Vet Tech Tales: The Early Years (5 page)

“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