The Gift of Pets: Stories Only a Vet Could Tell (15 page)

She displayed none of Ditto’s angst, loving the hectic, busy pace and the constant flow of the dogs and cats that moved like slow breaths in and out of the hospital. She would perch herself on the reception desk and survey each new patient with studied indifference. Some seemed to catch her attention more than others, though I could not discern what spurred her interest in specific animals. It was unrelated to size, gender, or species. She was just as likely to be drawn to a big, imposing dog as to a cat. If anything, she showed more interest in the dogs than in her own peers. When a new patient interested her, she would jump down off the desk and sidle up to it, tail high and leg dragging, to sniff its nose before walking away, apparently satisfied.

One day about three weeks after her surgery, I was surprised to notice that Rerun was subtly advancing her right foot forward and placing it on the ground with the pads down rather than simply dragging the tops of the toes behind her. At first, I thought my eyes were deceiving me, so subtle was the change. But over a period of a few days, it was clear that she was beginning to regain some neurologic function in the leg. Slowly, the improvement continued, till finally there was no hint left of the neurologic trauma she had sustained.

Rerun is still a beloved presence in our practice. This year she will pass her twelfth year with us. Her reign, which began with frantic energy and nonstop activity, has now settled into a calm and controlled routine. The clients know her well and look for her at each visit. Her tangle with the automobile as a young stray has left its mark. With time, the right foot has steadily and progressively deviated outward, so that she now walks with those toes pointed to the side, as if to signal a turn. The strain this places on her joints has left her with marked arthritis, for which she is treated with glucosamine, anti-inflammatory medication, and periodic acupuncture therapy.

She has earned her keep over the years by providing comic relief to waiting clients and overworked staff, by acting as an unpaid welcoming committee, and by occasionally donating blood to anemic patients, a role she would rather avoid. But her life has been full. As a senior citizen with nagging arthritis, she doesn’t venture as far afield in the office as she used to, spending much of her time in the ward with the boarding cats, looking out the window at the bird feeder. She is the employee in the office with the smallest paycheck, the best benefits package, and the second-longest tenure, and as such, she warrants a place of honor in the Seven Bends family. She also holds the record for the hospital mascot with the longest reign, having surpassed both her predecessors by many years. This longevity is testament to a more robust constitution than Cy’s, and a psyche less fragile than Ditto’s. Long live the queen!

The Bee’s Knees

If you had told me when I was twenty that at fifty I would be practicing companion-animal medicine rather than equine medicine, I would have laughed you out of the room. If you had followed that prediction with one that said I would have no horses of my own, there might have been physical violence.

At twenty, I harbored in my mind a pastoral image of the acreage I would own one day. It would have twenty, maybe thirty acres of partly wooded land with ten or twelve acres of open pastures surrounded by white rail fences, two of which would form a lane lined with pear trees down the middle of the property, leading to a spacious home. The house would be perched on a rise overlooking the pastures and be separated from them by an expanse of lush green lawn, free of dandelions and mowed in a pleasing pattern of parallel lines. A dignified but playful golden retriever would be sitting on the front porch under the reaching white pillars and would have ambled with flagging tail out to the car as you drove into the circular paved entry. Beside the house, in a covered portico, would be parked my blue Chevy Silverado with its heavy-duty suspension and a white veterinary box with an array of drawers and cubbies and refrigerators filled with medications and supplies to treat the horses that were my patients. It might also contain a few doses of distemper vaccine to pop into the farm dogs, which would be the only canine patients I treated.

This image was so well developed in my mind at the time that I could not envision even one component of that scenario being different in my future. But, as you now well know, that picture does not describe my life in any way. What, you may ask, made the difference between my projected plan and my current reality? I can answer that question with two simple responses.

