Vet On a Mission

by Gillian Hick

  The first day we reopened, about a third of the day was taken in giving refunds for pork purchased from the previous week. We courteously handed back the money and apologised for any inconvenience.

  ‘An inconvenience it surely is,’ one woman assured me sternly. ‘You’ve no idea how much this has put me out. I had friends coming over for a meal, and the recipe clearly stated that the four streaky rashers are essential to flavour the stew.’

  I smiled weakly, trying to looking convincingly understanding, as I handed her back her couple of euro.

  One caught me by surprise.

  ‘I wasn’t going to bother you looking for my money back for the pound of pork pieces I bought,’ she told me. I thanked her graciously. ‘But,’ she continued. ‘I did have a problem with them. You see I didn’t want to eat them myself, but I didn’t want to throw it out either so I fed it to the dog and he had the most terrible diarrhoea overnight. Do you think that the meat really was poisoned?’

  Gently I questioned her as to whether she would usually feed ‘Tiny’ (her miniature terrier) a pound of pork pieces, conscious of the ever-growing queue.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she replied, ‘he only ever gets his dry biscuits, but I thought it might be a little treat for him.’

  I explained that maybe it was more due to the sudden change of diet and not the quality of the pork, and suggested she fast him for the next twenty-four hours and hoped that would solve the problem.

  ‘Oh, thank you very much,’ she replied, putting her purse back into her handbag. ‘You seem to know a bit about dogs yourself.’

  It turned out that this wasn’t the only implication of the pork crisis for the canine population. Mrs Jones wasn’t the only one who thought that the contaminated pork would be a tasty treat for her dog. That evening I drove home with the kids once more in the pyjamas – the only clothing I had seen them wear all week. I was hoping for a quiet clinic when Ralf phoned me apologetically. ‘That dog I saw for you this afternoon really feels like he has a blockage. He’s been on fluids all afternoon, but we have our staff party tonight so I can’t get back down to check him.’

  With the kids dining on takeaway fish and chips in front of a DVD, I groaned as I palpated the dog’s tender abdomen. Clearly, something solid, deep in his intestine, was causing the painful, ragged breathing, despite the heavy pain relief and anti-spasm medication that Ralf had treated him with that afternoon. Amanda had set up the theatre just in case, but had long since gone home. I was grateful to my years of working without a nurse that I was comfortable taking on the role of anaesthetist, surgeon and nurse all at once. I worked silently, almost on automatic pilot, cautiously anaesthetising the little guy, who relaxed gratefully onto the surgical bed. Within minutes I was slicing through his midline, revealing bulging, gas-filled intestines. Following the gassy gut quickly led me to a sharp object within a loop of inflamed, small intestine. Thankfully, due to his rapid diagnosis, the gut appeared healthy so, clamping off both ends, I incised into the affected portion, to reveal a large fragment of sharp bone.

  ‘Yeah, that’s a piece of a pig’s vertebrae,’ confirmed Donal not long before midnight that night, when we were finally getting ready for bed. Thankfully Beanie made an uneventful recovery and was bright and perky when I left at six the next morning. I left the discharge notes ready for Amanda to pass on to the owner.

  By 23 December, even the kids were getting weary of the pancakes-and-pyjamas routine.

  In the life of a butcher, 23 December is the worst day of the year. All the customers are panicking and frazzled, as though only just realising that Christmas is around the corner and you know that you still have to deal with getting up the next morning. At least on Christmas Eve the end is in sight. Knowing it was going to be a long day, I had left a note for Amanda, asking her to put people off until eight that evening, hoping I could manage the few cases without an extra pair of hands. Luckily the majority of clients were grateful to be seen and glad of the few extra shopping hours. Of course I did manage to ruin yet another person’s Christmas: Harvey, a cherubic Chihuahua with an aggressive streak worthy of a much larger dog always needed at least two people to restrain his tiny body to clip his toe nails, and they suddenly urgently needed clipping that day.

