Unlikely Companions

by Laurie Hess

  I SMILED AT Kelsie as she handed me my cappuccino.

  “Give Mr. Piggy a kiss for me.”

  She puckered her lips and kissed the air. “Say ‘hey’ to all the animals at the hospital for me.”

  With coffee in hand, I zoomed out of the driveway and onto Sunnyslope, toward the hospital.

  7:30 A.M., ANIMAL HOSPITAL

  I WAS THE first to arrive, so I unlocked the door and re-locked it behind me. I’d learned the hard way that no matter what the hour, if I leave the door open, someone with an animal will come through it. I turned on the lights and computer monitors and rolled up the shades to allow the early-morning sunlight to stream in through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Right on cue, Target, the hospital’s resident African gray parrot, opened an eye and greeted me. “Helloooo.”

  “Hello, old girl.”

  Not wanting to miss out on attention, Stop, the female red Eclectus parrot who shares the same cage, came alive with a squawk and a screech.

  “Good morning to you, too. I know it’s early. I’m not too happy about it either.” The two birds splashed around in their water bowls for a few seconds and then started their regular morning exchange.

  “RINNNNG . . . RINNNNG . . . ,” said Stop.

  “HELLOOOOO?” replied Target.

  “RINNNNG . . .”

  “HELLOOOOO?”

  The routine was as established as Target’s permanence at the hospital. Everyone knew Target—the staff, patients, and clients alike. She was a fixture in the waiting room, nearly as familiar as Marnie and Colette. I could hardly remember when she hadn’t been part of the team.

  Several years before, I had answered a weekend call from local police. “We’ve apprehended a bird flying around the Target store in Mount Kisco. We think it’s a parrot. We need to transport him to your animal hospital for possible identification and treatment.”

  Apprehended? I’d treated birds that had flown into all manner of windows and gotten entangled in toys. I’d even resuscitated a parrot after his owner rolled over onto him in the middle of the night (like I said, it’s not just cats and dogs that love to snuggle and cuddle), but treating a bird that had been arrested—this was new.

  “Okay, Officer, I’ll be right there.”

  I arrived at the hospital at the same time that a police car with its siren howling pulled into the parking lot. I walked across and approached a car with two officers squabbling in the front seat.

  “You can’t just open the door. It’ll fly out!” the officer behind the wheel warned.

  “Well, I’m not putting my hand back there,” his partner asserted. “He already snapped at me once, tried to take my finger off. You’ve seen that movie, haven’t you? Hitchcock, the one with the birds?”

  “Uh, yeah, Einstein, it’s called The Birds. And it’s a movie, it’s not real.”

  I would have enjoyed watching the two officers quibble if not for the tiny, frightened bird perched on the headrest in the backseat. I cleared my throat.

  “Officers, excuse me. I’m Dr. Hess. You called me about the parrot.”

  They both whipped their heads around in my direction and then looked back at each other. “She can get him out,” they said in unison.

  “It’s back there,” they said, pointing nervously toward the backseat of the squad car.

  As they prattled on, warning me about the dangers of trapping a “wild bird,” I slipped into the backseat. The parrot was not wild. I know immediately if a bird is wild-caught because around one ankle it wears a metal, ring-like band with an open slit on it, indicating it was put on after the bird was full-grown. Captive-bred birds, like the one I was looking at now, wear a solid metal ring around one ankle that is slipped over the foot when the bird is a baby. At first glance, this bird wasn’t much more than maybe four months old, and she was only about five inches tall. She had the typical slate gray feathers of a Congo African gray parrot with a few bright red feathers under her tail. White skin encircled her dark black eyes and her beak. I was pretty sure she was a baby girl.

  “Hello, there,” I said. “I’m going to get you out of here, okay?” I slowly reached toward her.

  “Don’t you need a cage, Doctor?” asked one officer. “Or a net?” asked the other.

