Call the Vet

We don lead aprons and while Pat holds Mitzi, I place the X-ray cassette on the table then pull on lead-lined gauntlets and take Mitzi back while Pat adjusts the machine’s settings. I lay Mitzi on her side, stretching her out, and when the dog stops coughing, Pat, standing behind me, clicks the dial in her hand. I place a new cassette on the table, stretching Mitzi out once more, this time on her back, and once more when her coughing stops, Pat clicks.

Speaking soothingly to Mitzi, telling her what a good girl she is, Pat takes her back to her kennel while I stop off at the darkroom, the closet on the stairs landing, and under a red light remove the X-ray film from the cassette, slide it in a hanger, then dip it in developer until it looks developed, then in water and finally fixer. I hang the X-rays over a radiator until they are dry and go back downstairs.

‘So how do I make myself look older?’ I ask Pat.

She smiles back and after a pause replies.

‘Have an unhappy love affair.’

‘No. Be serious. What should I do to make people see that I know my medicine?’

Pat pauses once more, then looks up at me and with a seriousness I haven’t seen before replies, ‘You vets are taught that dogs and cats are cases. Well, they’re not. They are family. People’s sons and daughters. Their husbands and wives. Don’t preach to people. Listen. Then they’ll think you’re older.’

That isn’t the first important lesson I learn from nurses. Long before vets understood what was happening in small animal clinics, nurses knew. My profession is still, by culture, masculine.

The X-rays show typical changes brought on by valvular heart disease, fluid throughout the lungs. After Brian looks at the X-rays, he asks me to join him when he meets with Mrs Wax and a discharged Mitzi.

Pat brings Mitzi to his room. ‘Mrs Wax, as soon as you left I immediately gave the patient an injection of Lasix to clean her lungs,’ says Brian. ‘It would have been much better if this had been done yesterday as my colleague suggested. I asked Dr Fogle to examine her lungs this afternoon, and he tells me the injection is already working and her heart cough will continue to improve this evening.’

Brian moves to the X-ray viewer mounted on the wall, where both X-rays are backlit.

‘Mrs Wax, Dr Fogle was able to diagnose the patient’s heart disease without the need for X-rays. You will see how large her heart is,’ and he points out the bulge in the shadow on the left side. ‘You will also see that the patient’s lungs, that should be dark indicating air, are white indicating congestion. Dr Fogle was able to determine this yesterday by listening to your dog’s breathing sounds.’

Mrs Wax has taken Mitzi from Pat and is holding her tightly. I say nothing.

‘What about her kennel cough?’ she asks Brian.

‘Complete the course of tetracycline that Dr Fogle advised. If we’re lucky, the other dogs won’t need any treatment. Pat will give you this, and the medicines for her heart. I would like to see her again in a week. Dr Fogle has experience interpreting ECGs and has recommended that we acquire a machine. He will run an ECG on Mitzi when we see her.’

After she leaves, I turn to Brian. ‘Thanks for that. Are we really getting an ECG?’

‘We are now. Mrs Wax may be tricky but she’s influential in the Kennel Club, and it’s best to keep her in the tent. And Bruce, I don’t know how to interpret ECGs, but you’re a fresh graduate so I expect you do. And if you don’t, I want you to know how to by next week.’

I waltz out of his room. I think Brian is scary but know that even though I’m in London, away from my family, at least professionally, I’ve got my own infantry platoon behind me.

* Digitalis is a heart medicine (found naturally in foxgloves) and Lasix was the brand name of the diuretic (‘peeing’ pill) furosemide. At that time, there was no generic alternative to Lasix.

† Dogs taken to Battersea always picked up a cough while there but it wasn’t caused by the known cause of ‘Kennel Cough’, a bacterium called Bordetella bronchiseptica (a relative of Bordetella pertussis, which causes whooping cough in us). Twenty-five year later it was discovered that ‘Battersea Cough’ is caused by a canine respiratory coronavirus. Although a vaccine was developed it was never licensed for use in dogs.

2

There is a lyrical fantasy that vets are more clever than doctors because our patients can’t tell us what’s wrong with them. That may not be true, but you’ll have a hard time finding a vet who will argue against it. Another trope is how we actually use the verbs ‘to vet’ and ‘to doctor’. ‘To vet’ is to make a careful and critical examination of something, while ‘to doctor’ is to change something in order to trick somebody, or to add something harmful. What would you like to be known for? As a Canadian vet in London, I was able to have the best of both worlds. While UK vets graduated with bachelor’s degrees and so were Mr, Ms, Miss or Mrs, Canadian vets graduated with doctorates so I could rightly claim to be a Dr. And I did, certainly for a year or so until I realised it created a barrier and I was happier with people calling me Bruce.

