All Creatures Great and Small...

With Louise gone I was footloose and fancy-free but still living at home — which is a handy place to be when recovering from an accident and not being in posession of much money.  But, I was still feeling frustrated with life, as though I was being delayed in some quest that I could not yet clearly visualise. I wanted to do something - anything - as long as it was better than the life on the dole that a lot of my friends had settled too easily into. As chance often has it, when I recovered enough to go out visiting and the like, an incident occurred that made me even more determined to give up forever the opiate of apathy .

I was still seeing a good friend from my school years, “Starchy” Hamilton. We called him Starchy because his mother seemed to spend all her time and energy washing, starching and ironing his clothes till they were shiny and stiff as a laminated board. Starchy used to creak as he walked and always had to “break in” the clean clothes slowly or they would snap. He used to sprinkle a bit of water in the crotch to soften it up or else he would have been cut to ribbons by the edges of the frayed seam that had been starched to the hardness of a tungsten tipped saw. His mother seemed to spend her entire life swathed in a steam of starch vapour.

I went to visit Starchy one day and received a terrible shock. There was Starchy’s mum in the ironing room as usual, surrounded by the familiar steam and starch vapour, but sporting an enormous plaster over her face where her nose should be. I backed out of the room quickly and bumped into Starchy who explained what had happened. It seems that after years of inhaling dense clouds of starch vapour, Mrs. Hamilton’s nose had become rigid and brittle with the stuff. Her hooter was completely starched inside and out, through and through, and just a couple of days before, she’d tried to smother a sneeze by clamping her schnozz and the thing snapped right off. Because of it’s condition it couldn’t be stitched back on so she was now waiting for a suitable nose donor to appear at the hospital.

It may seem funny to some but I was struck by this small human tragedy and it started me thinking about doing something useful with my life to help relieve pain and suffering in other humans.

I was too young to own a pub so I tried another tack. I put in many long minutes of thought, which included the realisation that the only tangible experience of pain and suffering I could lay claim to was the fact that I had spent my entire life with my family. However, because of that very background, I reasoned I should try for a job that had personal contact with other suffering animals, so I rang up a veterinarian and booked myself on for a work experience season of All Creatures Great and Small.

I knew I’d be good at this sort of thing because a couple of weeks prior to my decision to be an animal-carer,  my sister had a thorn stuck in her paw, I mean foot. She looked a pitiful sight, licking her hoof and whining so I slapped a muzzle on her, tied her to the clothes hoist and yanked out the thorn with a pair of pliers. She was so pleased that she licked my hand and didn’t even bother to belt me round the ears for muzzling her.

Armed with this valuable hands-on experience I marched into the vet’s office, confident in the knowledge that it would only be a matter of a day or two and I would be able to breathe life into a kangaroo skin rug or teach dogs with bad breath to gargle mouthwash. However, I didn’t get off to a great start.

I thought it wouldn’t matter that I trod in some barker’s eggs on the way to the vet’s office because it would just make me more acceptable to the animals who would naturally take me for one of their own.
And they did. Six dogs in the waiting room dragged thier owners off their seats to sniff my boots. And they weren’t the only ones who sniffed the crap on my boots. You’d think that a vet receptionist’s nose would be used to the smell of dog shit, but no... she picked it straight away.

After ordering me outside to clean my boots, she gave me a white coat and pushed me into the surgery. What a place that was! I wandered around it, checking out all the instruments and gizmos to see how they worked and was in the middle of stretching out on the stainless steel operating table when the vet strode in.
‘Ah!’  said the Vet, ‘My first patient. A simple desexing job...!
I was off that table so fast my feet hit the deck before my reflection faded from the cold shiny surface. Just my luck — a vet with “a sense of humour”.

Our first patient was an overfed Labrador that I had to lift onto the table. The vet wanted to take his temperature so I began to prise the dogs slobbery chops apart and drag out his tongue for the thermometer when I noticed the vet hanging around the wrong end of the dog (the sense of humour rising again, I surmised). Then he did a very odd thing  —  he lifted up the dogs tail and stuck the thermometer right up the dog’s date. I was so shocked that I passed out.

