As I retired from small animal practice or, as I tell my colleagues, promoted myself to only doing production animal work, I very quickly became out of touch with veterinary aspects of cat and dog medicine. In 2006 when I was faced with a major health issue, my partners ruled out after-hours and weekend work. This was a very generous gesture on their part because it increased their workload. As it was, I was beginning to feel rather inadequate when it came to doing small animal work because I was only doing it during the odd weekend and after hours.
Being on duty for after-hours calls and weekend work does eventually become a bit of a grind. I suspect PJ would have carried on working for a few more years if he had been able to drop being on duty for 24 hours at least one day a week and working weekends. Unfortunately, with me not doing this work, it would have meant a lot of extra work for the other vets in the practice if he had done so.
In the early days it didn’t seem to be a problem. It added to the interest and excitement; it was just part of the job. You also often got to know clients quite well after a few hours with them assisting on some emergency midnight surgery cases. Still, I always found late night calls a bit of a problem because I definitely wasn’t at my best when first woken up. Chick grew to loathe midnight calls as well because she knew how I reacted when the telephone woke me from a deep sleep. I just did not perform well.
Calls would often go something like this.
‘Hello,’ I would answer after fumbling around, sometimes picking up the bedside radio or trying to turn off the alarm clock first. I’d occasionally also knock over my glass of water, which really put me in the right frame of mind to be civil.
‘Is that the vet?’ A tip: this is not a good way to get a friendly response. Of course I’m the bloody vet. Why else would you be ringing me and I do have a name. Very occasionally I would get an ‘I’m very sorry to disturb you’ but usually not.
‘Yes,’ I would reply, or ‘I think so’.
‘Well, I’m really worried about Tigger.’
‘Who the hell are you and who the hell is Tigger?’ I would feel like saying. Instead I usually had to ask who was speaking. Not introducing yourself is just plain bad manners. Waking me up when I’m not at my best, asking if I’m the vet, and not introducing yourself: we are off to a very bad start. Chick is by now cringing next to me.
By the time I had found out who I was speaking to, I was usually starting to think a little more clearly and hoping like anything I could find a way of solving their problem without having to get out of bed. Sometimes if I thought the animal could wait until the morning, I would suggest they give the dog a disprin. This didn’t always go down well with the dog’s owner, nor PJ or Stuart when they had to deal with the problem the next day.
Chick today reminds me of two questions I invariably asked.
‘How long has she been like this?’ If the problem had only started an hour or two ago and was getting worse my reaction was somewhat more civil than if it had started the previous day.
‘What colour are its gums?’ That was a good question because no one ever knew and it gave me a little time to wake up further as they went to have a look.
Often, however, it was best to get out of bed and get in the car and drive into town to see whatever the problem was, because if I didn’t I would invariably lie awake waiting for them to ring back to tell me that there was no improvement. Our children, George and Caroline, remember the times when I was having a bad night. They would get woken by the phone and shortly afterwards hear me stomping down the hall, slamming the back door shut and then the car roaring off down the drive. What really annoyed Chick was that after I left in what she reckoned was always a foul mood, she would lie wide awake hoping everything was going all right. Then when I returned, invariably now in a good mood, I would fall sound asleep — and she wouldn’t.
On the odd occasion there was definitely no need to get out of bed and I could turn over and go back to sleep with a clear conscience that I had done all that was necessary.
I received a call after midnight one night from Greg Mitchell, who had recently acquired a young German shorthaired pointer. Up until then he had been very much a cat person but when his wife walked out on him, she took her precious Burmese cats with her. As she didn’t like dogs, Greg very quickly got hold of one, partly I suspect to ensure neither the wife nor the cats returned. Greg, who had always had a fondness for a beer or two, tended to top up more regularly after they left. It was after one of his late-night sessions that he came home to find Neville, his dog, in some distress.
‘Pete,’ he slurred, ‘It’s Greg here. I’m really worried about Neville.’ There was no need to ask who Greg or Neville were. ‘He’s all hunched up and uncomfortable and it looks like his balls have slipped down and are strangling his cock’.
‘That does sound very uncomfortable, Greg. I’m not too sure I’ve ever experienced that. Tell me what you can see’.
‘Well his cock is all swollen up and red and his balls are not where they should be. They look like they are coming out. Bloody hell, it’s horrible.’
By this stage I was getting the picture.
‘What sort of look has he got on his face? Does he look in distress?’ I asked him.
‘Ah, no, no, he looks quite happy actually.’