A common feature of my extended Canadian family is that we don’t swear. None of us: my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles or first cousins. My kids don’t either. Swearing was a cop-out. As teenage smart alecs, we sometimes used French-Canadian swear words, sacrement or tabarnak, but that was really to show each other how clever we were. When I got frustrated by the antics of my closest cousin, I’d call him a toton, a complete idiot, but never a ‘tit’. I spent the first 25 years of my life hearing an occasional ‘darn’ or ‘holy moly’ and not much more. Then I arrived in Britain.

Brian didn’t like going on home visits so I went on all of them, several each week so early one afternoon on a leaden, monochrome day I am standing on the pavement in Berwick Street Market in Soho, on a home visit to see two Dobermans that have drawn blood from each other in a lunchtime dispute.

After morning appointments finished, I’d exchanged a luncheon voucher, given to me instead of cash as part of my weekly salary, for a Scotch egg from Express Dairy, and with my mock leather doctor’s bag filled with what I thought I’d need, I’d walked past the regal Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons headquarters in one of the great mansions in Belgrave Square, up past the ambulance entrance at St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, along Piccadilly to cacophonous Piccadilly Circus. I continued past the theatres on Shafetsbury Avenue until I reached the bustling street market. I love that walk. Still do.

‘Woodrow and Singleton’ had a cream-coloured Morris Minor estate or ‘shooting brake’, as Brian called it, that I could use on home visits, or I could take taxis if I wanted. But if I had the time, I walked. That’s a habit I haven’t lost. I looked at the grand buildings I was strolling past and it was exciting to think they were older than the country I was from. It was like walking through an old black and white movie – recognisable but still alien.

I haven’t been to Berwick Street Market before. Awnings from the Georgian shops and houses that line the street overhang the tarpaulins that roof the individual fruit and veg stalls, each lit by one or two naked light bulbs. Dogs – all mutts – lie on the pavement or simply wander around. They probably belong to stallholders. I don’t know and don’t ask. The stallholders shout out the prices of their produce, although at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of the market there is one stallholder selling used clothes and another old fur coats and stoles, neither of whom give away their prices. I walk along the pavement until I get to the address I’ve been given, a tailor’s shop, and press the buzzer for Flat Two. I notice the sign beside the buzzer says, ‘Cindy – Large Chest for Sale’. I think to myself that if I had a large chest for sale, I’d make a big, proper sign, glue a Polaroid of the chest on it and have it on my front door at eye level, not little and faded beside the bell.

An elderly Italian woman answers the door.

‘Hi, I’m Bruce Fogle, the veterinarian,’ I say.

‘Meester Veta. You comma with me,’ she replies, and I follow her up the stairs. I know from visiting my dad’s relatives in Glasgow that the British don’t like bright light, but the naked red bulbs in the hallway and landing cast no light at all, and I hope Cindy doesn’t have them in her flat too. I won’t be able to see which parts of the Dobies are bleeding and which aren’t.

She opens a doorway from the hall into a room overlooking the market. I don’t see any chests of drawers in that room.

‘You waita heera, Meester Veta,’ the old woman commands, and of course I do. I’ve always done what I’m told to do, although with time I’ve learned to question authority.

Good, I think. At least there’s a little natural light through the net curtains.

‘Miss Sharona!’ she calls out. ‘Meester Veta issa heera.’

‘Thank fuckin’ god!’ Sharon replies.

‘Come in, darlin’,’ she calls out, and I walk through the door into a tiny, narrow kitchen where two female Dobermans are curled like black commas on blue linoleum floor identical to the flooring at Pont Street. Neither gets up to greet me. Both look sad, some would say embarrassed, as dogs are so capable of appearing.

‘I knew when the butcher gave me them bones there’d be trouble. They was real miserable wiv each other, a real cat fight.’

‘Hi. What’s her name?’ I ask, as I lean down by the dog nearest me.

‘Joni,’ her owner answers.

I say hello to Joni, and when she shows no resentment to my touching her head I feel around her neck for signs of damage. My fingers land on raw flesh on the far side. She’ll need a stitch-up.

I move over to the other dog.

‘And her name?’

‘Jayni. You know what fuckin’ sisters are like, luv. Was a real cat fight.’