When I woke up I was sitting on the floor with the receptionist splashing water on my face telling me that I would get used to that sort of thing. I didn’t bother to tell her that I couldn’t care if he’d shoved an umbrella up the dog’s arse, the reason I was so shocked was that it was the same thermometer I’d popped in my mouth to take my own temperature not more than a few minutes before. I gargled a few hundred times with soapy water but I didn’t feel good for hours after that.

The things a vet has to do! A parade of animal ‘Believe It Or Nots’ came through the door. I handled some of the trickier cases, like the goldfish that kept drinking all the water in its bowl. The solution was quite brilliant. I thought. I merely added a cup or two of alcohol to the fish’s water. The little twerp went like mad trying to lap it all up but before he got half way through he began to hiccup, pissed it all back into the bowl and fell asleep. I’d seen that kind of thing happen at home and I took an educated guess that  it might work on a fish.

Then there was the lovely old lady who shuffled in with a large pet turtle she said was walking a lot slower than it used to. Considering it took her twenty minutes to cross the floor it didn’t need much research to get to the bottom of this one.

‘Has he been off his food?’ I enquired gently.
‘It’s funny you should ask that,’ She replied nodding sadly. ‘He hasn’t touched a thing all week.’ 
And why should he. The apathetic amphibian had karked it!
Rather than spoil the old lady’s day I simply nailed some wheels onto the defunct turtle’s feet, tied a piece of string around his neck and handed it back to the old lady. After telling her the turtle was living off his stored fat and not to worry about feeding him, the old dear happily shuffled out of the surgery, closely followed by the rigid terrapin-on-a-string. Only a callous hound would have told her the awful truth.

Without a doubt the saddest case of all was that of a woman who brought her husband in on a leash and explained that he thought he was a dog. As he sat on the floor licking himself we suggested that a psychiatrist might be able to help.

‘Why?’ she demanded, ‘What would a psychiatrist know about fleas? Because that’s what’s wrong with him!’
The customer is always right. We sold her a curry comb, a flea collar and some dog wash, and took the money off her quick-smart in case her deluded husband snapped out of it before they left the surgery.
The sad part was that we saw them again a couple of days later when she brought him back into the office. He was frothing at the mouth and looked to be in a bad way. It seemed we had no choice but to put him to sleep - the big sleep!

It really was sad because when she got back home she realised that he’d only been chewing on a tube of toothpaste that her kids had left on the floor. Of course it was too late by then but under the circumstances we felt that the least we could do was refund the money on the curry comb and recommend a taxidermist who could make an artistic arrangement of her dear departed surrounded by some of his favourite toys and bones.

At this point I feel I must explain the circumstances surrounding my hasty departure from a position that would have made a good career for me. In an effort to win favour with an attractive young lady customer, I thought that, after we had inoculated her cat, I might demonstrate the natural affinity and trust between myself and her pet by having it cuddle up to me when I presented it to her in the waiting room.
It was an idea that reeked of warmth and charmth but as I stepped into the waiting room, cradling the disoriented kitten, I realised we were surrounded by the largest collection of animals and beasts ever gathered in one spot since Noah was purser for the Ararat Shipping Line. The cat saw the vast, silently snarling and drooling  menagerie too and sunk its claws into me with urgent fear and began spitting at the gathering. The sudden shock of being clawed made me drop the cat and that was the cue for the riot to start.

About an hour later, after firing off dozens of rounds of tranquilliser darts we assessed the damage. We’d lost three budgies, two parrots and a duck. Four dogs were unconscious, a poodle and a Pomeranian were missing. Three cats had also disappeared and a cow was shaking with fright on top of the counter. There was a camel hiding in the fridge, a kangaroo hanging onto the light fitting and many owners and other assorted beasts, as well as a huge crocodile, were sleeping it off on the floor. I was prepared to cop a little of the blame for the way things turned out but when the crocodile yawned I noticed a wrist-watch wrapped around its tonsils.

Now, whether that was the reason for the croc’s visit to the vet in the first place or whether he had acquired it as spoils in the fight I wasn’t too keen to find out. So before any one of the sleeping owners awoke and found their little Johnny or Joan missing and a satisfied croc with a full belly, I turned in my dustcoat and disappeared like pocket money at the Royal Show.

And never gave the girl in the waiting room another thought; I felt sure there was another one somewhere else if I looked hard enough.

o-0-o

To Chapter 4 - Da Vinci was a Deadbeat