I moved the ladder over and Lisa and I started cleaning the higher cages. We were barely done with our first cage each when a heavy-set woman with long black hair in a white clinic jacket shoved through the door holding a pair of patient records. She moved straight to the exam table. “OK, let’s see how Cricket is doing this morning.”
Her voice was pleasant enough, but something about the way she didn’t look at Kathy or greet her but just expected her to get the dog was a bit off-putting. And while she had to have seen Lisa and me there, she didn’t so much as acknowledge us. She shook down a thermometer while Kathy lifted the little black poodle out of its cage and carried it over, being careful not to hold the little urine-soaked dog too close. The lady in white wrinkled her nose as she inserted the thermometer.
“Did she eat?”
Kathy shook her head. “Dr. Norris told us not to feed her last night.”
“Throw up?”
“It doesn’t look like it, but she spilled her water, so kind of hard to tell.”
The lady in white sighed. “It would be nice to know for sure.”
Then why, I wondered, doesn’t she go look for herself?
After a moment she pulled the thermometer out and jotted down the temperature on the dog’s chart. I wanted to ask what it was since Kathy didn’t appear too interested, but since I didn’t even know who the lady was, I didn’t. Being forward was never my strong suit.
“Is it high?” Lisa raised her voice as she pulled her head out of the cage she was papering.
“I’m sorry?” A haughty ‘Are you talking to me?’ tone rang in the lady’s voice.
Unruffled, Lisa repeated, “Is Cricket running a temperature?”
The lady looked at Kathy, the question obvious in her expression.
“They’re the Explorers Dr. Norris asked to work this weekend,” Kathy whispered fairly loudly. “Phoenix and Lisa.”
I saw the lady’s demeanor change in a proverbial eye blink. “Oh. Have you girls ever worked at a clinic before?”
We shook our heads. She smiled, and I could swear the tomcat I was holding had never betrayed such a predatory expression. “I’m Dr. Reese. Glad to meet you. And, yes, Cricket’s temperature is high – 104 degrees. But it was 105.2 yesterday. Her lab work indicates it’s probably a bacterial infection, so I’m going to give her some more antibiotics and something to keep bringing her fever down.” To Kathy she said, “Give her just a few bites of dry food. Let me know if she throws it up.”
Dr. Reese shuffled around to one of the cabinets and pulled out two vials and a couple of syringes. She filled the syringes while I finished cleaning the cage I was working on. Kathy tucked the little dog close and put a hand around her muzzle. I heard Cricket yelp as the first needle went in, then whimper at the touch of the second. It was a small thing, but just by watching, I was already learning something about restraining a small dog. I hoped it wouldn’t be long before I was asked to hold a dog for treatment.
“OK, Caesar next,” Dr. Reese told Kathy.
Kathy deposited the still wet and dirty little poodle into a clean cage, then eased Caesar out, holding him in as close an approximation to the way he had been laying as she could. Intuitively, I realized the awkward hold meant Caesar wasn’t jarring his back leg any. The soft light over the exam table caught the glint of metal poking out of the sewn skin. It looked pretty painful.
Dr. Reese slipped the thermometer into Caesar and felt gently around the incision while Kathy kept a light hand on Caesar’s head in case he tried to bite. When she took the thermometer out she said, loudly enough for me and Lisa to hear, “No temperature. We’ll just start him on some oral antibiotics. Put some Veriton on the stitches so he doesn’t start licking them. And don’t take him outside for a couple of days. Just leave a towel under him.”
“Do you give anything for the pain?” I asked.
“No. We use pain to keep them from being too mobile. If they hurt, they won’t jump around too much and maybe pull out their stitches. You can’t just order a dog to get some bed rest. And really, dogs and cats don’t seem to feel pain nearly as much as we do.”
I wrestled with that. Clearly, Sally the Chihuahua wasn’t acting like she was hurting too much after having had her abdomen cut open. I thought about my mom being admonished to not pick up anything over 10 pounds for three weeks or to even get out of bed for a few days after her hysterectomy. And even though she had been heavily medicated with codeine, Mom had had no inclination to try to rush the doctor’s orders. Yet here was a little mite of a dog dancing around and threatening her stitches less than 24 hours after being spayed. Was the pain threshold for dogs and people really that different?