  It was almost seven that evening by the time I got out of the shop. As I half-jogged the short distance to the church car park, I was mentally calculating how long it would take to get over to Granny’s house to collect the kids and the promised lasagne and apple tart and get back to the clinic. I couldn’t face another set of phone calls to reschedule people.

  In the dark evening it took a few seconds to register that the large yellow piece of metal attached to my front wheel was a car clamp. I stared stupidly at it for a few minutes, willing it to disappear. I could have cried when the reality sank in. In fact, I think I did cry until I noticed a few other people passing me by, all dressed up as though looking forward to an evening out, throwing strange looks at me. By then the effect of the last ten days really began to sink in.

  Desperately, I pleaded with myself not to fall apart for just one more day. I phoned the clampers’ number and wearily recited my credit card numbers, at this stage resigning myself to adding another eighty euro to the massive overdraft that was eventually rolled into a five-year bank loan to fund this year’s Christmas. When the clamper finally arrived, I smiled weakly at him, willing myself not to cry. I apologised if I had delayed him, reminding myself that he too, like the rest of us, was just doing a job.

  ‘Well, that’s what you get for spending the day up in Dublin shopping,’ he replied smartly. I really – I mean really – felt like slapping him, but thankfully just didn’t have the energy, so I sank into the car and wished him a Happy Christmas, hoping he would notice my tone of sarcasm.

  It was late, very late, by the time I got home, saw the few (thankfully grateful and cheerful) clients, fed and bedded the horse and other animals for the night and got organised for the final morning of my career as an authentic pork-butcher’s wife. The kids were well asleep by the time myself and Donal got to bed, exhausted but with a sense of relief that it was almost over.

  Although Christmas Eve was usually an exciting time of year, this year, by the time the last ham was sold and the final wash up done, even the kids seemed subdued, any excitement turning into grumpiness as they too had been put out by the whole chaos of the lead up to the big day. Santa arrived by the skin of his teeth that year, cheering up the kids enormously as they bounced back into full action. But that morning as I almost dozed through Christmas Mass, I wondered how we had all got it so wrong. How it all could have turned into such madness and how people could delude themselves into believe that having a ham or a half pound of stuffing could make such a difference to what should have been the simple message of Christmas?

  The Christmas Mass, which I normally enjoy, seemed totally meaningless that year as I looked around at everyone dressed up in all their finery. When my work phone buzzed, volume turned down, halfway through, I was grateful for an excuse to leave. Even though the dog in question didn’t need to be seen, I walked home on my own, leaving Donal and the kids to follow me. I threw a chicken in the oven and prepared a few roast potatoes – the full extent of our Christmas dinner as neither of us had the heart for anything more. Then I sat and drank a cup of tea – the first fifteen minutes of rest I had managed in well over a week.

  Thankfully, the excitement of the day and the exhaustion of the week meant that the kids went to bed early that night, and we followed closely behind them.

  To my shame, it was Donal who was the first to think of the obvious point that everyone else had missed. ‘Where,’ he wondered, ‘was the animal welfare in all of this?’

  Prior to the massive changes in legislation over his years as a butcher, small farms had kept a small number of pigs, being fed local food and moving on to small local slaughterhouses. With the change to massive pig units, the pigs themselves had become just a number. The day aft
er the entire Christmas stock had been loaded into a skip, word had come through that the factory Donal had purchased his meat from had been clear all along. Apart from the obvious waste of food, which could have fed vast communities of people in need, how many pigs had been needlessly slaughtered because of human corruption in sourcing cheap food supplies? For a nation of people who supposedly have animal welfare close to their hearts, there was little comment on the fact that so many thousands of pigs had been slaughtered because of human greed – at a time of supposed goodwill to all.

  Chapter 13

  Dreams of Donkeys!

