As any young vet in a rural practice will know, dealing with emergencies and unpredicted jobs for which you have no previous experience is not uncommon. In the field you are suddenly faced with difficult situations for which no planning has been possible. You are on your own and you just have to make do.
I remember in my early days thinking of all the possibilities that might occur out of the blue, and I tried to be well prepared for any potential rare event. I had all the drugs and equipment I believed would be useful packed into my little Subaru, followed later by a second-hand and far too small Datsun Sunny. As a result I travelled the dusty back roads in a well-laden vehicle carrying too much never-to-be-used equipment and too many drugs that eventually had to be thrown out when they went past their use-by date.
As years passed, my cars got bigger and became air conditioned and more comfortable and I grew wiser and carried far lighter loads.
Anyway, with time, rural vets become fairly self-sufficient and invariably carry most things they are likely to require during a routine day. It’s when we are suddenly removed from our ‘office’ and another means of transport is required to get to a job that we can find ourselves short of supplies and it becomes essential that we have the ability to improvise. In Cock and Bull Stories I wrote about one of the worst days in my life, at Molesworth Station, where halfway through castrating half a dozen unhandled three-year-old colts and after one had already died on me, another one herniated through the castration incision. I had to catch the colt in the middle of a large stockyard with his intestine dragging in the mud and re-anaesthetise with the remaining drugs and then clean and replace metres of filthy intestine before he came around. Having flown to Molesworth I didn’t have any spare stocks of anything, so had to make do in a difficult situation. Having a horse herniate through its castration wound is an event you hear about during training but hope like hell you are never going to be faced with. They are not the emergency surgical events you can prepare for, but when they do occur you usually find a way to deal with them.
John Smart tells a wonderful story about being faced with an unusual situation in the Catlins when he was a very young vet, and barely a year in practice. It really illustrates how he adapted to the situation and helps explain why he has become one of the most well-known and widely respected sheep vets in the country.
The Catlins lie in the southeast corner of the South Island and contain the only area of native rainforest remaining on the east coast of New Zealand. Although well recognised nowadays, the Catlins were almost a forgotten corner of New Zealand when John arrived in Balclutha in 1976. The main reason for this anonymity was the fact that the only way through most of the area was a very rough gravel road and getting into the depths of the country back then was regarded almost as a bit of an adventure. Because of their relative isolation, the farmers of the Catlins were a particularly hospitable bunch and always pleased to have a visitor to talk to. There is still a very strong community spirit in the Catlins.
In April 1977 John received a call just after lunch about a cut horse down at Ken and Shirley Mackenzie’s farm at Chaslands, deep in the heart of the Catlins. The message was to meet at their house and they would take him to the horse, which was ‘on a beach’ somewhere. After an hour of thumping over endless potholes and corrugations John arrived at Ken and Shirley’s. He was then informed that the horse was at the far end of Waipati Beach and getting to it would first involve driving in on the access road to the Cathedral Caves, a local tourist attraction. After arriving at the Cathedral Caves carpark he would need to collect all the equipment he might conceivably need and transfer it to packs on a horse. The horses would then be led down the winding pedestrian access track through native bush to the beach and once there mounted up and ridden 5 kilometres to the far end of Waipati Beach. Here they would have to cross the Waipati River and finally it was a short distance up onto a small plateau to where the patient was.
Horseriding was a novelty for John. As a classmate of his at Massey, I knew John would go to great lengths to avoid anything to do with horses. And he will admit to not having a lot of interest in matters equine. So he had only ever ridden a horse once before, as a small boy and reluctantly. This was to be his first real ride and it was 5 kilometres there and 5 kilometres back. Luckily the horse was a placid one and to John’s relief behaved himself. It was a nice sunny afternoon and he almost enjoyed the 40 minute trek along the beach with the native bush on one side and the breakers of the South Pacific rolling in on the other. Due to lack of recent rains the Waipati River was not too high, and after fording it there was a short trek up onto a small grassy plateau above the river where John’s patient stood by an old rusty one room corrugated iron musterer’s hut.
Thankfully getting to our patients is not usually this involved. And while that part of the job was enough of an ordeal John then had to cope with his favourite animal, which had more of a problem than he had predicted. This horse had a very deep cut to the back of its front leg near the elbow. What had happened was Ken and Shirley had saddled up the horse with some equipment to go fencing. They had strapped a spade to the saddle and at some point the saddle had slipped causing the spade to dig into the back of its front leg.
It was an extensive wound that was going to take more than a sedative and local anaesthetic. Back then we didn’t have the wonderful tranquilisers now available and so more often had to resort to a general anaesthetic to cope with difficult-to-stitch wounds. The most common drug we used then was an intravenous short-acting barbiturate anaesthetic — Thiopentone. The recovery phase from this could be long and wild. When you anaesthetise a horse you need a reasonable-sized area for the horse to fall onto but more importantly an area large enough for the horse to recover on. Getting to their feet in a groggy state means they stagger around a fair bit. Unfortunately for John, he only had the one small flat grassy area available, on two sides of which there were steep banks to the river below. John reckons he tried unsuccessfully to put out of his mind visions of a ‘drunk’ horse staggering off during the recovery phase and heading over the bluff and crashing onto the rocks in the riverbed below.
He organised the gear he would need and sedated and then anaesthetised the horse. It dropped to the ground with the cut leg uppermost, much to his relief. Ken, after one quick lesson, became an anaesthetist’s assistant and, while John cleaned up the area round the cut and the wound itself, he sat on the horse’s shoulder holding a syringe of anaesthetic in the jugular vein. Because Thiopentone only lasts for a short time the horse required several small top-ups to remain under for the duration of the surgery. And it would take some time to suture this mess back together again. When John sensed the horse getting a bit light he would get Ken to push a few more millilitres into the vein. John worked as quickly as possible because the more times you top up the longer and wilder the recovery phase is likely to be.
It was a challenging clean up and suturing job but once the surgery was finished and all the equipment removed from the vicinity then came the potentially tricky recovery. They waited quietly after the horse first started to stir, not wanting to disturb it — the longer it took for the horse to try to stand the better. Eventually the horse lurched to its feet and stood there wobbling. To John’s relief it didn’t try to take off. In the end the recovery he had been stressing over turned out to be somewhat of an anti-climax. The job ended up being a six and a half hour mission but a very successful one. The wound healed up well and the horse was back on normal duties within a couple of months.
After the long journey back John stayed for a well-deserved albeit rather late cup of tea with Ken and Shirley. During the course of the conversation the fact that John was marrying his girlfriend Lois in about a month’s time came up. Before he knew what was happening Ken had loaded their old second-hand black and white television into his car. This was much appreciated since Lois and John didn’t have two pennies to rub together but John says that this is typical of the friendly nature of the Catlins residents. This TV did exactly another two and a half years because John recalls it eventually died in November 1979 at the time of the Erebus disaster.
John had a demanding but memorable day, faced his fears, and was rewarded with lifelong friends and a TV set.
After dismounting at the end of that day back in 1977 John has never been back on a horse.