Cricket was obviously in a different kind of pain from not feeling well. A bacterial infection to me seemed to mean that there was localized pain somewhere. I considered what little I knew about human medicine; strep throat and food poisoning came readily to mind, and I thought about how the first thing people reached for was something to dull the pain. Yet Cricket hadn’t been prescribed a painkiller of any kind.
And Caesar, though trying to be brave, was shaking and whimpering under the vet’s probing fingers. Burying a sharp metal rod that was half the diameter of a pencil and now poking a half inch out of the incision line deep into bone had to have left a painful reminder. I was sure a person in a similar situation would be begging for morphine.
Was using pain to manage the healing process truly in the best interest of the patient? Or was it merely an inexpensive way to keep the animals still and tractable while they were in the hospital? I figured I would have to wait several years and study animal physiology in-depth before I knew the scientific answer to that riddle, even if the non-scientific answer seemed very clear.
Veterinary medicine has, of course, made significant strides in the last 35 years. Pain management therapy is now a part of most surgical procedures. We can always look back a generation or two and scoff at barbaric thinking and practices in any medical field. What’s harder to do is to forgive the people who were at that juncture, who questioned the prevailing philosophies and, being unable to influence opinion, simply adopted the current practices for their own. Whether post-surgical pain management is necessary was only the first of a series of philosophical differences I had with the profession at the time. There would be many – many – more to come.
New Tricks
I cleaned the cage where Cricket, the little black poodle, had been while Kathy put Caesar up. The cage, wet and messy, stank with that special odor of illness. And to reach to the back wall to sponge it clean meant levering my body into the cage from the chest up, my nose deep into the stench that wouldn’t be wiped quickly away. Still, I could easily imagine that it could be much worse. Dogs with diarrhea spattering waste everywhere, from the top of the cage to the walls and on themselves. Or vomit filled with yellow-staining bile or other unpleasantries. Still, cleaning cages held more appeal than changing diapers. I held my breath and scrubbed away.
Behind me, Kathy approached the Akita’s run. This I had to see. In her hand she held a nylon leash looped back on itself to form a makeshift noose. The Akita’s upper lip curled back in silent warning.
“Good Sam,” she cooed to the dog standing stock still in the run. She put her hand on the gate latch and the dog’s silent warning turned audible, a low growl issuing from deep in his chest. Kathy eased the gate open, stepping sideways into the run, her leash hand forward, keeping the bulk of her body in the opening so Sam couldn’t see any chance of escape. The dog’s growl intensified.
I watched, rapt. A growling dog this close to me was a novelty. I had seen others, like my dad, threatened from a distance, but I had never been directly threatened myself. The closest I had come had been that embarrassing incident at the home of a family acquaintance, Bob, who lived on a couple of acres of land midway between suburbia and country. He had caught a half-grown coyote pup and raised it on a long chain in his front yard. The coyote had matured into
a fairly docile animal, but underneath it all he was still, in essence, a creature of the wild.
One warm fall day when I was 13, a couple of buddies were visiting Bob along with my dad, my brother and me. We all paraded out to see Bob’s chained-up prize. Never one to miss an opportunity to interact with any animal, I stepped up with the guys to pet the coyote. The animal took one look at me and launched himself my way, locking my legs between his two insistent front paws. I never had a moment’s fear. I simply held my ground and pushed down on the strong shoulders. But before I had a chance to catch another breath, my dad picked me up bodily and hauled me to safety outside of the chain’s reach. I blushed with anger and embarrassment.
“What are you doing!” I pushed away, acutely aware that three young men whom I barely knew were watching this ugly little scene.
“That’s a wild animal,” my dad growled back at me, throwing an accusatory glare Bob’s way.
“He wasn’t going to hurt me!”
The look on my father’s face was one of deep disgust. It spoke plainly of the fact that I was just a naïve young girl, unschooled in the ways of the world.
“He wasn’t! He was –” I broke off and stomped away, too embarrassed to explain what I knew that they didn’t. I was menstruating and the male coyote, who had never been properly socialized, had reacted on instinct. Harming me was the last thing on that poor canine’s mind.
