Tales from a Wild Vet: Paws, claws and furry encounters

It was a short visit for me this time, all too soon I was kissing Jacques goodbye and I couldn’t hold back my tears. It would be almost three months before I saw him again, but at least we would be able to look forward to Christmas together.

Mum had warned me that when I got home I would meet the newest member of the family. She and Dad couldn’t cope for more than a few days without a springer spaniel in the house, so they’d gone to a rescue charity and found a six-year-old liver-and-white springer called Roxy. She’d belonged to a family that loved her, but they’d had to give her up when they had a baby – maybe on account of her particularly ear-splitting bark, which my parents only discovered after adopting her!

Still missing Tosca, I wasn’t sure I felt ready for another dog, but when I met Roxy my heart melted. She was very different to Tosca, in looks and in disposition. Unlike the independent Tosca, Roxy stuck like glue, a little shadow following us around, seemingly constantly anxious. One evening we watched One Born Every Minute – the television programme about childbirth – and as soon as a baby started crying, Roxy would get up and start pacing the room. She fussed around Paddy, our Yorkie, too. Paddy was prone to reverse-sneezing attacks, a spasm of the soft palate a bit like a very sudden bout of hiccups. It’s fairly common in small breeds with long, soft palates and not dangerous, but every time he started sneezing Roxy would go over and sniff around him like an over-attentive mother.

Unlike Tosca, Roxy was obedient and attentive, desperately trying to please. That is until she went for a walk, and then her spaniel switch flicked on and seemed to short-circuit her ability to hear. On walks she lost her fretful demeanour and became a typical springer, leaping and throwing herself about without a care in the world.

When I started taking her to agility classes she excelled, and we had a lot of fun. She’d fly over the jumps and scuttle through the tunnels. She’d even race over the dog-walk and A-frame. But the seesaw was her nemesis; as soon as it started to tip she panicked, suddenly not quite so brave.

There was big excitement in the Hardy household for another reason, too, because the week I got home both Mum and Ross were graduating. First Ross graduated from Canterbury Christ Church University. His degree was in music, and the ceremony was held in Canterbury Cathedral. Ross is two years younger than me, but his degree was two years shorter, which is why we ended up graduating in the same year. As his big sister I was grateful that at least my ceremony had come first. His was lovely, although unfortunately Mum, Dad and I were stuck behind a pillar inconveniently placed there by the Normans when they rebuilt the cathedral some 1,000 years ago, so we spent a lot of time craning to try to spot him.

Mum’s graduation ceremony came five days later in London at the Barbican. Her parents, Grandma and Grandpa Nevison, were there with us, beaming with pride. Mum had gone to art college after leaving school and was working full-time as a graphic designer when she began her studies with the Open University in 1998. After three years she deferred the remainder of her degree to research and write a book, only taking up her studies again in 2011 once she’d wound down her design business. Now she had qualified in humanities with creative writing and we were all hugely proud of her.

Feeling a little left out, Dad joked that his degree was in fatherhood, from the School of Hard Knocks. He hadn’t liked school and hadn’t done well and when he left he’d gone to work in construction. A few years later he got a job in the City, starting at the very bottom of a large financial institution. Now he’s one of a handful of people running the company, though I still don’t know exactly what he does!

Before my next locum job I had a couple of days in which to begin planning my trip to Uganda with World in Need. I had met David Shamiri, the director of WIN, through our local church. He came to England from Yemen, and he and his Polish wife Magda do a huge amount of work to help others. In my last year at vet school I decided I’d like to travel and do some voluntary work before settling into a permanent job, so I went to David and asked whether he could use the services of a vet.

World in Need works to transform the world through aid and education, and David suggested I might go to Uganda to help remote communities without access to a vet to care for their animals – especially goats. WIN had arranged to give goats to many of the villagers, but its aim was to give one to every household as part of the drive to help them become self-sufficient. However, many of the goats’ new owners had little idea how to look after them.

So I agreed to go to Uganda for four weeks to help out and we arranged the trip for the following February, after my stint with the Grahamstown SPCA. David told me I would be able to stay with the local pastor, George Amoli. Conditions would be very basic, he warned me, with sparse electricity and a bucket for a shower. And, of course, no internet or phone connections.

