by Gillian Hick
By morning, Brook was neither better nor worse, still twitching slightly, but at least his temperature was stable and his urine output was copious – liberally soaking me every time I moved him! At least for the day time, I had Amanda and our new trainee nurse to take over some of the monitoring and I got to rest for a few hours in the afternoon, semi-slumbering on the couch in front of the TV with the kids.
By night time, Brook was frustratingly the same – perfectly comfortable, but showing absolutely no signs of improvement. I almost began to wish that something would change, either way. Despite Jim and Paula’s assurance that their kids were fine, I was sure they were struggling, not knowing whether their larger-than-life buddy was going to make it or not.
I had to make a decision. I knew from experience that I could do one night of up-all-night and still just about function the next day, but after the second night I simply wouldn’t be in a fit state to work or be responsible for three children. Ignoring all normal protocol, I packed a few boxes, and, with Donal’s help, hauled all the equipment that I would need to keep Brook stable for the night, over to the kitchen. The kids were delighted, preparing a thick bed of duvets and covering it with plastic and towels. I placed my drugs and syringes high up in a press, well out of reach of any inquisitive hands.
So that second night Brook stayed on the kitchen floor while I managing to top up his medications and monitoring without the journey over and back to the surgery. I had, on a few occasions, spent some or all of the night in the kennels with a patient requiring intensive monitoring, prior to the setting up of the Dublin emergency clinic, but at least with Brook in the kitchen I was still close to kids and could enjoy the comfort of my own bed even if for very short periods.
By this stage, all efforts at keeping monitoring records – often the most tedious part of a time-intensive case – had been dispensed with (thankfully a sister cannot really be regarded as a client and it was unlikely she would sue me if things went wrong). And really there was no change to record. Brook stayed stable but with as little sign of improvement as of deterioration. Each time I tried to reduce the dose of anaesthetic, the seizure activity immediately began to increase.
The phone calls to Jim or my sister, whichever was available, became increasingly futile as I relayed the same message each time. It was Paula who brought up the possibility of putting him to sleep. Apparently, the anaesthetists in the children’s hospital were intrigued by the daily drama and fascinated with how a dog in a humble vet’s kitchen could still be going, two days later.
By the third morning, as I tried to organise breakfast for the kids while Brook lay slumbering, attached to all the medical paraphernalia, it was Fiona who sat chatting to the patient. As I served up the hurried breakfast, I was intrigued by her continuous giggling as she sat talking to him.
‘He’s wagging his tail at me,’ she announced.
I didn’t bother to explain that his wagging tail was nothing more than twitching. Who was I to burst the bubble of a five-year-old? Amanda helped to carry Brook and all his equipment back to the surgery the next morning. Before moving him, I again increased the medication slightly, fearing that the movement could trigger a major seizure, which at this stage would make the efforts of the past forty-eight hours futile.
Before the evening clinic started, we repeated the blood tests, and although there was slight improvement in his kidney function, his liver was still struggling.
Wednesday was our half day at work, dating back to the days when I would close early to go my Blue Cross clinic in Ballyfermot on a Wednesday evening. At lunch-time, we had to reverse the journey of carrying Brook back to the kitchen to his designated hospital bed in front of the stove.
Fiona sat, arranging the increasing supply of teddy bears around his bed, thankfully not noticing the ones that went missing in the night after he had piddled on them.
I washed the dishes in slow-motion, wondering how long I could put off ringing my sister; we had agreed that three days would be as far as we would let it go without any signs of improvement before having to make the decision to push the anaesthetic past the dose of no return. I knew that the amount and duration of the medication in his system was dangerously close to, if not beyond, toxic levels. In the absence of the required level of intensive care monitoring equipment, it was reaching the stage where I was potentially doing more harm than good.
My internal struggle was broken by the sound of Fiona’s not unfamiliar giggling.
‘Stop tickling me,’ she squealed. I turned absent mindedly to prevent the squabbling only to see that she was lying alongside Brook and he was tickling her – his tail lazily wagging up and down across her head as it rested on his broad back. Quickly I glanced to the kitchen clock to see that yes, he had been due his next top up some fifteen minutes previously. Each time, I would wait for his depth of anaesthesia to drop and not until the tell-tale paddling limbs resumed would I add more anaesthetic via a port to his intravenous line.
But this time, although the heart rate had increased slightly, there was no limb paddling, only an intermittent wagging of the tail every time Fiona giggled. As I had long giving up on the charts, I could not fill in the response to external stimuli section with ‘wagged tail in response to child giggling’! Which was just as well as it would be never be approved if the case ever did get to being published in some fancy scientific journal. But yes, there it was again, the definite tail wag with each episode of giggling.
Fiona, delighted with herself for ‘fixing Brook’, was slightly put out when I had to relieve her of her duties, as allowing Brook to gradually come out of his enforced sleep could be slightly dangerous as his behaviour could be somewhat unpredictable and he could even be aggressive.