  I dream a lot. Even as a child I dreamt a lot. Sometimes the dreams are hazy and disconnected; sometimes they are clear and logical. Sometimes the dreams are more clear and logical than the craziness of running a veterinary practice! When I first qualified as a vet, the dreams got madder especially when I started to do night calls – the bane of every vet’s life. In the early days, I would lie awake every night that I was on duty so that when a call came in, it was almost a relief to just get up and get on with it. But as the novelty wore off and experience slowly kicked in, I began to develop the practice of ‘automatic pilot’ – I could speak to a client in an apparently coherent manner, dress, drive to the call, carry out whatever function was required in a relatively adequate manner and be back in bed without ever fully engaging myself.

  It was a skill that came in very handy when the kids arrived – a big bonus for any parent. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and it would take me a few moments to decide if the night’s events had been a dream or had actually happened.

  One such occasion arose after a particularly long week, where my sleep had been interrupted several times for a few nights in a row. The clients and kids had been particularly imaginative in ensuring that I never got a full night’s sleep just in case I got used to it. Usually this was when the dreams became even more irrational and this night was no exception.

  I couldn’t even remember going to bed and was asleep within minutes which was very unusual for me. I’ve no idea what time of the night I slipped into my dream-state to one of those dreams that was at the same time totally illogical but very clear. In the dream the phone rang like an ambulance siren, but when I answered it, the call was from a client from one of the nearby housing estates who I saw on a reasonably regular basis with his two Jack Russells. However, this time it was the donkey that was in trouble. I’d say I could count on one hand the number of donkeys I treat each year, but who was I to argue with my dream-state logic as the client asked me to call out to a donkey in a housing estate who was apparently in great discomfort and frothing at the mouth.

  Even in the middle of the day, taking directions is always somewhat challenging for me and I remember well that when I started in my first mixed-animal practice job, my biggest concern was not whether I would be able to manage to calve the cow, but simply finding the cow! On this occasion, I don’t think even the modern joys of Google maps would have guided me to donkey in a housing estate.

  Somehow in the typical randomness of dreams, I made my way to the housing estate, driving through back roads and wandering through a maze of houses before I was stopped by a man with a flashlight, guiding me to a corner house. Abandoning the warmth of the car, I followed the hooded stranger to a dimly lit back garden, which expanded into a significant larger space than was apparent from the front of the house. As the back garden became flooded in light, I looked in awe at a meticulously manicured garden, planted on either side with ornate bushes and neatly divided by a tiny pebble-lock path. My gaze followed the tiny pathway of the back of the garden, and there was a little thatched cottage, the dark straw roof in stark contrast to the brilliant white of the rough walls. A tiny red door was the only splash of colour. The top half was open, revealing the dimly lit interior of the quaint abode. Feeling somewhat like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I cautiously peered in though the opened top half of the door, allowed my eyes to adjust to the light until I could focus quite clearly on a donkey standing in the corner behind an old-fashioned kitchen table and chairs. The dim light, I could see, was coming from the stove in the corner.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked the donkey, my voice sounding slightly eerie and out of place. I startled when the hooded man pushed past me and went inside.

  I could feel the soft rubber of the earpiece of the stethoscope as I auscultated the donkey’s slightly rounded tummy. The eerie silence was broken by spasmodic gurgling in all four relevant sections of the gut, indicating that there was no obstruction or blockage. Magically producing a bottle and some needles and syringes from the large pocket of my waxed jacket, I drew up a reduced volume, to match the diminutive size of the donkey compared to my usual equine clients, and injected the liquid into the jugular vein running the length of his hairy neck. I looked around the small cottage and noticed with satisfaction that there was no feed available which might exacerbate the colic overnight. Leaving the cottage, I closed the half door gently behind me. ‘Nice to meet you,’ I called back the donkey behind me and felt slightly offended that he didn’t reply. As I reversed my steps down the little pathway, I noticed the neatly trimmed bushes on either side that could well have been the cause of his night time indigestion.