‘You up to living like that for a month?’ David joked.

I hoped I would be. It was certainly going to be a challenge.

David suggested I contact a few animal charities to see if they would sponsor me, and perhaps even donate equipment or medicines. I wrote to dozens of them and eventually ended up in a room with members of the British Goat Society, who were keen to know more about how I’d use their money if they were to sponsor me.

It’s probably fair to say that the members of the British Goat Society are fairly passionate about goats. They write the standards for goat shows, of which there are many, and their members can spend many happy hours talking about, viewing and tending to these animals. In the interview room with me were 15 people who were spending the day having a conference about goats.

‘Are you any good with goats?’ asked one member, peering over her glasses at me.

‘Well, I did some work experience as a teenager at a goat rescue sanctuary called Billie’s. I learned to muck out and feed and was taught how to trim their feet.’

Home to dozens of goats, Billie’s was beautifully run and maintained, and what had surprised me when I worked there was discovering that goats aren’t timid like sheep, they’re more like dogs and can be very playful – they have big personalities.

More questions followed and I did my best to sound hugely enthusiastic about all things to do with goats. I must have passed muster because, much to my delight, the BGS very generously agreed to sponsor me to put together 100 goat ‘goody bags’ to take with me to Uganda. They were very excited about supporting a project that they could see would make a real difference to the health and welfare of goats, and hence the owners, too.

I was on my way.

CHAPTER FIVE

First-time Surgery (#u356210ed-fa4e-5381-af13-04f957448623)

When I had a phone call asking whether I’d like to do a locum job in southern Cornwall for a week, I jumped at the chance. I love Cornwall and I thought it would be fun to drive down there and have a week in a practice somewhere completely different.

It was only after I said yes that I realised it was, by pure chance, the vet practice where my cousin Kate worked as a senior vet. Kate – actually my dad’s second cousin but slightly nearer to my age than Dad’s – had married a Cornish guy and they had settled there.

‘Come on down,’ she told me when I rang. ‘It’s a lovely practice, I’m sure you’ll enjoy a week here.’

So one Sunday evening in early October I packed my bags and set off on the six-hour drive. The practice had booked me into a little coastal hotel nearby, but this time I didn’t feel quite as lost as I had during my first week as a locum two months earlier. I was getting the hang of it and enjoying the variety that the job offered, although my staple hotel diet still seemed to be Pot Noodles. My car didn’t like being by the sea, though, as with every gust of ocean wind the alarm would go off, so I spent much of my evenings looking up how to turn off a car alarm on the painstakingly slow hotel internet, while repeatedly leaning out of my bedroom window to turn off the alarm, which just kept activating.

On my first day I was down in the diary to operate in the morning and consult in the afternoon. I was looking forward to the challenge of operating, and hoping for something reasonably straightforward.

I arrived bright and early to find that I wasn’t the only newly graduated locum who’d been hired.

‘Jo! Fancy seeing you here!’

‘Oh my goodness, Lizzie, I didn’t know you’d been hired too!’

It was a nice coincidence. Lizzie had been in my year at the Royal Veterinary College and during our final year she’d been in the sister rotation group to mine, which meant we had a number of placements together in hospitals, practices and farms as we ploughed our way through the long, long list of rotations on our journey towards finals. And now here we were, the other side of it all, working together.

Lizzie was bold and outgoing, the sort of person who fitted straight into the team and who, after hellos and introductions, was confident enough to say, ‘Who wants a cuppa?’ and find her way to the kitchen to make tea for the whole team before we started work.

The practice, like many across the UK, consisted of a large number of part-time staff, both vets and nurses. There were four vets and six nurses, plus two receptionists, but rarely were there more than three vets, three nurses and one receptionist in at once.

Lizzie and I had been hired to replace one of the practice partners who had hurt his back – the theory seemed to be that two graduate locums made up for one senior vet. In fact, we soon realised that the practice was overstaffed, and since the surgical suite was about to be refurbished, Lizzie got to work cleaning up and moving items into storage, joking that she was happy to be paid a locum salary to do housework.