The next positive reflex I got was about two hours later, when the more continuous tail-wagging episodes progressed to a quick lick of my nose as I peered in the back of his eyes with the ophthalmoscope trying to ascertain his eye reflexes.
I tried to ring Paula a couple of times that evening and when she didn’t answer, I assumed she was avoiding the bad news. When I finally got hold of her, I was able to report that there was some progress, but although things were looking more positive, I still couldn’t guarantee that Brook would return to normal function.
But return to normal function he did! Although he stayed with us for almost a week, reluctantly giving up his stove-side private room to be downgraded to a general public hospital ward, by the following week he was fit to go home although he had lost a massive amount of weight and his blood results were still of concern. Six months later he finally got the all clear, when the last blood result returned to normal after a special liver diet that allowed his liver to rest and, as is often the case in a young and otherwise healthy dog, rebuild its own normal function.
We never did find out for sure the cause of Brook’s poisoning and I never did get to write up a scientific case report for the Vet Journal due to the absence of intensive care records.
And Frank, the postman in question, became a bit of a local hero – at least in the eyes of the kids who got their larger-than-life buddy back in one piece.
Chapter 17
An Intimate Relationship!
It seemed that the red kite reintroduction programme that I’d learned about from Marc was succeeding as, at first occasionally, but then with increasing frequency, I would see red kites circling and hear their distinctive cry in the woods behind us. When we first moved to the area, there was a nest of buzzards that we would see while out walking in the woods and they seemed to become accustomed to us as we passed, initially with buggies and back packs full of kids and, as the years went by, with our more adventurous explorers. The trees where they nested were tall, and they would sit and watch us and occasionally fly over us as though marking their territory.
It was some months after Damien’s visit to us that I first saw a kite circling in the woods behind us. Over the years, as the kite population grew, the buzzards kept to one side of
the woods while the kites, in general, kept to the lower side. In years to come, as the populations continued to expand, it seemed that a road divided their territory. I would sometimes see a kite perched high up in a tree on one side of the road, with a buzzard on his perch on the opposite side with a distance of no more than twenty or so feet separating them. All in all, it appeared to be a very amicable neighbourhood!
It was probably well over a year after Damien’s visit that I woke one Monday morning to see the local wildlife warden’s van pulling into the driveway. I had spent the weekend sick in bed and, as Donal didn’t open the shop on a Monday, he had dropped the kids to school and I had been hoping to get an extra hour in bed before going over to the clinic at ten. After a few minutes of bracing myself, my curiosity got the better of me. I slowly dressed and opened the gate instead of climbing it as I usually did, to go over to the surgery.
I didn’t know the new wildlife warden, but the box looked interestingly large and, sure enough, he pulled back the straw to reveal another red kite. Rough and all as I felt, the unfortunate kite looked a lot worse. He had been found in a ditch under some electricity pylons, and the assumption was that he had flown into some wires at speed. Despite my previous success with Damien, this guy looked fairly hopeless, but I went through the motions of weighing him, checking his tag number, injecting him with antidote, radiographing his body and full wingspan and then bundling him into what was now officially the bird unit under a heat lamp.
Marc rang later that morning and I told him that it was unlikely that the bird would make it. He was a good weight and – after getting through the wet and tousled feathers – I’d found that his condition had been good before the accident, but now he was severely shocked and, in addition, had a nasty, open-fractured wing. The harsh reality of working with wildlife is that if they cannot return to one hundred percent health, where they will be able to hunt and feed themselves, it is not compassionate to keep them alive. A kite with an open-fractured wing, with the bone protruding through wet and dirty feathers has a very poor chance of returning to perfect flight. As we chatted, we were both obviously pondering the options, but neither of us could make the call to simply euthanise him.
Ciaran, as he later became known, ended up spending almost six months with us, as he recovered sufficiently in the first few days to make it through an anaesthetic for the surgery to repair his wing. The wing, in the end, healed around the tiny pin that I had had to adapt to drill into the hollow wing-bone. However, due to the severity of the soft-tissue damage, and the complications of infection, he developed muscle adhesions that did not allow him to return to perfect, hunting, survival flight. The level of care that he required and received, especially in the early days when he had to be tube-fed on a regular basis before gradually progressing to crop feeding, meant that he became tame to the extent that he eventually ended up becoming a permanent, fully-engaged, and cheeky resident in a falconry.
If I had known at the start how much work would be involved in his recovery, I might have hesitated. I didn’t dare ask Amanda to add care of a comatose kite to her already busy daily workload and was happy to take full responsibility for him myself. For the six months he stayed with us, checking the in-patients and locking up at night, usually around half-ten or eleven at night, after the kids were all in bed asleep would be his time. Of course, his general care, treatment and feeding went on throughout the day, but with other patients to care for, along with their owners and with all that was going on with the kids, it seemed that the late evening was the portion of day that I had most freedom to spend a bit of time with him.
