Vet Among the Pigeons (17 page)

‘Indeed and I do not,’ he spat out at me. ‘Isn’t the poor divil bad enough without you gettin’ yer hands on him.’

Stunned into silence, I said no more and we stomped out around the back of the shed to where my patient waited. Looking at the thriving calf, I felt confident that she was by the good bull, but decided not to offer any opinion. At least, I thought, for once there might be a positive
outcome
to my visit.

Having plucked the required sample, I carefully
examined
it to ensure that enough follicles were present. I then sealed and labelled it and I was thankful to get out of the yard in record time. Without a backward glance, I pulled out and went straight for the post office where, correctly labelled, the parcel was sent towards its destination. It was late that evening when I got back to the office but I wasn’t surprised, with the time of year, to see Seamus’s jeep still in the driveway.

Seamus seemed in a peculiar mood, but with a load of reports still to be filled in, I didn’t pay too much attention to him, hoping to get my paperwork completed before the evening clinic.

After a few minutes he casually mentioned that he had been talking to Des that afternoon.

‘Oh great. Lucky you,’ I replied, not taking my head out of the sprawl of paper. ‘Giving out about me as usual, I suppose? At least I can’t be blamed for killing anything this time – he wouldn’t even let me look at a sick bullock he had in the yard.’

Surprised not to get some reply, I looked up at Seamus, who was still standing, watching over my shoulder.

‘Well,’ he continued after a lengthy pause. ‘He did
mention
that the calf died after you left.’

‘Yeah, very funny,’ I replied, unconcerned. ‘Well, if that bullock dies, he needn’t blame me.’

After a pause, Seamus continued. ‘I’m not joking. The calf did die. Apparently it dropped dead about twenty
minutes
after you left the yard.’

Somehow, by some freak of nature, it appeared that a healthy, thriving calf had let out one great big bellow and dropped dead for some unknown reason, which in all reality could never have had any connection whatsoever to me plucking a few hairs out of his tail. Until the day Des Leadon dies, he will never be convinced of anything other than that I killed his calf. Of course, in typical sod’s law fashion, when the DNA results came back, they proved that my casualty was, indeed, a very expensive one.

From that day on, I tried my best to avoid the yard but my luck was to run out one weekend when I was on duty. Just after midday, a call came in to say that one of Des’s cows was down with milk fever. As I was the only vet on duty for the day there was no option but for me to attend.

‘At least,’ I consoled myself, ‘it’s only a milk fever. What could go wrong?’

Milk fever, a condition where the calcium in the body gets rapidly depleted from the high demands of milk
production
, results in a cow going down and even dying if treatment is not given quickly enough. However, once treated promptly, a simple bottle of the intravenous
calcium
will restore full health in a very short space of time.

‘Yet,’ I continued to myself, ‘if that calf managed to drop dead …’

My sense of dread intensified as I neared my
destination
. Quickly, I rechecked the boot: several full bottles of calcium, a clean flutter valve, needles – everything was in order. I vowed to inject the cow and get out as quickly as possible. At least, even though it was my weekend on call, the jeep so far, for the first time in my previous four
weekends
on call, had not broken down. A man like Des would be convinced that a broken-down car would be yet more evidence of my inherent incompetence.

Soon we were passing through the nearby village and a sense of relief flooded though me, knowing that even if we broke down now, I could grab my gear and walk if
necessary
. Within a few minutes, I was pulling in through the gates of the yard.

Although Slug often came out in the yards with me, on this occasion, I told her to stay, whispering in to her through the opened boot, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be out of here soon.’

Having pulled on my wet gear, I left her gazing
anxiously
after me, sitting on the driver’s seat, paws on the steering wheel.

Des managed not to utter a single word to me or make
any eye contact as we trudged though the mucky yard to the calving boxes where the cow lay.

Following his lead, I silently examined the cow, and indicated that I would return to the jeep to get the required calcium. In our college days we had always been advised to fully examine the patient before producing the
appropriate
medication.

Back at the jeep, I went to pull open the boot and was irritated to find it was locked. ‘Bloody electrics,’ I muttered to myself, knowing I had left it open.

It was only when I went around to the passenger door and found that it too was locked that I started to panic. Running around to the driver’s seat, pulling in vain at the handle, I felt a wave of heat surge up through my body as I saw the car keys glisten against the bright spring sun, hanging smugly from the ignition. I was locked out. It was only after a minute or two that I realised that my initial reaction in blaming the electronics was incorrect. In fact, it was actually Slug who, obviously offended at having been left behind, had jumped from the passenger’s seat to the driver’s seat and inadvertently managed to stand on the control panel that lay between the seats, triggering the central locking. For a second, I thought of just getting into the jeep and driving away, as fast as I could, to
somewhere
, anywhere, preferably a few counties away, until I realised I couldn’t even do that.

