Vet Among the Pigeons (10 page)

The next task was the bath. With Sidney safely
contained
in his pillowcase, I went in search of a suitable
container
. Search as I did, though, I failed to come up with anything suitable for a four-and-a-half-foot constrictor to have a bath in. There was nothing for it – our own bath it would have to be.

Molly clapped her hands when she saw me running a mix of hot and cold water into the bath and immediately started pulling off her fleecy jumper.

‘Monny bath! Monny bath!' she cried, in obvious glee at the unexpected morning treat.

‘No, Molly. The bath is for the snake.'

She looked at me incredulously and I couldn't but agree with her – maybe I was losing it.

With ten centimetres of tepid water gently swirling around the bath, I slowly lowered the snake. It wasn't until he sank down to the bottom that I began to wonder if he would know to hold his head up over the water level or not.
I counted to five as he lay motionless below the surface, thin trails of bubbles blowing out of his nostrils. There was nothing for it but reach down and grasp the head.

So there I knelt, crouching over the bath, firmly holding Sidney's head at arm's length and watching, with a mix of horror and fascination, as the long body gradually relaxed and uncoiled and lazily flicked from side to side, creating little whirlpools in the water.

Of course, the phone had to ring.

Desperately trying to get my mobile out of my right pocket with my left hand while keeping my eyes fixed on Sidney, I finally managed to hold it up to my ear. It was the bank manager. If I was free, he asked, could I take a few minutes to discuss my account with him? Glad of the excuse, I casually informed him that I was actually tied up at the moment – bathing a snake.

Sounding slightly incredulous, he began to enquire as to why I was bathing a snake. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Molly, who had been strangely quiet up to now, heaving a large bottle of bubble bath up onto the edge of the bath.

‘Snakey like bubbles. Pink bubbles!' she declared as she started to tip the contents into the bath water.

‘No, Molly!' I shouted and I reached out to grab it from her while still holding onto Sidney. I watched in horror as the phone slipped out of my hands, skidded along the edge of the bath tub and with a resounding plop, fell into the water.

I didn't even begin to wonder what the bank manager would think – but at least he couldn't ring me back, I
thought wistfully, as I watched my phone glide carelessly up and down along the base of the bath from the current created by Sidney's body.

‘Okay. That will have to do you,' I told Sydney after what seemed a lot longer than fifteen minutes.

All that was left to do now was to stomach tube him with the mix of concentrate feed and supplements,
specifically
designed for ailing reptiles. I was well familiar with the scenario of having the snake restrained by the owner, with the first half metre or so, depending on the size,
dangling
down vertically, to allow me to slip the carefully measured tube over the back of the mouth and down into the stomach. Today, with no loving owner to console him, Sidney was in no mood to cooperate. Clearly in a huff at being hauled out of the warm bath, he was now coiled tightly in a roll with only the head that I was still holding, sticking out.

Obstinately, he refused to open his mouth, which I gently probed with the well lubricated tip of a stomach tube.

There was nothing for it but to lower him back into the bath to see if he would uncoil. It took three or four more attempts before I finally managed to get him to open his mouth so I could pass the tube in. He hung down, the bottom few feet still in the bath water. With the stomach tube in place, he hung sullenly, obviously reluctant to coil with the rubber tube in him. With one hand, I managed to attach the sixty millilitre syringe onto the top of the tube and gently squirt in the mushy, grey-brown liquid.

I watched the last of it disappear down the tube with the
aid of gravity, but before it had all gone down, Sidney decided to rebel. Flicking his tail up again, with the skill of a well practised contortionist, he began to coil. Dropping the syringe, I was forced to grab him mid-trunk and resist against the surprisingly powerful movements to keep him in a straight line, until all the fluid had trickled in. I tried to ignore the muscular rippling under my hands until I was satisfied that the tube was empty and I could safely remove it.

‘Right. That's it. You're done!' I said, thankful at last to be able to release the head and drop him back into the vivarium before firmly replacing the lid.

The next week seemed to rotate around injections, baths and tube-feeding as it took a few hours each day to muster up the courage to approach my patient. By day three, the bubbles had stopped blowing out his nostril and when I reweighed him on day five, despite myself, I was pleased to see that he had put on some weight. By the end of the week, the previously dull skin was starting to shed and the thin backbone was not quite so visible. I felt
confident
that Sidney was beginning on the long road to
recovery
– I just didn't know how long it would take. My main problem now was that as Sidney recovered his strength, he became livelier and more aware of my limitations as a snake handler. While he loved his bath and tolerated his injections, I could no longer tube him on my own. As soon as he would see the tube coming, he would coil himself firmly into a knot, knowing full well that I wouldn't have the ability to force him out of it. By the sixth day, I offered Donal the option of holding his trunk or passing the
stomach tube. Thankfully, he chose the former as I was much more confident at giving out directions than
following
them.

