Vet On a Mission

by Gillian Hick

  The ongoing nature of Bella’s condition meant that I saw Jenny quite regularly. Maybe it was the regularity of her visits that strained her poor car to its utter limits, so increasingly Jenny might arrive an hour or two after her appointed time, usually on an evening where Donal was out so I would be on my own at home with the kids by the time she announced her arrival accompanied by loud protests from her heroic car. Her consultations were usually interrupted by my having to take something off the cooker, or rescue Fiona and Jack from some over enthusiastic encounter.

  Far from being apologetic about her untimely arrival, Jenny seemed put out by my not-quite-undivided attention, and rolled her eyes every time the door opened from the house or the noise from the kitchen raised by a few decibels. I used to console myself that the time I spent working and away from doing all the things I felt I should have been doing with the kids would in time be justified by earning enough to provide a reasonable standard of living and potentially paying their college fees. Unfortunately, in Jenny’s case, I couldn’t use this argument as not only did she regularly leave me short of the already-subsidised fee, but I also sometimes had to give her ‘a loan’ to pay for her petrol to get home.

  On one occasion, Bella’s ears had flared beyond the levels of ear drops and tablets, so I admitted her for sedation and a more thorough investigation. Jenny was not put out in any way by the fact that I would need to keep Bella for a few hours until the sedation wore off. I suggested a local coffee shop, but with the somewhat limited mileage left in the car, Jenny opted to sit in the car.

  It felt rude to leave her sitting there, but she assured me she had an old newspaper and could occupy herself. I didn’t bother discussing the extra cost over the usual visit fee; Bella was in so much discomfort that I just couldn’t send her home without doing something to alleviate her condition. I sedated the little dog immediately, as she seemed quite anxious at the separation from her full-time companion. Jenny took Bella everywhere.

  ‘If she’s not invited, then I simply won’t go,’ she told me, clearly in a position to commit to her life as an eccentric spinster. I saw a few more clients before Bella was sleepy enough for me to examine the ear properly. I was with great relief that I gently plucked big clumps of matted hair from the delicate ear canal. Although I knew from the scarring in the narrowed ear canal that the relief would only be temporary, at least Bella would wake up feeling better.

  To save Jenny any extra delay, instead of letting Bella sleep off the sedation I decided to give her an antidote so that she would wake up within a few minutes. When I went to fill Jenny in on her progress, she had disappeared. As it was a beautiful morning, I decided she had gone off for a walk, but when she hadn’t come back over two hours later, I was beginning to worry.

  As it was approaching playschool pick up time I had no option but to lock up and head out the road to collect Fiona and Jack, and get them home for a quick snack, before collecting Molly from the dizzying heights of senior infants in the local national school at two. The middle of the day was always a tight period, with even minutes of a delay throwing the finely tuned system out of control. As though innately sensing my sense of urgency, Fiona and Jack chose to go in extra slow motion. The beans were too hot. The butter wasn’t spread properly on the toast and a list of other crises to the mind of a toddler. A full glass of milk spewed out across the kitchen floor just as Jenny returned. For once she was unannounced as on foot, and, seeing the locked back door to the surgery, she poked her head in the kitchen window.

  Jack screamed in fright at the head in the window while Fiona took the opportunity to dance up and down, shrieking with delight as the milk splashed beneath her pink boots.

  I had to leave Jenny as I piled the reluctant pair back into the car to race down to the, thankfully, very local primary school. Molly was full of news about a new girl in the class, but I only half heard her, as I planned to dish out a packet of rice cakes in front of a video while I discharged Bella, wondering why Jenny could never actually come at a time I was organised.

  Having gone through Bella’s discharge medications with Jenny, I went to hand her the bill. Jenny apologised and ran back out to the car. She arrived back with a large bunch of daffodils, which had clearly been roughly pulled from their roots and tied in what looked like an old tissue.

  ‘I knew there would be an extra charge, but I had nothing on me so I got you these,’ she said, offering me the raggy bunch of half-bloomed flowers. I accepted them graciously, trying not to wonder whether Coillte or one of the neighbours’ gardens had donated them.

  Just as we loaded Bella into the car, a shriek erupted from the sitting room, breaking the short peaceful silence.

  ‘You know,’ Jenny said to me, cranking down the car window as the engine reluctantly spluttered to some sort of life. ‘You might think you’re some sort of super woman, but you’re not. You might think you can do it all, but you’re neglecting those children.’ With that she reversed out of the drive way, and turned up the windy road, leaving a thick trail of smoke behind her.

  I was momentarily stunned, but only for an instant, as I then had to pull myself together to pick up the pieces of the latest calamity in the sitting room.

  It was evening before I actually had time to allow her words to register. I couldn’t help but feel that maybe she was right. When I had first set up the practice, it was purely because I could not get a job in mixed practice with a young baby. Night work and out-of-hours calls in a large-animal practice and all it entailed meant that I had decided to work from home, purely so that I would be there while the kids were small. I had always planned on returning to mixed practice once Jack was old enough to go to school.