In a moment of brilliance, I decide that if Slug had
managed
to stand on the control panel while crossing over the seats, she could do it again and reverse the locking. As she now sat in the driver’s seat, I ran around to the passenger’s
side and called her to me. She happily obliged, jumping cleanly over the control panel. Running back to the
driver’s
side, I called her again. Another clear round! Back I ran to the passenger’s side, desperation hitting. No joy! Around and back I ran, again and again, with Slug
enjoying
the game enormously.

It was this sight that greeted Des when he finally decided to come and see what had happened to me.

‘Are ye playing with the dog or are ye going to treat me bloody cow?’ he bellowed up the yard. It was the first time I had ever heard him speak in anything other than an undertone. I stared at him, like a rabbit caught in
headlights
and reluctantly stumbled out my story.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the shiny
bottles
of calcium ready and waiting to restore my dignity. For a moment, I wished I was back at my inner city clinic where surely some local youth would have gladly picked the locks for a fiver.

‘I don’t suppose you’re any good at picking locks?’ I trailed off as Des stared at me with disbelieving contempt.

Some forty minutes later, I was back at the yard, having had to endure sitting by Des’s side in his car as we bumped our way to the surgery to collect a few bottles of calcium and a flutter valve. As he waited for me, Des sat sullenly staring into space. ‘Are ye sure ye haven’t forgot anythin’ or would ye like me te have te drive ye back out again?’

It seemed a lifetime before I watched the sticky liquid flow into the blood stream, flicking determinedly at the valve to look like I was doing something. With a long, loud
belch, the cow, staggering a bit, tucked in her hind legs and got up.

‘Well, ye haven’t killed her – yet,’ Des informed me, back by now to his muttering as he shuffled off to the farmhouse.

I didn’t see him again as I sat at the end of his long avenue until after lunch waiting for the AA to come and open the car. Slug, thoroughly bored by now of the game of running from one side to another, snoozed peacefully.

Ironically, the cow lived, and from that day on I had no more disasters, although Des never once gave me credit for anything I ever did.

I advertised the jeep in the
Farmer’s Journal
the next week and ended up selling it for a few thousand euro less than I had paid for it not six months previously. I felt bad because I sold it to another vet from the far side of the country, but I knew he felt bad because he thought he had ripped me off. I heard a few years later, from a colleague who worked with him, that it had never given him a moment’s trouble.

P
robably one of the most obvious life-style changes in veterinary practice, as well as life in general, is the total and unrelenting tie to a mobile phone. In many ways, the mobile phone is an invaluable tool for the provision of an emergency service, to the extent that it is often hard to imagine how our veterinary predecessors ever survived without them; but sometimes, just
sometimes
, how I envied my older colleagues their position. With the advent of mobile phones, every trace of privacy had been taken away. Now, it is possible for a client to ring the emergency number just as you are settling into a hot bath to ask what time your next surgery is at. Or they can ring you when you are pushing a laden trolley around the supermarket, complete with a collection of irate toddlers, to find out how much a vaccination is likely to cost. Better 
still, while sitting in church, where hopefully you have remembered to at least put the phone on vibrate, an inquisitive client can ring to query an account or
double-check
the dose of antibiotics. Once qualified as a
veterinary
surgeon with a mobile phone, your life, your plans, your next moves, are never your own. Everything is
dictated
by the whim of the person at the other end.

I noticed that every time the mobile rang out of hours, my stress levels jumped. For those few seconds, where the call could be from the owner of a seriously ill animal requiring major intervention, or from a client with not enough manners to realise that you might, possibly, be trying to have some sort of a life outside the job, the stress is huge. It was almost amusing at any veterinary gathering to observe how when a mobile rang, everyone responded in some way. For myself, I found that it helped me to change the ring tone every few months.

Within weeks of qualifying, I endured a particularly long night of almost continuous calls, almost all from the one client. It didn’t help that the client in question was not, in fact, a client at all, but had been given the practice
emergency
number by Directory Enquiries. The first call came shortly after midnight, just as I had fallen into a deep sleep, exhausted by the demands of the work as a new graduate. Serena, my potential client, apparently did not occupy the same time zone as I did, as she sounded incredibly bright and cheery at the other end.

She explained at length how her little terrier didn’t seem quite himself. In my zealous enthusiasm at the time, I grilled her in detail about the dog in question, but found
that with her somewhat vague replies to my in-depth
questioning
, I was unable to fathom why she felt it necessary to call an emergency number after midnight. As the
conversation
continued, she seemed to lose interest in talking about the dog and I found myself continually trying to steer her back to the topic and away from discussion of a party that was going on in the flat above and the general comings and goings around her. It seemed, as far as I could gather, that the dog was doing everything a dog should be doing, other than the fact that his owner felt that he was not as bright as he should be.