On the following Thursday morning, after Sidney had survived my tender, if not so loving care for a full week, the phone rang.

I was never more relieved to hear Dieter's German accent booming down the line. He was aware of my
reluctance
with his beloved species, and he could never quite comprehend it.

‘But surely, you vill vant to keep him now you have made him better?' he questioned.

‘Oh no, he's all yours,' I assured him quickly. ‘How soon do you think you can get here?'

So keen was Dieter to see his new charge that he insisted on making a detour from Dublin airport via
Wicklow
. By the time he arrived, I had all the medications and instructions packed. The only thing that remained was Sidney himself, who seemed to be a little feisty this
morning
. Graciously, I allowed Dieter the honour of loading his new addition.

‘Doesn't look too bad now, does he?' admired Dieter, as Sidney looped himself in slow, gracious movements up his arms and around his neck in a casual manner that he had never displayed with me.

Despite the mutual love-hate relationship that I had built up with Sidney, I was very relieved to see him being loaded into the back of the Ford Fiesta. As soon as the crunching of gravel stopped, I packed up all the
containers
, stomach tubes, heat pads and the whole array of
accessories that he had used and soaked them in a strong disinfectant solution in the bath. That evening, having drained and dried all the accessories, I disinfected the bath, scrubbing it as it had never been scrubbed before. To this day, I still, personally, prefer to use the shower!

I was a bit surprised not to hear from Dieter over the next few days, but no news was most definitely good news in this case.

A few weeks later, just when the nightmares were beginning to fade and I was almost feeling brave enough to sleep with my feet sticking out from under the duvet, an A4 envelope arrived, lined on one side with stiff
cardboard
. Eagerly I ripped it open and to my horror, out fell a photograph of Sidney in mid-strike, jaws opened one
hundred
and eighty degrees wide around the scrawny body of a day-old chick. In horror, I dropped it, the quality of the photograph being so good that I could almost smell him again. The sheet enclosed read:

L
ooking at the appointment book for tomorrow, I shuddered in horror. The morning would be taken up with an obese Labrador spay, followed by a messy TB test in a bachelor farmer’s pad, where
organisation
wouldn’t be the outstanding quality of the operation. But, for once, these didn’t worry me. What was causing my anguish was the afternoon appointment: 3.30pm: Gillian – annual accountant meeting.

Already I could picture myself meandering through the morning’s work, hoping that if I stalled long enough I could, justifiably, ring and postpone, knowing, however, that on the one morning that I wanted Terry Byrne to be his usual, disorganised self, he would have his meagre stock in perfect order. I mentally packed the two
Solpadine
which I could take before heading off to the brightly coloured office of the accountant, where, deceptively, real
plants actually grew. However, the bright décor and living plants was where it all ended. Once trapped inside the four walls, I knew there would be no escape from the mental torture that lay ahead.

It had started some two months before when the odd memo had begun to appear in the day book: Gillian – call accountant. The next month: Gillian – accountant looking for files. Some weeks later: Gillian – accountant missing statements. On they went.

Although working within a practice, like most mixed animal practitioners I remained self-employed – a ploy, it seemed, devised to ensure the prosperity of accountants for many generations to come. I actually thought that I was quite good at my end of things, meticulously filling in cheque stubs, filing invoices of paid and unpaid dockets, putting all the bank statements in one designated folder, even remembering to file the grey, not the blue copy of the chemist’s prescription (remembering grey for accountant – boring). However, despite my best efforts, the invisible goblin that seemed, on an annual basis, to accompany my carefully sorted accounts from our house to the
accountant’s
office somehow managed to delete files, mix up paid and unpaid invoices, eliminate whole cheque-book stubs – anything that could cause general chaos.

I soon discovered that going to the accountant was a bit like going to the doctor. Once you got inside, the
exchanging
of pleasantries, possibly designed to settle your nerves, inevitably served only to prolong the suspense. Once that was over (having probably added a significant amount to the bill) it was on to the nitty gritty of things.

‘On the twelfth of November you wrote a cheque for an undisclosed sum: explain!’

It was like being back at the oral exams in college but, in reality, I was more likely to be able to explain the
fertility
problem of a maiden mare than to come up with any logical explanation as to why there was no record of my VAT return for some particular two-month period.

On the day in question, at the appointed hour, I
genuinely
tried to focus, tried to show some interest in what was going to account for a significant percentage of my annual expenditure. As the besuited figure at the opposite side of the table pushed a few obscure figures around an A4 pad, I glanced around me, staring in bewilderment at the rows of dull-coloured books in various poses around the office. A few opened pages – rows of figures,
formulae
, percentages and deductions – not a single clinical sign or surgical instrument in sight. I wondered, yet again, how anyone could spend their life in this environment.