After I had stopped chuckling away, I explained that Neville had either been dreaming of a bitch somewhere or was possibly very happy to see Greg. He had an erection and what Greg thought were displaced testes was actually the swollen bulbus glandis — important erectile tissue that allows a dog to get tied or knotted when mating.
‘Go to bed, Greg, and leave Neville alone. Let nature take its course.’
On another occasion telling the owner to let nature take its course was possibly not good advice. I had been woken up at some ungodly hour on a Saturday night by a man who had become worried over the last few minutes because his cat, which was about to have kittens, had not made any progress since she had started to go into labour.
‘How long has she been trying to pass a kitten?’ I asked.
‘At least 10 minutes and she is purring frantically,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never heard her purr so loud. Something must be wrong.’ He sounded a little anxious.
‘And what has she passed so far?’
‘Nothing — there’s a little blob of whitish jelly stuff showing though’.
‘Just leave her alone and go to bed. Give it time. Sounds like everything is in order.’
‘But the book says she should have had the first kitten by now.’
‘Don’t worry about the book. If she hasn’t had the first one in half an hour, ring me back. Don’t interfere. Let nature takes its course. Goodnight.’
Twenty minutes later the phone rang again. The same man again, now sounding even more distressed.
‘She’s had the first one but she stopped straining and there are more in there because I can see them moving and none are coming out.’
‘OK — what’s the kitten doing?’
‘It’s trying to find a nipple but can’t find it.’
‘What’s mum doing?’
‘She’s just lying there purring but she’s not doing anything.’
‘She’s resting. She will be OK. Give her time.’
‘But the book says …’
‘Forget the bloody book. It might be 12 hours before she is finished. Sometimes they take a long time and it’s all quite normal. If she strains really hard and nothing appears and she looks as if she is getting distressed then ring me back. Have some faith, man. Have faith that nature will take its course and all will be well.’
An hour later, about two minutes after I had finally got back to sleep, the phone rings again.
‘She’s had three now but she has been straining really hard and nothing has happened. You told me to ring back if nothing happened.’
‘How long has she been straining?’
‘At least five minutes. Oh — one minute. Oh, one has just popped out. Oh goodness me. Thank the Lord.’
After lecturing him again on the importance of having faith, I told him to bring her and the kittens into the clinic at 10 the next morning and let me check her. I didn’t think about it when he replied that that would be really good because he had an early morning start but would be free by then.
It was only when he came into the clinic that morning with the cat happily nursing half a dozen kittens that I realised I had been lecturing the local Anglican minister on having faith.
A few weeks after PJ and I set up on our own in our renovated house, now a very basic clinic, it was broken into. I was woken by a phone call from the police, who had noticed a door open and realised we had been burgled. The burglars had had plenty of time because they had been through all the drugs in the cupboards, helped themselves to potential useful ones for themselves, stolen our dart gun and then obviously sat around and drunk a couple of bottles of beer we had stored in the fridge. The police were very interested to know what was taken but a lot of the stuff we only found was missing when we wanted to use it and found it wasn’t there.
This applied to a drug called apomorphine. This is a very useful drug for inducing a dog to vomit if it has, for example, swallowed a poison. It is a derivative of morphine but has very different effects. It is also a very effective emetic for humans but one of its main medical uses is to treat erectile dysfunction.
Word must have got out among the criminal fraternity that the Anderson and Jerram Veterinary Clinic in Blenheim had some really useful drugs and was a breeze to raid. We didn’t have a safe nor did we have an alarm, and it was very easy to jimmy any window or door open in the old house. This was very irresponsible on our part but the budget was tight and security wasn’t high on the priority list in those early days. After being robbed it became so. We got a safe and put in an alarm system within a week of being robbed. Two days after the new alarm went in, it went off. We again received a late night call from the police telling us that we had been robbed. On getting to the clinic we found that after they had forced the back door open, they must have been startled by the alarm. They made a hasty retreat and didn’t have time to steal anything.
We slept better knowing we had an alarm system in and didn’t think too much about the initial robbery until some weeks later, when a local inspector rang and said he wanted to talk to us about a death we had something to do with. He told us someone in Christchurch had overdosed on something they had stolen from us. The doctors needed to know what it was he had taken, but no one really knew other than it was ‘stuff they had stolen from vets in Blenheim’. I’m not sure that overdosing on apomorphine in combination with a horse tranquilliser or two would have been a pleasant way to go, but then again, perhaps there could have been worse ways. While we didn’t get any of our drugs back, the police did recover our dart gun, which had been converted to fire live ammunition. Thankfully we never had another break-in.