By the end of our, by now, lengthy conversation, I still couldn’t quite figure out why Serena was worried, but
suggested
that if she was still concerned in the morning she could bring him into the clinic for a check-up. At this she explained that she had no transport and would much prefer if I called out to her. ‘I don’t wanna be puttin’ anyone ou’ havin’ te drive me over to ye. But don’t come out in the mornin’,’ she concluded. ‘Dis party will be goin’ on all nigh’ and I’m not workin’ anyways, so I never wud be up before t’afternoon meself.’

At least this explained why she was so bright and happy, not having suffered from the ill-effects of a
strenuous
working day. She seemed reluctant to end the call, but, by now, I could barely keep my eyes open, knowing that it was clearly a false alarm. Thankfully, I settled back down into the bed, but couldn’t go back to sleep,
wondering
whether, in my newness to the job, I had missed some vital piece of information.

It was only when I had finally drifted off, almost an hour
later, that the phone rang again.

‘How’re ye?’ called out a familiar voice. ‘It’s me again.’

‘Sorry, who am I talking to?’ I asked, momentarily
forgetting
the previous call.

‘It’s Serena – the one wi’ the dog, y’know?’

It seemed that my in-depth questioning had created a barrage of new concerns in Serena’s over-alert mind that in her eyes needed to be dealt with and now she was
adamant
that she wanted me to call out – immediately – to examine her dog.

Again, doubting myself, I repeated my list of questions and my ‘over the phone diagnosis’ assured me that there was absolutely no indication, even in my over-anxious state of being a new graduate, to see the dog in any sort of a hurry. Politely, I explained myself, but by now Serena was becoming somewhat agitated and a little bit more aggressive than her previous chatty form. Several times she cut across me to give directions to one of the most dubious inner-city addresses. The place was familiar to me, as one of my very first calls in my new job had been to examine a horse for a welfare group in that very estate. The welfare organisation had advised me to ring the guards to
accompany
me for safety purposes. After two days of continuous requests at the local police station, I eventually went out on my own.

The third time Serena rang, I didn’t have to ask who was calling. I could clearly hear the sound effects of the house party that was obviously now in full swing. Again I repeated my questions and again I reassured her that her little dog sounded perfectly healthy and his general
well-being
was of no immediate concern. There was no friendly banter from her this time and her verbal aggression made me glad I had refused to go out. This time I told her very firmly that I was not going out to see the dog and reiterated that she should attend the clinic the next day if she was still concerned.

I had only hung up when the forth call came – this time screaming abuse with no preamble. By now, it had begun to sink in that perhaps Serena’s initial euphoria during the first call and her subsequent paranoia and now aggression were not entirely from natural causes.

The next few calls came in rapid succession; each time I simply repeated that I was not going to call out and told her not to ring again. Then, for a blessed two hours there was silence, but at that stage I was so agitated and
bewildered
that I tossed and turned, endlessly hoping, in vain, to sleep.

The alarm clock flashed four-thirty when the calls began again. Now there was crying and stories of an ex-boyfriend and an irate landlord and some neighbour who was
causing
trouble and wanting me to call out – and, this time, not even a mention of the dog. The next few calls continued in such quick succession that I eventually lost track of them; it was only the following morning that I counted a total of sixteen calls received from Serena.

Eventually, the calls slowed, with Serena becoming more and more disjointed. Then they stopped abruptly at about six-thirty in the morning. My head ached with
weariness
and frustration as the first burst of the dawn chorus assaulted my ears and I battled to sleep. I didn’t ever find
out what happened to either Serena or her dog, if she had one; since six-thirty that morning, I never heard another word from her.

When the phone shrilled in my ear again a little after eight that morning, I felt like a very taut wire. This was the seventeenth time in eight hours, and I snapped. Of course, the inevitable happened. Without even bothering to check the number flashing on the screen, I pressed Answer and bawled into the phone: ‘Your dog is not sick. I am not coming out to see you. Don’t ever ring this number again.’

I heaved a breath, exhausted with effort and stress. There was silence at the other end of the phone.

‘Did you hear me?’ I yelled, determined to make my point. ‘Don’t ever ring me again.’

Again, silence, followed by a very shocked and hesitant voice which sounded vaguely familiar. In disbelieving horror, I gradually recognised the subdued tones of one of my lecturers from college. I had referred a lame dog to him the previous week and he was ringing to report on the patient’s progress.

But it seemed that he was now more concerned about me! My mind was so numb with mortification. It seemed so unfair that I could be caught out in that one off-guard moment.

‘… and we all have bad days …’ I heard him say. ‘And if ever you feel the need to talk … And sometimes we find that veterinary is not the career we thought it would be …’ On and on he went while I lay back, burning a hole in the pillow with embarrassment and wondering if, within the cushy
confines
of the veterinary college, he had ever had to deal with
sixteen calls between dusk and dawn from a client who was clearly in far greater need of help than her dog!