I didn’t speak to Dad for a week after that. It was bad enough he had picked me up and carried me off in front of Bob and his friends. I could almost forgive him for that. After all, like the coyote, he had reacted on instinct, almost heroically even, when he thought he saw his child in danger. What I couldn’t forgive was that he would think, even for a moment, that, given the choice, any animal would choose to attack me instead of him. Had he learned nothing about the natural order of things?
And now here was Kathy confronting a growling dog half her size. After her sincere soliloquy on Cage Cleaning 101 and her practically palpable disinterest in the medical aspect of the animals she cared for, I had to admit to not having the greatest respect for this young woman who looked to be either in her late teens or early 20s. Now, however, I was reassessing my opinion of her. She reached her arm out slowly and slipped the leash’s noose gently over the Akita’s head, keeping her hands well out of snapping range. Slowly, she pulled up on the leash, snugging the noose about Sam’s neck. The dog lowered his lip, but the glare in his eyes didn’t fade. Overly taut muscles shook the dog from nose to tail, but he walked obediently out of the run beside Kathy.
She guided him to the exam table where Dr. Reese stood holding a long streamer of gauze, an end in each hand and the middle tied in a loose fold. While Kathy pressed the dog against the table leg with her knee, Dr. Reese slipped the fold around the dog’s muzzle and quickly tightened the knot, closing the dog’s mouth. Two quick passes around the nose with more of the gauze and a quick pass of the gauze from under the jaw to behind the ears and the makeshift muzzle was complete. Sam could blow bubbles of saliva out between his back lips, but his teeth were clamped tight. Working quickly, Dr. Reese held off a vein in the dog’s foreleg and injected him with Levamasole, a powerful, and sometimes fatal, drug to kill his heartworms.
“While I’ve got him,” Kathy told me, “put a bowl of water and a couple of cups of food into that run at the end.”
I hurried to do what she asked, then backed off as she brought the Akita to its new run. She slipped the bowtie from behind the ears, unwrapped the muzzle and stepped quickly out of the run, closing the gate behind her. She held up the strip of gauze, now wet with saliva. “The gauze only works for a little while. When it gets wet it stretches. So we’ll dry it out and use it again tonight.”
Frugality – ever the word, even if it meant reusing two short feet of stretched-out gauze.
Kathy moved down the runs to get the Rottweiler for its heartworm treatment, and I stood in front of the Akita’s cage. Sam didn’t snarl or growl at me, but his hard stare promised trouble if I came any closer. He had given me a lot to think about. I would certainly have to learn how to handle unfriendly animals, for one. That was something that hadn’t really occurred to me before. How do you control a spitting cat that’s all claws who doesn’t want to be examined? How about a small, fragile-boned Yorkie that’s out for blood? Or a fear-biting Mastiff that weighs as much – or more – than you do? I had always envisioned docile animals that only needed a comforting pat or two while on the table. At most, maybe some guidance to turn them the proper way for easy examination. Now, it seemed, I would need to know how to hold them so that, not only would I not get bitten or scratched, but the vet wouldn’t get bitten or scratched either.
Most disturbing, however, was the thought that there could be animals in this world who might be unfriendly to me. Ones that I would have to use proper restraint methods on. After all, I was able to make friends with any animal, wasn’t I? Surely it would only take a reassuring word and a pat from me to calm even the most volatile pet.
“Hey there, Sam.” I whispered in my most beguiling, non-threatening tone. I smiled at the dog, expecting to see a grudging wag of the tail. It didn’t move. “Hey, pup.” I took a half-step toward the gate and Sam’s lip raised a quarter of an inch. His stone stare never flinched.
“Okay then. Maybe later.” I wasn’t prepared to admit defeat, but there were more cages to clean, maybe some dogs to bathe, and hopefully some more patients to see. Sam would come around if I had more time with him. Of course he would. Wouldn’t he?
