Don't Turn Your Back in the Barn (Adventures of a Country Vet)

by Perrin, Dr. Dave

  "Surely he's not trying to play a tune. I haven't heard two notes yet that could possibly belong together!"

  "I haven't either," agreed Doris.

  "I can manage here. You sneak out and peek in Anthony's window to see what's going on."

  Doris feigned a look of shock. "Spying on our neighbours was not part of the job description!"

  "Neither was smoking dope, and you've been inhaling that all day!"

  Doris snorted and left for the lab in a pretend huff. We were still using an extension cord for light in the back room, and I knew that she wouldn't be likely to stay in there for long.

  "When's the landlord going to do something about a light back here?" she hollered. "It's ridiculous to have to drag this thing around."

  "There's one there. If you can believe it, it's on the ceiling under that big sheet metal tray. Apparently, the upstairs renters let the bathtub run over and the water wrecked some of Gunnar Larsen's photo equipment. That big galvanized tray over your head was a plumber's answer to the problem."

  "You've got to be kidding."

  Within a few minutes, Doris returned with her jacket on.

  "Can you cover the phone?" It was more a command than a request. "I'm going to slip down and get some more room deodorizer."

  The cat was off the anesthetic machine and was beginning to come around. He made faint paddling motions with his front paws and was breathing more rapidly.

  "I knew you couldn't resist going next door for a look," I laughed, pulling the cat's tongue out and removing the tube. "You're as curious as I am."

  "Don't be silly! I'm no peeping Tom."

  I had no sooner opened the kennel door to settle the cat than Doris burst back into the office.

  "He looks like he's giving a kid lessons," she blurted, before she was even over the threshold. "There's a boy about ten or twelve sitting there, and Anthony's teaching him how to finger the keyboard."

  Sure enough, Anthony was giving music lessons. Over the ensuing weeks, we were treated to about every possible squeak, squawk, and wail that could be manufactured by a manmade instrument. We had never heard evidence that Anthony actually knew how to play an instrument himself, but it wasn't stopping him from trying to teach others.

  The pace in the office really began to pick up. We experienced no rude surprises, and I was doing enough of some procedures that they were actually becoming routine. I was surprised how accepting people were of our meagre surroundings and how easily we could please them when we expended a bit of effort. One day around closing time, I was hanging a curtain to block off the surgery from the waiting area.

  "Oh, by the way," Doris called from the back room, "I've booked a dog spay for tomorrow afternoon. I wasn't sure how long it would take to do one, so I put it down at three. Would you rather do it in the morning from now on, or should I just fit surgeries in where I can find room?"

  My heart sank. I knew we were going to book spays sooner or later, but later would sound better than tomorrow! I stood up on the chair attempting nonchalance and managed to start one screw into the ceiling. I took a deep breath, and my heart rate slowed almost to normal.

  "It was Max Sneider who called," Doris went on, "and his dog just had a litter of pups three weeks ago. He drowned them all as soon as they were born, and he doesn't want to deal with her getting pregnant again."

  "Did he happen to say what kind of dog she was?" I was feeling so insecure about the procedure that I never even commented on the distasteful manner Mr. Sneider had chosen to dispose of the puppies.

  "He lives just up the road from my place. I see her in the orchard all the time. She's one of those tan-coloured hunting dogs—a little bit on the fat side."

  A little bit on the fat side was putting it mildly! Mandy, the Sneiders' golden retriever, was obese; perched upside down on the tabletop, she looked more like a walrus than a dog.

  I took more than the usual amount of time clipping and shaving the area for surgery; to tell the truth, I was stalling. Finally, I motivated myself to get on with it. The site was prepped, the drapes were in place, and the blade was fixed into the scalpel handle. The scalpel was poised over the most forward part of the incision.

  Anthony couldn't have timed it better if he had been peeking through a hole in the wall! Just as I started my incision, there came the most unnerving blast on a horn.

  "Oh no," Doris groaned, as the pitch changed. "Someone is practising his scales."