Meanwhile I cracked on with the operation list for the morning. Since we didn’t have a super-clean operating suite, we could only do what were known as ‘minor ops’ – those that were less risky and didn’t involve going deep into the body – in the prep room out the back.

First on my list that morning was an entropion correction on a cat. Entropion is when the eyelid rolls inwards so that the lashes rub continuously on the cornea of the eye. Very uncomfortable for the poor cat, who gets inflamed and sore eyes. Entropion surgery isn’t all that common and I had never seen one performed, although I knew the theory. It involves making a crescent-shaped incision like a new moon beneath the eye, removing the skin in the crescent and stitching the remaining skin together, thus pulling the eyelid back into the correct position. But there were details I wasn’t sure about. What thickness of skin should I remove, for instance?

Lizzie stuck her head round the door. ‘All OK?’

‘Lizzie, have you ever done entropion surgery?’

‘Um, no, actually. But Fossum is on the shelf behind reception if you need it.’

‘Fossum’ is every vet’s best friend. It’s an instruction manual called Small Animal Surgery by Theresa Welch Fossum and it gives step-by-step instructions on how to do every operation you can think of on a cat or a dog.

Every surgery has a Fossum. I took it down off the shelf and pored over it, checking the details of the operation. It looked straightforward enough.

‘Nothing to do but have a go,’ I muttered to myself as, with the cat anaesthetised and Fossum open in front of me, I followed the steps, peering across the recumbent cat every now and then to check that I was on course, with a helpful nurse watching the anaesthetic and occasionally turning a page for me.

By the time I’d finished I was cautiously pleased – the cat’s eyelids were now in the right place and I’d done a pretty neat job. I asked Kate to have a look, just to check a senior member of staff was happy with my work; she peered over my shoulder, said I’d done well and gave the nurse a thumbs-up to wake the cat. Once I’d made sure that the cat was fine, I closed Fossum, put it back on the shelf with a pat to say thanks, and went to get myself a cup of tea.

My second op was removing two rotten teeth from a greyhound. I was actually more nervous about this than I had been about the entropion correction, despite having done dental surgery before. There had been a difficult practical at university, which became known as the ‘dead dog head practical’ and which still made me shudder every time I remembered it. During our training we had practised, under supervision, removing teeth from the heads of dead dogs. The first time I did this I had really struggled. The beagle head I had been given – one of many donated to the university from pounds, labs, racing kennels and owners kind enough to leave their dogs for us to learn on – had been used for several practicals before mine, so all the easy incisor teeth had been taken out already. I was left with the outer incisors, which are much bigger than the front ones.

The technique involves pressing all around the edge of the tooth with an instrument called an elevator, which has a sharp curved end and a handle that fits perfectly in the palm of your hand. The pressing weakens the periodontal ligament which holds the root of the tooth in the socket. When the tooth is wobbly, you can wiggle it with forceps to weaken it further and carry on rotating between the two until the tooth is wobbly enough to pull it out.

After 10 minutes of applying pressure, then wiggling, the tooth was still very firmly in place, so I decided I would apply a little more pressure with the elevator, but at that moment it slipped and I sliced all the way up the gum. The clinician in charge came over to take a look.

‘Just as well this dog is dead, or you’d be doing some stitching right now. At least you didn’t take out its eye. Believe me, that’s happened. Now try again, with more patience this time,’ he said.

Remembering this, I took a deep breath as I looked down at the very much alive dog that was anaesthetised on the table in front of me. I had scaled its teeth to remove the tartar and now I needed to remove two rotten wobbly teeth before polishing all its teeth to finish. ‘Patience,’ I reminded myself as I leaned in to begin pressing with the elevator around one of the rotten teeth. I was wearing a mask to avoid inhaling bacteria from the dog’s mouth and it was hot and uncomfortable, but half an hour later the teeth were out and the greyhound had a squeaky clean polished mouth.

Two down, one to go.

My final op that morning was an anal gland flush on an elderly pug. Anal gland expression is the least glamorous part of a vet’s job and only too common. Anal glands sit at the four and eight o’clock positions in the anus, and if the faeces aren’t firm the glands can fill and become impacted. It’s the reason why dogs sometimes scoot their bottoms along the floor, and if this occurs regularly the glands can become infected.