  I ignored their attempts to be helpful and continued to reach my hand out toward the bird. I held my palm open and waited. The baby bird stepped gently onto my finger, and I stroked the top of her head and back.

  “You’ve had quite a rough morning, haven’t you?” The bird closed her eyes and relaxed under my touch.

  “Well, look at that, he likes you,” said the lead officer.

  “Actually,” I said, “he might be a she.”

  Indeed, she was a tiny African gray parrot, and she was missing a toe. After a thorough examination, I determined that her injury was well healed, so further treatment wasn’t needed. She was a sweet little bird, very tame and so young—the kind of pet parrot owners are dying to have and devastated to lose. How had she gotten lost? I wondered. How had she found her way into Target, and what would happen to her now? I took her back to the hospital with me to look after until we could find her owners.

  Colette contacted the local SPCA, and we entered a description of her, mentioning her missing toe, on several lost-and-found national websites such as PetAmberAlert; we even hung a poster in the hospital waiting room: “Lost and Found African Gray Parrot.” I was sure someone would claim her; African grays are worth a lot of money, even when missing a toe. I’d seen price tags as high as $2,000. I was surprised that even after several weeks, her owners hadn’t shown up to take her home.

  “I guess she’s ours,” I said to Colette one afternoon as she stood feeding the baby gray a slice of banana through her cage.

  “No argument here,” she said, pleased. “I’m all in favor of having a hospital mascot. But she needs a name.”

  We couldn’t come up with anything more clever than the most obvious one, so we named her Target and moved her into a permanent Plexiglas cage in the waiting room with Stop, and the two female birds have been gossiping like girls and greeting visitors to the hospital ever since.

  I FED BOTH birds and gave them a few strokes on their backs. Target began to whistle the theme to the SpongeBob SquarePants TV show: “Who lives in a pineapple under the sea—Sponge-Bob SquarePants.”

  “Shhhh, it’s much too early for that,” I whispered as I stroked her.

  Pet owners often ask why their birds talk so much. Parrot pets generally make a lot of noise because they are naturally very social animals. In the wild, they often live in flocks of hundreds. They forage for food, hunt for nest sites, and raise their offspring together, and through it all they talk, talk, talk. Many birds chatter all day, whether they are speaking unrecognizable “bird speak” or mimicking human language they’ve overheard or been taught. Klaus, an umbrella cockatoo—a large white parrot with a crest that opens like an umbrella—who often boards at the hospital, favors this greeting: “Hey, there, whatcha doin’?” in the deep voice of an older woman.

  Since arriving at the hospital, Target had developed quite a repertoire of songs she picked up listening to the TV in the waiting room. She whistles the SpongeBob song the most, as well as a few others that all have the same tiresome quality of getting stuck in my head for exceedingly long stretches of time. Most recently, the theme song to The Andy Griffith Show has crept toward the top of her playlist. When Target’s not singing, she and Stop have made a great game of parroting the chirping noises of every bird that comes through the front door, including cockatiels, lovebirds, and parakeets.

  Once Target and Stop settled down, looking as though they might both fall back to sleep, I tiptoed away and into the main treatment room, where I’d moved both sugar gliders, Lily and Mathilda, for easy monitoring by the hospital staff and where the slightest change in their condition would be noticed. They were sleeping together, side by side, so that the stripes on one blended with the
stripes on the other. I could scarcely tell where one began and the other ended. I ran a light finger along Mathilda’s fur to see whether she’d absorbed the subcutaneous fluids we’d flowed through an injection drip into them overnight. All of the fluids were gone; yet her gums were still tacky and dry, and when I pulled the skin over her back, it stood up like a tent, indicating she was still dehydrated. They were both roused by my touch, so I pushed some pelleted food in front of them. Gliders tend to wake up ravenous, but neither seemed interested in eating, which indicated that their weakened state had not improved.