Although, thankfully, I’ve never had another night as bad as that one, there is no doubt that a considerable amount of stress comes from having to deal with night calls. At one stage, the clinic came up with the idea of diverting the phone to an answering service out of hours and during lunch time. With this, the client would have to leave a message with an unknown voice on a switchboard, who would then text a brief message to the vet on duty. As a rule, once clients realised that they were on to an answering service they would just ring back at a more appropriate time unless the call was urgent, in which case one of us would ring them back within minutes. We were all delighted with the idea initially, and for the first few nights it seemed to be a success. When unexpectedly encountering the paging system some people did leave messages about trivial issues, such as what time we would be answering the phone at, but we soon found that it was an effective device for training clients, though the
receptionist
did have to take a bit of flak when some didn’t really grasp the idea of the pager service.

‘That lad that answered the phone last night was no use at all,’ boomed Jack O’Reilly over the phone at nine on the button one morning. ‘I asked him how much pen strep to give me bullock and he told me he had no idea. Not much good to me at all.’ We laughed to think of the poor guy
sitting
in his office getting entangled in a lengthy
conversation
with old Jack.

Unfortunately, our love affair with the paging system
was to come to an abrupt end. At almost two o’clock on a freezing cold winter’s night, my pager beeped at the
bedside
. Slug snored on, not yet having identified the beeper as being a call. Fumbling over my bedside locker, I picked up the pager and read the message: Ring Mary Keogh. This was followed by a local number. Nothing more. No ‘urgent’. No details.

In my groggy state, I was a bit confused by the message. The name was not familiar to me. Usually, the people in the pager service would add some bit of detail like ‘cow calving’ or ‘dog hit by a car’. Before I had reached for the phone, the pager went off again, and then again – three messages in less than a minute. With a sense of dread, I realised that at this hour of night it had to be a calving or a colic or something that could not be dealt with by a
reassuring
phone call from the depths of the bed covers.

Having located the light switch, I scribbled down the number and before I had even dialled it, the message came through a fourth time. I’m never at my best when woken from a sleep, but four messages in a row were just a bit too much. Although this was some years after my night of hell with Serena, multiple calls still tended to cause me intense stress, and by the time my return call was answered, my blood pressure was rising.

‘Gillian here, from the vet’s,’ I said curtly. ‘What appears to be the problem?’

A voice even groggier than mine replied. ‘Sorry, who did you say you were?’

‘Gillian, one of the vets. You paged us four times. What is the problem?’

There was silence at the other end of the phone and then a mumbling and I could just about hear the muffled voice of a woman in the background.

‘Who is it, Larry? Who’s ringing at this hour of the night?’

More muffled sounds followed as I waited with
increasing
irritation, wondering what was going on. There was a pause before the man came back on the phone.

‘Eem, yes, my wife did ring all right. She was just
wondering
at what age we could have our puppy vaccinated?’

The mixed emotions of relief that I didn’t have to get out of bed and sheer outrage at someone ringing at two o’ clock in the morning to enquire about puppy vaccinations swirled through me.

‘You’re joking!’ I blurted out. ‘This is an emergency
service
, FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY!’ I had woken both Donal and Slug at this stage. ‘Ring the office in the morning,’ I snapped and just as I hung up I heard the man say, ‘Well, thanks for returning the call.’

I was so furious at having been woken up that,
ironically
, I couldn’t sleep. After about half an hour I got up and checked on Molly and Fiona, just for something to do, really. How I envied them their peaceful sleep – Molly, in characteristic head-under-the-covers mode, Fiona, fists tightly clenched as though concentrating on something really important. I’d say it was almost four before I nodded off into a fitful slumber.

The next morning, Arthur and Seamus were equally stunned when I relayed my tale. Melissa, the receptionist on duty, however, just started to grin as I got to the end of my story.

‘You mean to say,’ she asked, ‘you rang them at two o’ clock last night and ate them for asking about a
vaccination
?’

‘Well, what would you expect me to do?’ I asked, annoyed by her reaction.

‘Well, it’s just that the pager people rang first thing this morning,’ she told me. ‘They apologised profusely, but apparently there was some problem with the system and the pages were all delayed by twelve hours going out, and then they were all repeated three or four times from
mid-afternoon
onwards,’ she finished, her face breaking into a grin as she watched me absorb this information. The shock must have registered on my face as it occurred to me that a twelve-hour delay meant that the unfortunate Larry and Mary Keogh had, in all innocence, left one perfectly
reasonable
message during lunch hour and been rung back in the middle of the night by an irate, neurotic vet, giving them a lecture about emergency services and out of hours calls!