  My rumination was cut short by the sound of ambulance sirens blaring again, getting louder and louder with each tone. And then I woke, feeling the heavy weight of the duvet weighing me down as I tried to free my arm to knock off the alarm on my phone. As I checked the time, I realised with a start that I had obviously hit snooze a few times, as I was now a good twenty minutes later than I needed to be to get the kids up and off to school. I didn’t have time to dwell on my gentleman donkey in his thatched cottage as I made scrambled eggs and packed lunches in record time.

  On the way back from the playschool, I stopped in the local shop, picking the biggest of the still-warm, locally-made scones and within minutes was back in the kitchen, kettle boiling, thickly spreading the scone with butter and jam. I sat down with relief to enjoy a few stolen moments before going over to the clinic. Only when I was biting into the second half did I hear the text coming in on my phone. Feeling slightly irritated that my few moments were being interrupted, I waited until the last mouthful was swallowed and washed down with the dregs of the tea before I reluctantly brushed away the few crumbs and rinsed the tea cup. Only then did I check the phone to see what today had in store for me.

  I sat back down and re-read the text a few times before it sank in. ‘Thanks again for calling out to the donkey last night. He passed droppings about an hour after you left and looks right as rain now. Let me know what I owe you and I’ll drop it in later today.’

  As I said, sometimes my life is crazy and my dreams are so clear it becomes difficult to separate life from reality. That, combined with chronic exhaustion and an innate ability to take and follow directions, assess a clinical case and drive back home and get to bed without ever really waking up are probably typical patterns in the life of the few who attempt to combine on-call veterinary practice with three young children.

  It was a few nights later, having a cup of tea with John, that it began to make a little more sense. John being John, knew the retired father of one of the last remaining thatchers who had been a friend of the owner of the donkey who worked in a local drugs company but did a bit of building work on the side. The little cottage was an old cow shed that had been left at the side of a field when the housing estate had built and the thatcher and the builder and taken upon themselves to renovate it into a traditional style cottage. I assume the donkey was only housed in it for my benefit that night, but still feel a little put out that he hadn’t the decency to bid me good night after my efforts to help him through his ordeal.

  As I said, even when working in mixed practice, donkey calls were uncommon, and even more so when I was, supposedly, now treating only small animals so it was unusual to get a call to a donkey later that same week but this time I most definitely wasn’t dreaming.


  Edward was a regular patient. Nobody could ever quite work out how old he was. I had visited him a few times before we worked out that myself and Edward had in fact first met many years previously in my student days. Every Christmas the Mansion House in Dublin hosts a ‘live Christmas crib’. I can’t remember if there was a live Mary and Joseph or a baby at all, but I well remember the wooden crib that was erected each year to house the donkey and sheep, and a random assortment of other animals that participated. Thousands of kids from Dublin and further afield remember the excitement of going to see these animals each year as one of the highlights of the Christmas season.

  As veterinary students we were asked to volunteer to work shifts to supervise the animals and answer any questions the passers-by might have and – realistically – to protect the animals from the potentially excessive interest. I did it a few years in a row and well remembered the quiet old donkey who stood patiently in the corner, never over-engaging with his audience, always polite and never putting a hoof out of place.

  It was many years later when I was called out by a neighbour who had been involved in renting animals to film companies to examine the donkey, who was slightly lame. Having dealt with the lameness, we sat down for a cup of tea and I began to tell Karen, the owner, about the student days looking after the crib animals. Her smile broadened into a wide grin before she eventually broke into a loud laugh.

  ‘That,’ she announced, ‘was Edward.’ It turned out she had taken over the care of Edward from his previous owner, the infamous Joe Gallagher, after he passed away. He was now living out his retirement, munching his way through a lush field in Ashford. It took me a while to be convinced that it was the same donkey, as Edward had been an old donkey when I first knew him many years earlier. After that we tried to ascertain his actual age, but we could never pin it down. Edward, it appeared, was timeless!