  As I made my incision through the skin and into the subcutaneous tissue, we bantered back and forth, arguing about whether we were being tormented by a trombone, a trumpet, or a French horn. We had finally decided on a trombone, when I got my first bleeder.

  "My God, I'm not even into the abdomen yet and look at that sucker bleed." As I waded through the deep layer of fat on Mandy's abdomen, vessels lay like booby traps in a minefield to slow my progress. Anthony's student had finished his scales and we were into the second chorus of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" by the time I ligated the last vessel in the muscle layer and made my way into Mandy's abdomen.

  "Will you look at that, Doris! She's got to be the fattest dog that I've ever seen on a surgery table."

  "It makes me want to get started on a diet," Doris said, surveying the scrolls of fat that billowed forth from the dog's tummy.

  Working my finger down the right side of Mandy's peritoneal cavity, I fished repeatedly for something that would fit the description of her uterus. Just when I was certain that the ligament I had applied traction to would produce the uterus for me, up popped a round pink blob that I recognized as the bladder. Our student next door was into the final throes of what I decided was "The Star Spangled Banner."

  "SON OF A BITCH!" My right foot found its way to the wall with four or five well-planted kicks. Doris froze, a look of horror on her face, then quietly made her way to the front and locked the door.

  "The Star Spangled Banner" came to an abrupt end, and an eerie silence pervaded the room. Now the only distracting noises were those of the traffic outside and the rhythmic click, click of the valves on the anesthetic machine as Mandy breathed in and out.

  My incision had been lengthened a third and fourth time. The entire contents of Mandy's abdomen were displayed on the drapes in front of me before I finally found the pink strip of uterus floating in that ocean of blubber.

  By this time, my gloves were slippery and gleaming with fat, and I was having a great deal of difficulty holding onto the tissues. My surgery notes and textbook had detailed the process: follow the uterus to its termination at the ovary, grasp the ovary firmly, and apply traction to rupture the uterovarian ligament that attaches it to the body at the level of the kidney.

  That all sounded fine if you could see it, but in Mandy all those structures were enshrouded in gobs of fat. I could feel a solid, irregular structure buried deep in the blubber. Assuming it to be the ovary, I grasped it and began to pull. The textbook had mentioned mild traction; I wondered when applying mild traction became pulling like hell.

  To me, mild traction occurred when tearing a piece of heavy paper towel or at the very most, when tying a shoe. Well, that was one tight shoelace! It finally ruptured with a pop that made Doris's eyes light up. She had been watching intently as I struggled to bring the ovary up and out of the abdomen. She quickly checked the colour of Mandy's tongue in an attempt to conceal her concern.

  "Just look at that fat," I whined, trying to imagine how the artery and vein that I was required to ligate would ever see the light of day.

  My hands were shaking. I was startled by the fact that such a dramatic rupture could occur without doing permanent damage to the dog herself. I grabbed a sponge and began stripping away at the blubber to try and expose the vessels. My gloves were now so slippery with fat that I could hardly maintain my grip on the ovary. I had just found the vein when an accordion lesson began.

  "Can you believe this?" I glanced at Doris in a plea for moral support. "This is supposed to be a routine procedu
re. Can you believe this?"

  Doris shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes. The accordion lesson proceeded with the same squawking and squealing as did every other session. I could just see the kid wrenching those billows back and forth and taunting the keys to scream louder and louder.

  Trying to tune it out, I focused on the task of working the gauze back and forth and stripping the fat away to leave nothing but the artery and vein. I applied my clamps and tied off the vessels. Next, I cut the stump, held it with a clamp, and watched for signs of hemorrhage. Gently releasing the ligature, I began tearing through the broad ligament that suspends the uterus. Several vessels were larger than normal due to the recent pregnancy, and they had to be tied off as I went.

  By the time I repeated the process on the other side, Doris was a nervous wreck. What with the squawks and squeals that penetrated the wall and my robust cursing as each new vessel sprang a leak, she was having difficulty focusing.