  Some of the clients also noticed how increasingly busy I was becoming. One elderly lady came to visit with her two geriatric dogs, purely to register them with the practice as a friend had recommended us. She was an absolute lady and we chatted for some time about her two ‘boys’ and some people we knew in common. When I met the friend who had first recommended us she told me that Meryl had loved the practice, but decided not to register with as I, in her words, ‘looked utterly exhausted’.

  Although slightly taken aback, I was touched by her concern. Although I had never until that day, to my knowledge, laid eyes on Meryl, it seemed in the weeks that followed, that we were destined to ‘stalk’ each other, as we began to bump into each other in all sorts of unusual places: in a petrol station, at the post office, passing by the local bookshop. We followed each other all around Wicklow over a period of about two weeks. That Friday evening, we met at the check-out in Lidl. As I unpacked my piled-high groceries, I noticed a young mother with two small children behind me with only a handful of items. As I was unusually child-free that evening, I told her to go ahead of me. As she thanked me and passed me by, the man behind her snorted indignantly.

  ‘Just because you have all the time in the world to do your shopping, it doesn’t mean the rest of us have all day to spend in here.’

  I hadn’t noticed Meryl standing at the till beside me, but she had overheard the comment and was having none of it.

  ‘Young man,’ she said, although he was clearly in his sixties, ‘this lady is probably the busiest person you or I will ever meet.’ There was a silence from the usually bleary-eyed shoppers, as Meryl had spoken in tones loud enough for everyone to hear.

  The man looked away. Picking up his basket, he shuffled off to a till at the far end of the shop, which incidentally had a much longer queue.

  Meryl did end up becoming not only a client, but also a friend as, over the years, I tended to her elderly pensioners. We sat in her elegant back kitchen when, several months apart, I was called to assist with the passing of first one, then the other of her beloved pensioners, freeing them from the suffering of bladder cancer in the case of one, and simple old age in the other. Although devastated, Meryl was grateful that her boys’ endings had been so peaceful.

  ‘I hope when my time comes,’ she whis
pered to me, her then-frail hand holding mine, ‘that you will be there too.’

  Some years later, I discovered by means of a phone call from a kindly neighbour that Meryl was in her final days. Politely ignoring the ‘no visitors’ sign, remembering her request that day in her kitchen, I went up one evening to sit with Meryl, sadly not in her comfortable kitchen, but lying in a hospital bed, and thought back to the feisty lady that was too concerned to come to me as I looked too tired.

  She was not conscious as I sat and chatted to her, but deep down, I felt her presence was still there and that she knew I was there too. After a while, Brian O’Reilly, her local rector, arrived also and we sat for some time either side of her, reminiscing about old stories from the time we had known her. At one stage, one of her machines started to beep and, resisting the urge to get up and check it, we waited patiently for the nurse on duty to come in. Having reset the machine, she turned to myself and the Rev. Brian and kindly asked if we were relations. Brian immediately stood up and introduced himself as the Rector. She shook his hand warmly and asked was I a relation. ‘Oh, no,’ I replied without thinking. ‘I’m Meryl’s vet.’ Despite the nurse’s confusion, we all roared laughing and I feel sure that Meryl was highly amused to be laid out, flanked by the Rector and the vet in her dying days.

  In her time, and although Meryl had no children herself, she had always reassured me that our children were so lucky to be brought up in veterinary practice. She seemed to see the positives and the ways in which it enriched their slightly chaotic lives. She was always amused to see them flitting through the practice with an assortment of animals, and watched with great interest as they grew and developed their own interests over the years.

  I suppose it’s something that every working mother wrestles with, and there were days and moments where I felt I had got it badly wrong. Ken, the courier, brought it home clearly to me on one occasion in particular; I had been up sporadically through every night of the preceding week, as the kids and the clients seemed to have a hidden rota, carefully taking it in turns to ensure that I never got a night of uninterrupted sleep. Ken was unfortunate enough to have to make his way up the windy bends through the woods to the practice most days of the week, delivering orders, and became well known to the kids. Molly would, in anticipation of his daily drop offs, be waiting at the gate to offer him the customary ‘cup of tea’, which he always politely declined.

  He usually dropped the parcels in the back door, but on this day, I was unusually late opening up. I had dragged myself out of bed well after when I should have got up, and barked grumpily at the kids when they started wrestling with each other over some unknown offense. It was one of those days when I just knew I would have to hold it together for a few hours until the morning blues passed and my inner night owl kicked in. I couldn’t find the keys when Ken rang at the back door. When I finally managed to open the door, and peered out at him through bleary eyes, I was surprised to see him standing on the doorstep, tears streaming down his face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Taking a deep breath between peals of laughter. ‘I went to the front door, but the little one opened it and said you were in a bad mood, so I wasn’t to talk to you or I would make you cry!’

  And cry he did – laughing so hard! Thankfully he himself had four children much the same age as ours, so he didn’t ring Childline on the way out, but hopefully rang his wife to make her feel better.

  Despite my self-questioning, there were many good times too. Our house was always a noisy house, filled with people and dogs and cats, and even the goats sometimes chose to break in. The old Shetland pony made it as far as the sitting room one afternoon. As a child, with my allergies, despite my protest, pets were limited. In our house, we made up for it and probably even went overboard. Every bed had a dog as well as a child. The house was never tidy, but well-messed from being lived in!