His recovery from the shock and trauma of his accident was much slower than that of either Damien or Hedwig and it took a full week of carefully dribbling a diluted meat solution into the crop via a home-made stomach tube. I would have to support his flaccid neck, using gravity to allow the liquid to drain down into his crop in an attempt to prevent him aspirating the material. Then we progressed to crop feeding – carefully forcing tiny balls of minced meat in to his crop and gradually increasing the amount and size. As he slowly became more alert, there never was a time that he seemed intimidated by me and he never showed any sign of aggression although I always stayed immensely respectful of the enormous, elongated talons. My own kids intermittently came to see him, although to them, it wasn’t overly unusual to have a strange animal hanging about in the surgery.
In the early days, I tried to minimise contact as much as possible to reduce his stress. At the time, kites were still quite uncommon, and I didn’t want a horde of people, however well-intentioned coming to see him so we secretly referred to him as the pigeon! As he got to know me, he slowly regained his feistiness, but when any stranger would enter the room he would slump dramatically on his back in a manner we referred to as his ‘dead pigeon act’ – an innate survival reflex of his species. I was honoured that he didn’t see me as threat and allowed me to see his true cheeky personality!
On one occasion, some months after his arrival, when he had progressed to eating large, roughly cut strips of meat mixed with small feathers to fulfil his dietary requirements and aid his bowel movements, I had him walking loose around the floor of the cattery while I cleaned out his cage. He seemed to enjoy these short outings and he needed to start using his legs and wings, if he was to rehabilitate to any extent.
It was late on a Saturday evening and I had had a call to a Doberman who had pulled a toe nail, deep from the bony area – the pumping blood that ensued brought the owners in to me very quickly, with blood spurting through the home-made bandage all over the back of their car. It was an easy job to sedate ‘Moby the Doby’ as he was affectionately called. I applied a tourniquet before removing the bandage and cauterising the bleeding vessel. Moby lay slumbering in the recovery kennel as Ciaran made his way from the open door of the cattery into the kennels to investigate. I was in the depths of the cage, scrubbing the incredibly sticky excrement that Ciaran supplied in increasingly voluminous quantities and deposited all over the metal bars when I heard a scuffle and to my horror, turned to see Ciaran, flat on his back, body keeled over in a dramatic death pose. For a split second, I thought that somehow Moby had awoken and escaped and attacked him.
Then I saw the confused-looking Doberman, still safely within the confines of his hospital kennel. He had clearly been disturbed by Ciaran’s scuffling and briefly woken from his drug-induced slumber to see a red kite peering in a him and momentarily jumped, startling Ciaran. I often wonder what dogs see when they are sedated or anaesthetised and have visions of them watching pink elephants flying around the room, but poor Moby must have got a fright to see the beak and beady eye of Ciaran and moved suddenly, triggering what I thankfully recognised to be his ‘dead pigeon’ pose! Within seconds Moby surrendered again to the remnants of the sedative in his blood supply and Ciaran, sensing that the danger was over, picked himself up and hopped off as though nothing untoward had happened.
It was at that stage that I decided he was ready to progress from the confines of the surgery out to a spare wooden stable, which Donal and Jack spent the weekend wiring to be fox-proof and assembling branches to provide a variety of climbing frames and perches.
Difficult as it was for Ciaran to recover physically, his ‘mental’ rehabilitation was proving even more difficult. It was my mistake that I spent too much time with him, and although I was conscious of not ‘taming’ him so that in time he could ultimately return to the wild, his need was so intense in the early days that by the time he recovered to any extent he was so comfortable with me that it became difficult to withdraw myself as much as I should have. At around the time that he progressed from eating mince ball to scrag-ends of meat, whenever I would go over to feed him late at night, Ciaran would start to sing as soon as I appeared. It’s a song I had never heard before and have never heard since he left, but it was a surprisingly melodic call, definitely similar in certain tones to cries that you will hear when kites fly overheard in the wild,
but at the same time very unique and different. I was thrilled the first time he did it and when he didn’t do it the next few nights, I thought I had imagined it,. But within a few weeks he would sing every night, initially only when I was on my own, but in time Donal and the kids got to hear it too; I had dragged them over to witness it as I think they thought I was losing it!
I seemed that Ciaran had decided I was his mother, or perhaps his mate – I’m not entirely sure which! While this was terribly flattering to me, at the same time it was not very conducive to getting him back to the wild.
When he first moved from the hospital to the stable I would put him out during the day and take him back in at night for a few weeks to acclimatise him to the change. One evening as I carried him back inside, the surgery phone rang and I reached out with my free hand to answer it. I dealt with the call quickly and reached over to place the phone back on the receiver. Ciaran was perched under my arm as usual and whether I frightened him by the unusual movement or he felt insecure, I don’t know, but for whatever reason he struggled and in an instant, gripped my hand and wrist with the talons of his left leg.