  The severing of the uterine stump and closure of the abdomen were relatively uneventful and, towards the end of the surgery, we almost relaxed. The spay from hell was all but over! Mandy was recovering nicely, and most of the mess had been cleaned up when Doris took her leave.

  "Are you all right without me, Dave? I'm sorry, but I've got to go to the bathroom in the worst way." Her body shivered uncontrollably. "I've been holding it for the last hour."

  "Sure, I'll be fine."

  Peeling off her smock, Doris hurried towards the back door. I knew this was a rush call because we both worked hard at timing our lavatory breaks away from that dingy little hole that passed for a bathroom. Sharing it with the barber shop annoyed Doris because nobody kept it as clean as she would like.

  I rolled Mandy onto her opposite side and gave her a few healthy thumps over her rib cage. She was shivering now and made a weak attempt at swallowing. I had the door to the kennel open and was about to lift her down when I heard Doris.

  Her scream was piercing! I headed towards her but quickly retraced my steps as Mandy tried to lift her head. I rushed back to the table and lifted the dog to the floor. She was coughing and gagging on the endotracheal tube and, as I pulled it out, she responded with a high-pitched whine. I could hear a racket and the sound of doors slamming. I took off in Doris's direction in time to catch her in the back room. She was struggling to slide the bolt in place to lock the door.

  "Oh, my God!" she shrieked.

  She was shivering convulsively, wave after wave. Her normal composure was in ruins—her hair ruffled, her blouse untucked, and her glasses perched precariously on the end of her nose.

  "Never in my life!" she managed to spit out. "Never in my life!"

  "What is it, Doris? What's going on?"

  "He was in there! He was in the bathroom!"

  She didn't speak while she concentrated on straightening her clothes and hair. She was finally settling down, and I could no longer see her trembling. She pulled her glasses off and cleaned them with a Kleenex.

  "He was in the bathroom," she began again, with more composure. "The light wasn't on, so I never gave it a second thought—with that damned bathroom back there, not big enough to swing a cat. I was undoing my skirt and squeezing through the door when I turned on the light and saw him sitting there on the toilet."

  "Oh, no! Who was it?"

  "It was that George, the white-haired guy who always hangs out on the corner. The guy with only one eye."

  "What did he do?"

  "Nothing. He just sat there."

  "What did he say when you screamed?" Doris didn't appear to appreciate the broad smile that adorned my face.

  "He said, 'Sorry, lady,'" she replied, with the tiniest trace of a smile.

  From that day forward, whenever something happened to get Doris upset or off track, I would try to get back in her good graces with the uttering of those same simple words, "Sorry, lady!"

  Today was shaping up to be one of those difficult days. It wasn't that I couldn't keep up with the work or that any of the cases looked particularly hard to handle. The problem was that everyone seemed to want an appointment for the same time of day.

  Things really got complicated when Mr. Renz called and wanted me to see Chico as soon as he finished work at four. He insisted there was no other time that he'd be able to come this week, and Chico was in a "bad way."

  The dog had been agitated in the morning and had dragged his bum across the white living room carpet just as Mrs. Renz was on her way to the hairdresser. As the carpet had been laid only two weeks previously, Alvira was less than impressed with the smelly, bloodtinged deposit that remained. In fact, she'd called her husband at work and suggested that he deal with Chico today, or both he and his dog could spend the night in the carport.

  The fact that my afternoon had already been booked for farm calls was the stickler. When I returned to the office from a herd health at Tsolum Farms, Doris was fit to be tied. She was discovering that being an orchardist had some advantages over being a veterinary receptionist. Today, no one was easy to please, including her boss.

  "It's not as if any of these appointments is a matter of life and death," I grumbled, scanning the day book. "Try and rearrange them so we can fit everything in and keep everyone happy."

  "But..." stammered Doris, "everyone insisted that the appointments be for the afternoon."

  "So that means you have to be persuasive. I don't want to sit around here with nothing to do for the rest of the morning, then rush around all afternoon. Unless you make some changes, I doubt we'll be able to fit everyone in without working all evening."

