post, I can see she’s in her mid to late fifties, and that locks of thick, honey-blonde hair seem to have come adrift from the bun pinned up on the top of her head, contrasting oddly with her wispy grey fringe.

  She turns her attention back to the envelope on the top of the pile, picks it up and holds it to the light, then takes a small knife from a pot beside the computer and runs the blade along the top fold to open it. She extracts the letter and spends a few moments reading it, before slipping it back into the envelope.

  Is it possible she doesn’t know I’m here? I give her the benefit of the doubt, and clear my throat loudly.

  ‘Name?’ she barks.

  ‘Er, Maz.’ I feel my brow tighten into a frown. ‘I’m Maz Harwood.’ I step forward, holding out my hand. ‘You must be Frances. It’s lovely to meet you.’

  ‘Your pet’s name?’ the woman says impatiently.

  ‘I haven’t got a pet.’

  ‘You’re in the wrong place then. This is a vet’s surgery. Don’t waste our time.’

  The fluorescent tube above me grows dim, then flickers and brightens again.

  ‘I’m not a client,’ I say, slightly cowed by her manner. She isn’t exactly welcoming. ‘I’m the locum. The vet. Emma’s expecting me.’ I make to go on through to the corridor beyond Reception.

  ‘Stop right there!’ Frances says sharply. ‘You can’t go any further – the rest of the practice is out of bounds to anyone who isn’t a member of staff.’

  ‘But I am.’

  ‘Not until tomorrow, I believe. Take a seat. I’ll buzz Emma, but I’m warning you – this may not be a convenient time . . .’

  Deciding not to cross Frances right from the start, I sit down, eyeing her from a safe distance as she stabs at the buttons on the phone on her desk.

  A few minutes later Emma appears in the doorway, in scrubs and surgical gloves. ‘Hi, Maz.’ She bounds over to greet me, giving me a hug. ‘I’m so glad to see you.’ She releases me and turns to Frances. ‘I hope you’ve made our new vet welcome.’

  ‘Of course,’ Frances says, cracking a smile in Emma’s direction.

  ‘Has the second post come yet?�
��

  Frances picks up the opened letter. ‘Is this what you’ve been waiting for?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Emma grabs it and turns away to read it.

  ‘Good news, I believe,’ Frances offers, feigning surprise when Emma turns back, all smiles.

  ‘Phew, what a relief,’ she says. ‘I’m in the clear. No case to answer.’ She tucks the letter into her pocket. ‘I saw a sick cat and booked it in for some tests – I was busy so it had to wait for a few days. In the meantime the owner took it to guess where, and old Fox-Gifford diagnosed renal failure. The owner followed up on his suggestion that I’d been negligent, and I’ve had to go through the rigmarole of contacting the Vet Defence Society, and answering questions from the Royal College.’ I bet Emma spent hours worrying about it, I think, as she goes on, ‘I could have done without the extra stress.’

  ‘I’m sure it was all a misunderstanding,’ Frances says, and Emma raises one eyebrow at me.

  ‘Come through. The coffee’s on and I’ve managed to restrain myself and save you a doughnut.’ She takes my arm and I accompany her along the corridor to the ward area, or Kennels as she calls it.

  ‘Did you realise Frances had already opened your post?’ I ask on the way.

  ‘Yes, she opens everything to save me time.’

  ‘She reads it too. I saw her,’ I add, which seems to be news to Emma. ‘Isn’t Frances a bit fierce for a receptionist?’

  ‘Maybe, but she knows her job.’ Emma grins. ‘I know it’s a bit unethical, but I managed to poach her from Talyton Manor Vets a couple of months ago. She’d worked there for years.’

  ‘You don’t think the Fox-Giffords deliberately set you up with her?’

  ‘No.’ Emma thinks for a moment. ‘Definitely not. They’ve been a pain in other ways, but no, I was the winner this time. She might read my mail, and refuse to wear the uniform – she says blue doesn’t suit her – and she still believes that the sun shines out of the Fox-Giffords’ behinds, but she has loads of local knowledge which comes in useful.’