First, there was a sea change in my professional outlook. During my junior year in veterinary school, I was surprised to discover how much I enjoyed small-animal medicine. It provided me the opportunity to pursue what is most fun for me in veterinary medicine—the detective work of diagnosing diseases in patients that cannot tell you verbally where it hurts; the relative ease of working with animals that do not require a padded recovery room and a truck-size anesthesia machine; and the intensely sentimental aspects of companion-animal medicine, where decisions turn more on emotion than on economics.

These reasons were important in my decision, but to be honest, there was another dimension of horse practice that worried me. Please don’t tell this to any horse people you may know; but at the time, I also realized that if I was to work on horses my whole life, I would have to deal with horse people. There is something unique about horse people that I am seldom confronted with in companion-animal practice. Every horse person knows everything about horses! Not only are all of them veritable horse whisperers, but they all want you to be fully aware of their equine genius. I know this to be true because when horses were my primary passion, it was with exactly this degree of respect that I regarded my own horse knowledge. I think this is coded on the same genes as a passion for horses.

To be fair, there are a few clients in small-animal practice that bring the same amount of self-taught knowledge to their interactions with their vet. Such people, though, account for only a small percentage of my clients. While typical pet owners do not come with this pride in their animal knowledge as standard equipment, horse people generally do, and it’s a trait that I found tedious.

Add to that the fact that much in the horse world revolves around horse culture. This is true whether your equine focus is western pleasure, three-day eventing, dressage, hunter/jumper events, conformation showing, or racing. Around each of these subspecialties has developed a world in which the participants speak a language and follow a set of rules to which the rest of the world is simply not privy. Immersion in one of these cultures provides a certain translatable advantage in another. But lacking exposure, as I did, to all of these cultural climates was a handicap that made horse practice virtually unassailable for me—a handicap that I would have eventually tired of accommodating. Medicine is hard enough as it is.

That explains why I am a fulfilled companion-animal practitioner. But it does not explain why, at fifty, I still have no horses of my own. Simply stated, it’s my kids’ fault! I did try very hard to develop in Jace and Tucker a love for horses similar to that shared by Cynthia and me. We extolled the wonderful virtues of horses and regaled our sons with horse stories. I related with suitable embellishments the countless tales of my nine summers as a camper in Florida and the six summers I spent as a staff member in a horse barn. Cynthia added her memories of Mike and Ike, Tangerine, and the other horses she had growing up as a child in Tennessee. When they were old enough, we enrolled Jace and Tucker in summer horse camp, where they spent hours circling a ring at a somnolent walk on horses that wanted to go no faster. All our efforts, though, were to no avail. If the horse-loving genes are not present at birth, the passion apparently cannot be evoked by even the most creative of parental tactics.

The final nail was driven into the coffin of my horse-owning hopes on Jace’s seventh birthday. We were camping at Camp Roosevelt in Fort Valley, the historic first of many Civilian Conservation Corps work camps in the 1930s where unemployed men were put to work planting trees, building roads, and keeping at bay the ravages of the Great Depression. You get to Camp Roosevelt by taking the Edinburg Gap Road east off Highway 11 on the north end of Edinburg and cresting the mountain at Tasker Ridge. As you descend into Fort Valley, you can stop partway down if you wish and fill a gallon jug or two with the fresh mountain rainwater that issues from springs and is dispensed through pipes by the roadway. You would think such water might carry a high risk of contamination when you look at the rudimentary delivery system that has been in place for generations. But you would be wrong; many families have used this free springwater as their main water supply for decades. If you turn south on Fort Valley Road at King’s Crossing and follow the road to the apex of the valley, it eventually heads east and ascends over Edith Gap and down into the Page Valley, where Luray spreads out sleepily on the valley floor along the banks of the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. Just before you reach the top of Edith Gap, Camp Roosevelt is nestled into a couple of acres of sheltered woods and boasts ten camping spots that are claimed on a first-come, first-served basis and paid for on the honor system. Those campsites are filled with families in tents most summer weekends from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

On that beautiful April day, I had the brilliant idea of taking the family on a trail ride. There is a wonderful little stable in the Fort that has a warren of trails in the surrounding woods and a barn full of suitably calm trail horses. I had called a few days earlier and reserved four spots on the eleven o’clock ride on Jace’s birthday. I thought this would be another chance to reinforce the ongoing horse indoctrination of the boys, and I was looking forward to it. During my six summers at camp, I had taken thousands of such rides, and even though I knew this one would be an hour of slow trudging, it would at least provide Jace and Tucker with another opportunity to feel the thrill of having the control of a thousand-pound beast in your hands, which had for me been intoxicating.