  "Okay," Doris replied with resignation, "I'll call Mabel Stern and see if I can change her appointment. She was very insistent that it be at the end of the day. I told her you like to get finished before too late and suggested that you'd have time this morning. She said there was no way she could arrange it until five or six. I finally talked her into four o'clock."

  Doris got busy on the telephone while I removed my coveralls and cleaned myself up. As I came back to the counter, she hung up the receiver.

  "I just can't understand people," she said, shaking her head. "This morning when I talked to Mabel, she was absolutely adamant that you had to come out tonight as late as possible. Now when I phone out there, her husband Jim says that he'd much rather you come right away—that he'll be able to help you now but won't if you come later."

  "Yours is not to reason why, Doris. Remember, the customer's always right."

  But Doris was right, too! People were strange, their actions irrational, their reactions unpredictable. Since qualifying as a vet, I'd often thought that veterinary students would benefit tremendously from more classes in psychology and human relations. I'd have loved to trade the classes I suffered through in mathematics and physical chemistry for those that offered insight into the functioning of the human mind. At the same time, it would be worthwhile adding a class or two in astrology so that we could better understand the compulsions of people. Maybe the stars could predict when demands on our services would be greatest, for it's fact that people always seem to want the same things at the same time.

  I pulled on my coveralls and headed to the Stern farm. With any luck at all, I'd be able to get this call done and be back to the office with plenty of time for lunch. As I pulled up the drive, I spotted Jim Stern throwing the last bales onto a pickup load of hay. I pulled up beside the shed.

  Shuffling through the boxes in the car, I gathered together everything that I thought I might need for this case. Doris had taken a rather vague history about a milk cow that was "just not right" so it could be anything. Jim jumped from the tailgate of the pickup. He was a tall, lean man who appeared to be in his early forties. His balding head shone from beneath the battered cowboy hat that he wore well back on his crown. A two-day growth of stubble adorned a face that was furrowed beyond its years.

  "Jim Stern," he said, pulling off a stained leather glove and extending his hand. "You may not remember, but I met you at the b
eefgrowers' meetin' when you talked on carin' for brood cows."

  "Good to see you again," I replied. His grip was firm, his hand warm and sweaty.

  "Don't know exactly what's up with Rosie," he grumbled, starting down the path towards the barn. "The wife seems to think that there's somethin' wrong with 'er. Took a look at 'er after your girl phoned, and she looked just fine to me. Called you back to cancel, but you'd already left. Seein's you're here, you may just as well have a look at 'er."

  Jim's stride was swift and purposeful, but the uneven wear to the heels of his cowboy boots and the bow to his legs suggested he'd rather be covering the distance on his horse. He pushed open the door to a fenced-in corral that surrounded the barn, and I followed him through. Two cows stood nose to nose at the end of the corral. One looked as if she were a Short Horn cross and the other, much smaller cow was a Jersey. Standing quietly with their eyes half closed, they were soaking up the morning sun in bovine bliss. As I watched, they each in turn regurgitated and brought up a cud. Chewing contentedly, they swallowed again. Neither cow seemed the least bit disturbed by our presence and it was only after Jim walked between them and cut the Jersey towards me that they even bothered moving.

  "This here's Rosie," he clarified, chasing her towards me. "Mabel insists she's off and way down in milk, but I can't see a damn thing wrong with her."

  I observed Rosie as Jim whacked her on the flank and herded her towards the barn. She was hesitant, but it was certainly not the slow, painful movement of a cow with hardware. It was the unperturbed, lazy movement of a sleepy cow that didn't want to be separated from her companion. In fact, Rosie looked comely enough to pose as a poster cow on a milk carton. Her confirmation was good and, although dainty, she was plump and well rounded. She had a full, nicely shaped udder and a hair coat that was sleek and glossy.

  Rosie had just reached the barn door when the corral gate swung open and Mabel stepped through. I had never been introduced to her, but I recognized her as the slim, long-legged brunette I had seen dancing with Jim at the Farmers' Ball. I remembered thinking at the time that they seemed a somewhat unlikely couple, Mabel being younger than her husband and not really looking the part of a farmer's wife.