  I left them to rest in the main treatment room and tried to tiptoe past the boarding room. Still, at the sound of my footsteps, the room came alive with high-pitched squawks and the scratch of scurrying feet. It wasn’t quite breakfast time, but now that the overnight animals were awake, I knew I’d have to feed them or face a riot.

  “Good morning, everyone,” I said to a New Zealand white bunny and two long-haired Peruvian guinea pigs, a leopard gecko and a panther chameleon, and a peach-faced lovebird and a blue-and-gold macaw. “Who’s hungry?” I lined up a series of bowls and filled them with veggies, insects, pellet food, and hay. Soon they were all happily munching—the birds making satisfied squawks, the guinea pigs hoarding and nibbling food in their hide boxes, the reptiles devouring insects whole. I closed the door to the boarding room and retreated to my office to begin making yet another round of difficult calls. Again Maxine was first on my list. I planned to ask her which mall she had adopted Georgie from. When she didn’t answer, I left her a message.

  “Maxine, I know this is a difficult time, but I may have learned something about Georgie’s death that you could help me with. The information might explain what made him sick so that I can determine the cause of his death.” I wavered, cognizant that what I said next might further upset her. “Maxine, I’m so sorry we lost Georgie, but you may be able to help me save other gliders who are sick. Please call me.”

  I went down my list of names, calling the other three owners of young gliders that had recently died under my care. No one picked up, so I left similar messages on one machine after the next. Then I waited.

  8:45 A.M., MY OFFICE

  MOST OF THE time an hour seems like an hour. Sometimes it seems like a lot more. This was one of those times. I could hear the hospital coming to life outside my office door. When I heard the familiar sound of the TV in the waiting room being turned on to Animal Planet, I knew Marnie had arrived. That cued Target and Stop to snap wide-awake and begin their battle over breakfast. Target would often push Stop off her favorite perch and hog the food. Stop would let out a deafening screech in protest. I took one final swig of my now cold cappuccino, pulled on my lab coat, and headed out to meet Marnie and Colette for rounds.

  Marnie had already beat me to it and was standing outside examination room number three. “I was just about to head in,” she said. “Thought I’d free you up this morning so you could keep an eye on Lily and Mathilda.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but their status is relatively unchanged, and I could use the distraction. Whom do we have in here?”

  “Gillian and her four-year-old ferret, Jenson, are our first patients of the day.” Marnie leaned forward and muttered, “I highly recommend a diet review.”

  I opened the door and greeted Gillian, who was dressed in electric pink yoga pants and a matching zip-up jacket. Dark hair framed her angled face, and her perfectly applied makeup was intact except for some smudged kohl black eyeliner under her eyes. I guessed she’d just come from the gym. She perched on the edge of the exam room chair, tapping her black Nike sneaker anxiously on the floor and holding a black-and-gray ferret that startled at my entry.

  “This must be Jenson,” I said to the lanky ferret, whose dark eyes were encircled by black fur like a mask. “Feel free to let him down on the floor.”

  Ferrets generally hate to be restrained. They’re naturally playful, independent, and curious creatures that love to pounce, run, and hide.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” she said without loosening her grip, “Jenson likes to be held.”

  He squirmed under her fingernails, and she clutched him tighter. It didn’t seem to be a point worth arguing, so I just smiled and pulled up Jenson’s chart on the computer screen.

  “It says here you want to discuss Jenson’s diet. What are your concerns?”

  “Yes,” she began quickly. “Jenson’s always been a healthy eater, but lately he hardly even picks at anything. It’s like he’s not interested.”

  At the mention of food, my stomach growled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since I’d left the house.

  “My husband and I thought that maybe he was tired of his food, so I picked up a new brand. But then I worried that the new food might make him sick, so I switched him back to his old food.” She shifted in her chair and began tapping her foot again; I got the feeling that many things worried Gillian.

  “As long as you picked up one of the name brands specifically made for ferrets, I’m sure it’s fine for him.”

  “Well, we weren’t sure”—she waved a dismissive hand—“so we decided to wait.”