We arrived a half hour before our scheduled ride to let the boys walk up and down the line of tethered horses, whose tails lazily chased away the inevitable flies that pestered their sides and legs. Tucker was drawn to the big bay horse with the four white socks and the blaze of white streaking his forehead. The wrangler told us his name was Blaze and let Tucker stroke his nose and offer the carrots we had brought with us. Jace had difficulty choosing between a palomino mare named Queen and a buckskin gelding, creatively named Bucky, with a black mane and tail. His decision was made for him when the wrangler told us that the buckskin liked to trot on the trail rides. After that, Jace was all about Queen, offering stirring summaries of the exceptional virtues of mares and the many advantages that palominos offered over buckskins. Besides, he told us, Queen reminded him of the toy horse he had loved in kindergarten, which he had called King Horse.

When the time came to mount our horses, Jace was assisted onto the saddle of the palomino, where he immediately grasped the saddle horn and pasted an anxious look of concern on his now seven-year-old face. Tucker sat astride Blaze and surveyed the saddle and reins as a NASCAR fan would the dashboard of a race car, no doubt searching for the accelerator. This is Tucker’s typical bring-it-on approach to a new activity. (I learned recently, as we were discussing the horse camp that we had placed such high hopes in, that Tucker had spent the entire two-week period wanting to, as he put it, “get the dang horse to run. How long can one person be expected to circle the ring at a walk anyway?” he asked.) It was with this same full-speed-ahead determination that Tucker turned his horse into the queue, his little legs barely reaching the stirrups, which were raised as high as possible.

Cynthia was put on Cheyenne, a staid and dependable black mare with a Roman nose and an apparent disregard for any cues a rider might give her. Cheyenne was committed to one simple goal—getting back to the stable after having expended as little energy as possible. That meant, apparently, following the horse ahead of her by matching each of its steps with a plodding one of her own, head down and eyes partially closed. Reins, stirrups, voice and weight commands, even the firm clumping of Cynthia’s heels on Cheyenne’s sides were all so many unnecessary and extraneous annoyances to the single-minded mare. All that she needed for navigational purposes was provided by the rump of the horse ahead of her.

Having been sure to make the wrangler well aware of my prodigious skills and limitless experience with horses of this sort, I was placed on a horse that required more in the way of direction than did Cheyenne. Bingo was a six-year-old paint gelding with, as I was assured by the wrangler, a little bit of “spirit” in him. I expected this meant I would need to be constantly vigilant to avoid losing control of a headstrong horse with a big heart and a will to run. To the wrangler, though, “spirit” apparently had a more biblical meaning: that Bingo possessed the “breath of life.” In actual fact, it meant that the wrangler expected Bingo to remain awake for the duration of the ride. At least that’s what seemed to be occurring as we left the paddock, where the horses had been loosely tied to the top rail of the fence.

Still, with Cynthia just ahead of Jace’s horse and me just ahead of Tucker’s, we headed out with high spirits, both Cynthia and I barking instructions at the boys and keeping up a steady stream of verbal encouragement. There were, as I recall, six or eight other guests whom the sole wrangler leading the trail ride was responsible for. I remembered from my years leading trail rides how it felt to have the safety of novices in my hands, and I felt good that Cynthia’s valuable horse experience and mine could so drastically reduce his stress level, freeing him to concentrate on the other riders in the group, who, no doubt, needed more supervision. The line of horses headed into the woods, following a trail that the horses had taken hundreds of times before.