  The hens and ducks were tamed thanks mainly to Fiona’s intervention, although the geese never really joined in. Clients became used to being met by a trio of geese in the driveway; we eventually had to rehome them to a client with a large lake after the gander got a little over excited in the middle of an evening clinic during breeding season. In the early days, before increasing client numbers made it cost-prohibitive, we used to make Christmas cards with pictures of our pets. When the geese featured one year, the local printers rang just to double check whether the cards were for the butchers or the vets?

  One afternoon in particular, I thought that maybe living in a veterinary practice was not such a bad upbringing for a child.

  I could hear the three kids in high glee as we finished up the clinic one afternoon. I knew Donal was home, so I didn’t have to check up on them, but I did wonder what they were up to that was causing such mirth and merriment.

  When I did get out to see them, it took a few minutes to work out what was going on. Molly’s rocking horse lay stretched on his side on the grassy area in front of the clinic, just at the point where the clients drive in and out. Robo the rocking horse was named after her first pony, the only word she would say in public for about the first eighteen months of her life, much to the concern of the local health nurse and GP.

  Apparently, Robo (the rocking horse) had been jumping a big jump, but got run over by a randomly passing unicorn. I listened carefully as they explained this to me, all of them talking at once. Anyway, the unicorn had apparently inflicted a severe wound, and now the luckless Robo required surgery. Unsure how to anaesthetise him, but having seen me placing the gas mask over our furry patient’s heads, the three had come up with a plan and, quickly acquiring one of Donal’s thick walking socks, assured each other that the smell would be enough to anesthetise the horse! So the horse lay on his side, enormous sock hanging over his muzzle, while Molly, as chief surgeon, wrapped the front limb in layers of vetwrap – not to be found in any children’s toy shop – while Fiona monitored the horse with the stethoscope and Jack sat on the horse’s head just in case.

  The three aspiring surgeons drew much entertainment out of the entire procedure, while later that evening I went to return the recovered horse to his bedroom, the used vetwrap to the clinical waste bin and the anaesthetic mask to the dirty clothes basket!

  But it wasn’t only their toys that stirred their imaginations. Despite the craziness of life in a veterinary practice, the live animals always provided much scope for real entertainment and life learning.

  Late one night, long past the time when the three were soundly asleep, I went to top up the horses’ feed and check the small terrier in the clinic recovering from a nasty bite wound.

  As I pulled over the door of the hay shed, I heard a tiny sound over the loud hissing of the goose, who had patiently sat on clutches of eggs over three breeding seasons, but never actually managed to hatch any. I listened again and knew instantly that at last, the goose’s patience was being rewarded. Carefully holding her beneath her head, I looked under to see a tiny, wet body still sitting in the half-opened egg. Goose eggs do not hatch as easily as hen or duck eggs and they often need assistance to break out of the thick shell. Although it was late and probably against the guidance of any parenting or child-sleep manual, I raced over to the house and, wrapping the kids up in warm fleecy jumpers and boots, brought them over, sleepy-eyed, to the shed. They were unusually hushed as I sat them up on the hay bale and gently withdrew the half-hatched gosling from its shell. Their eyes lit up in total awe as the little wet body began to shake itself and chirped loudly, demanding that I replace him with his anxious mother. We spent almost an hour there as three more of the large eggs began to hatch, and with each one they watched as the little body emerged from its cocoon to start a new life.

  Although, many times over the years, I have thought about the daffodil lady and oftentimes agreed with her, on that magical star-filled night, I felt that maybe I wasn’t doing such a bad job.

  Chapter 8

  An Unexpected Site Inspection

  Before starting to build th
e new premises, life seemed full-on – running a twenty-four/seven on-call practice out of a utility room with three pre-school children. So taking the practice out of the house seemed like a good idea; at least my nightly routine would no longer include dividing the soiled vet beds from the kids’ clothes to wash separately in the washing machine that resided in the bathroom (with the tumble dryer perched precariously on top as the utility room was otherwise occupied). I used to put on a load going to bed and hope it would be finished before Jack woke in the night so I could get another load on once he had settled. Most people store shoes or spare blankets under their beds. Ours was packed with sacks of dog food as our tiny premises didn’t stretch to holding more than two or three sacks at a go.

  Competition was fierce in the world of dog food sales, and when one of the sales reps saw our potential for growth, he offered me a weekend away if I would commit to their food for the next twelve months; I asked him if he would babysit the kids some Friday night instead, but he declined. Sales reps are inevitably a part of any business. In the early days, some of them went out of their way to help me, going beyond the call of duty to get me up and running, clearly in awe or perhaps in shock, watching me try to balance the practice with the toddlers. Some, however, clearly didn’t see past their own sales figures, and would call in unannounced when I was trying to stitch up the morning’s bitch spay before hurrying to collect the kids from playschool.

  So the idea of having a separate premises from which to run the practice was not only appealing, but rapidly becoming essential. With John lined up to supervise the entire project, things began to happen.