On it dragged – more putting this into petty cash, more writing this in and writing that off. If they can write things off like that, why can’t I just make it all up, I wondered idly to myself?

The accountant, seeming oblivious to my mental anguish, was still enthusiastically wading through the file. Was I happy with this figure, or that total? he asked on a few occasions. Dumbly, I nodded, acutely aware that by the time he would get to the end of each lengthy
explanation
, I would have totally forgotten what we were
discussing
in the first place. Almost an hour into the meeting, while going through the tax allowances for purchasing
surgical equipment, I almost felt that by the end of the
lecture
, I had some faint inkling of what he was talking about. As this was the first time during the session that this had happened, I asked what I hoped might be a
semi-intelligent
question, hoping to indicate some level of enthusiasm. He paused momentarily, looking surprised, as this was the first sentence I had uttered with more than monosyllables. Within seconds, I realised my mistake. Enthused by my tiny little flickering spark of potential interest, he was off, launching into a verbal explosion of molten lava which was no more use than dry ash by the time it got to my ears. It reminded me of the time I had started to spay a bitch helped by a student on her first day seeing practice. Enthused by her initial interest, I was happy to explain the surgical procedure in minute detail, pulling up a ligament or a uterine horn to demonstrate as I went along. It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later that I noticed she had gone a bit grey. I caught hold of her just as she slumped silently to the floor.

As the accountant came to the end of his flow, I
wondered
, idly, what would happen if I passed out – would that get me out of the remainder of the meeting or would he just carry on over my semi-conscious body?

Thankfully, at that moment the phone rang.
Apologising
for the interruption, I answered. It was Joe Hartigan, an eighty-suckler cow farmer from Roundwood. I had calved a cow for him early that morning before going to the surgery. He had just checked her to find she had since prolapsed her uterus, or as he put it himself, ‘put out her calf bed’.

‘When did she put it out?’ I asked him.

‘Well, I’m just up from the lunch and she was all right when I left so it can’t be out long now.’

‘Is she up or down?’ I further enquired.

‘She’s up at the moment, but she’s gone a bit staggery, like. I wouldn’t bet on her staying up for long.’

Joe was one of that generation firmly convinced that you needed to shout on the phone to be heard all that
distance
away. As I held the mobile even further from my ear, I noticed that the figure-fumbling at the other side of the desk had ceased and that the accountant was casting an occasional curious glance in my direction, obviously able to hear every word.

‘Try and keep her up and keep it clean so she won’t do any damage to the calf bed,’ I advised him. ‘If you wouldn’t mind giving the office a ring, either Seamus or Arthur will be out to you in no time. I’m just tied up myself at the moment.’

‘Right so, I’ll do that then,’ he bellowed down the phone.

Once the ringing in my ears had died down, the accountant tentatively asked, ‘How could a cow do damage to the bed of a calf?’

‘Well, if she goes down, it could tear or get dirty,’ I answered, grateful to be on to a more familiar topic.

‘But, isn’t the bed just made up of straw and that?’ he questioned, still clearly bewildered.

Gently I explained to him that the calf bed to which the farmer was referring was, in fact, the bed of the calf inside the cow and not outside.

His colour faded slightly, before he continued in a somewhat faint voice, ‘But how does the “thing”,’ he paused, as though unable to refer to it by name, ‘get out?’

‘If the cow forces too hard, particularly if she’s an older cow and has had a lot of calves or if it’s a very big calf, it’s easy for the whole uterus to pop out,’ I explained. ‘And, you see, once it’s out,’ I continued, warming to my topic, ‘the blood supply gets trapped, so if you don’t get it back in quickly you can be in trouble.’

‘And how big is this thing?’ he queried.

‘Well, when it comes out fresh it’s about this big,’ I told him holding my hands wide apart, ‘but, if that one’s left until tonight it could get this big,’ I assured him, throwing my hands very far apart to indicate the size of some of the engorged uteruses I have had the misfortune to try to replace.

‘And you just … push it back in … the hole it came out?’ he asked finally, having taken some moments to assimilate the information.

‘Yeah, something like that,’ I agreed uncertainly,
suddenly
realising he wasn’t quite ready for a full-blown pathology lecture.

‘And you do
that
for a living?’ he stated.

‘And you do
this
for a living?’ I replied.

There was silence for a few moments as we eyeballed each other – two aliens meeting in a hostile planet.

The stand-off was interrupted as the mobile rang again. It was the same number as before. ‘Are you okay, Joe?’ I asked, remembering to hold the phone a good foot from my ear to prevent permanent damage.