  “Wait, for—?”

  “My husband thought we should try it first to see if it was okay.”

  I regarded her quizzically. “Do you mean you ate it . . . yourself?”

  “Yes,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We thought we should see how it settled with us before we gave it to him.”

  There are more than 8 million ferrets living in homes across the country, and I’ve treated my fair share of them, but this was the first time I’d met an owner who taste-tested her ferret’s food. My eyes dropped down to the pockets on her warm-up jacket. I wondered if she had any on her now. Even as hungry as I was, I wasn’t sure I could stomach ferret kibble.

  “And?” I asked with genuine curiosity.

  She shrugged. “Tastes like Kashi cereal.”

  I digested this information and then said, “Did it make you sick?”

  “No, so we finally gave it to Jenson, but he’s still not eating it.”

  “Okay, can I take a look at him?”

  Gillian hesitated, holding fast to the thin, struggling animal. Was I going to have to pry him from her grip?

  “I’ll give him right back.” I smiled and held out my hands.

  She released her hold on Jenson and handed him over. His fur was smooth and long. I set the squirmy ferret on the examination table to palpate his belly before he wriggled through my hands. He slinked along the top of the exam table, his little pink nose and whiskers curiously sniffing and twitching.

  “Jenson,” she quietly scolded and began to reach for him.

  “It’s okay,” I smiled. “He can’t get very far in here.”

  Jenson dropped to the floor and squeezed his long body in between the wall and the exam table. Gillian watched him intently.

  “He’s a good weight and has great muscle tone,” I said, “so I’m wondering if his poor appetite has to do with something else. What’s the temperature in your home?”

  Gillian finally looked up at me. “I keep the thermostat around eighty degrees in the winter. I hate being cold.” She instinctively wrapped her arms around her slight frame. “Is that too low?”

  “No, it’s high.”

  I explained that while many small mammals feel comfortable at the same environmental temperatures as their owners, ferrets, along with rabbits, chinchillas, and guinea pigs, are a different story. They’re sensitive to warm temperatures because their long and thick fur makes it difficult for them to release heat.

  “Jenson’s likely overheating, and this would explain why he’s not eating.”

  Gillian looked at me quizzically.

  “You know how it is when you’re so hot in the summer, you don’t want to eat?”

  Gillian shrugged. “I try not to eat a lot anyway.”

  “Well, either way, I recommend turning down the heat. No higher than seventy-five degrees,
and if there’s a room in your house that tends to be cooler than the rest, move Jensen’s cage in there so he can, you know, chill.”

  Gillian ignored my attempt to sound cool. “And what do I do about the food?” she asked eagerly.

  “Stop eating it.”

  I stepped out into the hall, savoring the image of Gillian eating handfuls of high-protein ferret food before heading to a ninety-minute spin class to burn off the calories. My stomach rumbled again, and I felt light-headed. I knew better than to ignore the signs; I had to quickly grab a snack.

  THEY SAY THAT caregivers—nurses, doctors, and most people in a medical profession—often overlook self-care. We look after our patients and forget about ourselves. This is certainly true of me. I push myself as hard as I can for the animals in my care and don’t make much time for my own rest and rejuvenation. I used to think this constant tendency to be in overdrive was just a by-product of living in Manhattan until I recognized that many of my city friends took time to slow down, at least on the weekends. I finally had to admit that my frantic pace was more about me than where I lived. Still, Peter and I hoped that by leaving the hustle and bustle of New York City for the quieter, calmer countryside of Westchester County, we would naturally unwind and create that idyllic home we wanted for our future family. The move did slow me down, but I didn’t make my health a daily priority right away.

  For the first few years we lived in Mount Kisco, Peter commuted in and out of Manhattan on the Metro-North train, leaving early in the morning and often not getting home until long after the sun had set. I was working nearly full-time, too, rotating on-call shifts at various veterinary hospitals in the area, while also caring for a two-year-old toddler and a newborn baby.