First Contact
Everything in the kennel area was cleaned, fed, disinfected, bathed and/or walked by 10:00 the first morning of volunteer hospital duty. True to his word, the clinic owner, Dr. Norris, invited Lisa and me into the exam rooms to observe for the next two hours. I shadowed Dr. Norris while Lisa shadowed Dr. Reese. My primary duty that day was to entertain the puppies and kittens that came through and feed them treats while the vet sneaked up behind them with a thermometer or needle. It was generally routine medicine we saw that day: puppy and kitten exams, annual shots, heartworm checks, flea problems. Saturday mornings were mostly reserved for the 9-to-5 working people who couldn’t get in with their pets during the week. A bread-and-butter day of high-profit-margin invoices that the vets pretty much sleep-walked through, while Lisa and I were wide-eyed at every turn.
Outside the exam rooms, Kathy showed us how to draw up serum for vaccinations. We also got to peer through the microscope at fecal exams, catching glimpses of a variety of parasite eggs: hookworms, roundworms, whipworms. Who knew worms could be so interesting?
Noon and our ride came all too soon.
“Thanks for coming,” Kathy said as we were going out the door. “Dr. Norris let our other assistant, Ashley, take the day off because he knew you’d be here. You really helped out a lot.”
What could be better? We’d made a real contribution, even if it took two volunteers to equal one paid assistant. We’d been around animals for nearly five solid hours, and we’d learned a few things along the way. We were eager to work at the next clinic on our rotation.
The following Saturday, Lisa and I showed up for work at Dr. Sharpe’s clinic a few miles away. Animal care basics being pretty much the same everywhere, the facilities looked very similar to Dr. Norris’ clinic, except the hallways were a bit more open and the kennel area a bit brighter. Not that we saw much of the clinic, other than the kennel. Dutifully, we cleaned the cages, fed the animals, walked the dogs, and bathed and dipped a half dozen or so flea-infested pups. Carol, a petite woman in her mid-20s wearing a white lab coat with a stethoscope around her neck, showed Lisa and me where the cleaning and bathing supplies were, then left us to our own devices. She would pop into the kennel every now again carrying in one of the dogs to be bathed and dipped, or to carry out one of the other animals.
Two of the dogs in for a bath had long, matted hair. We brushed a collie for nearly an hour trying to get the mats out and s
pent another 40 minutes de-tangling a Maltese. By the time the dogs to be groomed were bathed, dipped and dried, it was 11:30. Lisa and I stepped into the hallway, hoping to be seen and invited into one of the exam rooms. We were indeed seen, but only by Carol, who began asking us to shuttle dogs from the back kennel to the front lobby and their owners’ waiting arms. In all the time we were there, Dr. Sharpe didn’t even acknowledge us.
“We were used!” Lisa wailed when we piled into her mom’s car at noon. “Free labor, that’s all they thought we were. We made them over $100 on those baths and dips alone and what did we get in return? The pleasure of doing their work for them, that’s all.”
“Aren’t you going to Dr. Fiennes next week? I bet things will be better there.” Lisa’s mom, ever the optimist, had a way of ignoring the facts of the present in favor of the possibilities of the future. I, personally, had long thought she was a bit of a twit.
Dr. Fiennes was no better than Dr. Sharpe. Lisa and I practically ran for the car at noon. “We’d be better off volunteering at a grooming shop if all we’re going to be doing is bathing and dipping dogs,” Lisa pointed out. “At least at a groomer’s we might learn how to do poodle cuts.”
I sighed. It was beginning to look like the nanny experience all over again. “We’re back with Dr. Norris next week. Let’s see how that goes.”
Dr. Norris himself answered our early morning knock. “Oh, were you two scheduled for today?” he asked, clearly surprised to see us.
My heart sank. If he wasn’t expecting us –
“You know, my last volunteers were no shows. I didn’t want to be shorthanded, so I have Kathy and Ashley both here today.”
Here it comes, I thought. My dad’s not going to like having to turn around and come straight back to pick us up.
“But since you’re here, I’ve been wanting to talk with you about this volunteer business. It hasn’t been working out too well. The other vets don’t want to work with the Explorers on Saturdays any more. Most of their volunteers have been no-shows, too.”
Vet Tech Tales: The Early Years Page 3