‘Well, now, I’ve been trying to get Seamus but he isn’t answering his phone. I was wondering if ye could come out yourself.’

In a flash it came to me that Arthur had had a late-night caesarean in Joe’s yard which had turned out badly, and since then, even though Arthur was in no way at fault, Joe was reluctant to have him out.

‘I can’t come out to you now, Joe,’ I replied, somewhat impatiently, knowing that the cow’s chances were
worsening
the longer we delayed and also knowing that Arthur was a more experienced vet than me anyway. ‘You’ll have to get Arthur. I’m in a meeting with my accountant in Dublin at the moment.’

‘You’re meetin’ the accountant!’ he roared. ‘Divil a bit o’ good them lads will do ye. Ye’d be better off putting the few bob in your own back pocket than in theirs.’

I ended the call as quickly as I could but, although the accountant didn’t comment, I had to suppress the
occasional
giggle as we crawled tediously though the
negligible
fixed and current assets.

By the time we got to page four of the accounts, I was starting to feel light-headed. I wasn’t used to sitting still for such a long period of time and I was getting fidgety. I nodded brightly at appropriate intervals, knowing that my only escape was when I could finally sign off along the dotted line on page six.

Finally, it came to the end. Wearily, I scrawled my
well-used
signature along the indicated dotted line, more suited to signing cattle TB cards in the hundred than for a tidy little official document. The accountant signed his own
name under mine, in fine flowing script. I couldn’t help noticing his fine-skinned hand and even nails in
comparison
to my own.

Before bolting, I remembered that the accountant of the practice had asked me to ask him for some form to do with retention tax for TB testing. It sounded like such a vague, useless thing that I was sure the accountant would never have heard of it.

After a few attempts trying to explain what I was
supposed
to be looking for, he brightened up and started to rummage through a well used file. ‘I have it here, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘Form P45 for PSWT deducted under
Chapter
1 Part 19 of the 1997 Act’ – he rattled off the long title, like a mantra.

I looked at him incredulously for a moment, and then the penny dropped. I broke into laughter, enjoying the chance to break the long tension. I was glad to see, despite it all, that he still had some vestige of a sense of humour.

He looked back at me, puzzled for a moment, and then flicked open a page. ‘There it is,’ he declared. ‘Sorry, it’s Part 18, not 19. I haven’t looked at it for a while.’

Horrified, I realised that he wasn’t joking. Turning my laugh into yet another cough, I nodded weakly as he offered to e-mail a copy to the practice accountant.

On the way home, I rang Donal.

‘Well, how did it go?’ he asked sympathetically.

‘Oh, as expected,’ I replied. ‘Usual story. Made no money. Spent money we never had. Still more tax to pay and another few grand to pay him for the pleasure of his services.’

Donal’s groan echoed mine down the phone.

‘I’ll get a take-away on the way home,’ I offered, feeling we needed some sort of consolation.

‘I’ll put some Bulmer’s in the fridge,’ he replied.

‘Had he anything useful to suggest,’ Donal asked later as we dished out the chicken curry and listened to Slug
noisily
crunching the last of the prawn crackers.

‘Well, apart from the fact that he thinks I should go for a career change altogether,’ I told him, giggling, as I relayed the story of Joe and his calf bed. ‘Other than that,’ I
continued
, ‘the usual stuff – buy stuff we don’t need to save tax even though we don’t have anything to buy it with. I think I’m supposed to go and lease a jeep or something and save loads of money.’

‘That might not be the worst thing to do,’ advised Donal. ‘At least you’d have a bit of comfort getting around the farms and that. Much safer driving with Molly in the car too,’ he added, warming to the idea.

‘Ah sure, the banger will go on for a while yet, ‘I replied, referring to the clapped-out Opel Corsa I had driven since I qualified. ‘Anyway, Slug wouldn’t be able to get in and out of a jeep with her dodgy legs.’

The conversation was interrupted as the phone rang. I answered it tentatively, hoping not to have to go out to anything major while my brain was still fried.

‘Did you have a rough time?’ Arthur announced himself, knowing my aversion to accountants.

‘What do you think?’ I replied glumly.

‘Well. If it’s any consolation, my day wasn’t great either. I had to go out to old Joe Hartigan. He said you
were out there this morning.’

‘Oh. That’s right. He was on to me too,’ I replied, not mentioning the fact that he didn’t want to get Arthur out.

‘Well, you know the last night I was out there that cow died after the section and he thinks I’m the worst in the world? Well, this time, the cow had prolapsed. Uterus didn’t look too bad, mind you. But the cow was down, very weak. In hindsight, she must have ruptured a blood vessel inside. I gave her the epidural and was rolling her around to get the hind legs back and didn’t she give one great big bellow and drop dead!’