Jayni is just as calm as her sister, and when I call out her name she gets up, walks over to me and presses her head against my legs, asking to be touched. She limps, and I see two clean, oval puncture wounds on her front leg near the elbow. She flinches when I touch the leg but shows no aggression towards me, only that mournful look. Dobies have an unfair image as aggressive dogs. That’s wrong. Many are real mamma’s babies. I open my leather doctor’s bag, get out my stethoscope and listen to Jayni’s heart, then Joni’s. Both are fine.

‘Sharon, I’m just going to give Jayni some antibiotics. Her wounds will heal. They’re easy for her to lick, so they’ll stay clean. Joni needs stitches. I can do that here if you like, but I’ll need you to hold her firm for me.’

‘A proper nurse, I am,’ Sharon tells me and I open my bag, take out a glass cylinder of xylocaine and drop the local anaesthetic into its metal syringe gun, then add a needle.

‘Fuckin’ ’ell! She won’t like that!’ Sharon blurts out.

‘It’s a very thin needle. I’ll drip local anaesthetic over the wound, then inject around the edges.’ I do this, first cleaning the area using cotton wool wetted with disinfectant. Then I rinse the wound with surgical spirit. Joni flinches but shows no anger.

While I prep, instil and clean, the transistor radio beside the sink plays in the background. In 1970s London I’d expected radio stations to play mostly British songs but Radio Luxembourg, the station Sharon has tuned into and the one I listen to in the sparsely furnished flat above the surgery where I am living, plays mostly American music. Today, it is cringe-making stuff, Lee Marvin singing ‘Wand’rin’ Star’, then Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’.

‘I’m glad she’s a Dobie. I don’t have to clip any hair. It’s a clean, fresh wound.’

From another compartment in my bag I take a spool of black surgical silk, cut off the length I need and thread it on a long needle with a curved cutting tip. I know from the last time I used that needle that it is getting blunt and is due for replacement. I place a long, narrow stainless steel bowl on the floor, part fill it with surgical spirit and drop a pair of scissors, a needle holder and the needle and silk in it. Nowadays, all of these items come in pre-sterilised packets.

Joni is an angel. The local anaesthetic works and she stands stoically, with Sharon on the other side of her from me, one arm around her neck by her head to slow down any snap she might make if I accidentally hurt her, and one arm around her chest. I think of how I love dogs. They’re so much more noble than we are.

‘That’s the singer what Joni is named for,’ Sharon says as I sew. Paul Burnett the DJ is playing Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’.

‘I actually heard her live a few summers ago, at a bar called Le Hibou in Ottawa, with Leonard Cohen,’ I comment.

‘You finished yet, darlin’?’

The wound is a hanging flap and stitching is simple, first a holding stitch at the apex, then filling in on both sides. Doberman skin is supple, but with a blunt needle I have to push ever harder with each stitch to complete the job. After I finish, I give both dogs their injections of Pen-Strep antibiotics and fill an envelope with pain-reducing phenylbutazone tablets, bute,* that will last for two days.

‘That’s wonderful, luv. It starts to get busy here around five. Now I don’t have to be away from work. How much is it?’

I answer two guineas for the home visit and five pounds for the stitch-up and injections.

‘Fuckin’ hell. You make more by the minute than I do!’ she replies.

Sharon takes seven green one pound notes and two shillings from a jar in the kitchen cupboard and gives them to me. I thank her and we walk back into her front room where a man is sitting on the sofa reading the Daily Mirror.

He looks up, stares blankly at me, then a wide grin bursts across his face. ‘Dr Fogle! Fancy meeting you here an’ all.’

I have no idea who he is.

‘Don’t you remember me? I brought the dogs to you to get ’em Epivaxed when Sharon was busy an’ all.’

I still don’t recognise him. At that time in my career, I was so concerned about the worthiness of my diagnoses and treatments, all I ever saw were the animals, never the people who accompanied them.

‘Oh, yes. Hi. How are you?’ and I shake his hand.

‘Miserable buggers!’ he says nodding his head towards the dogs in the kitchen. ‘’Ad a dust-up, did they?’

‘Yes, over a bone. They’re okay but they gave each other a chew. Same breed. Same age. Same sex. They tick all the boxes for having fights with each other. Do you know them?’

‘They’re mine. They live wiv Sharon when she’s workin’. They’re here for protection.’

What does she need protection from, I think, and only then work out why the lights in the hallway are red. I turn to Sharon. ‘If either one of them goes off her food, phone the surgery. They’ll need more antibiotics. The stitches can come out in 10 days. I can send a nurse to do that or you can bring Joni to the surgery.’

‘Mick’ll bring her in for her stitches,’ Sharon answers. I shake Mick’s hand and Sharon walks me to the door and out into the hallway where I shake hers.

I start down the stairs, then stop and turn back to Sharon.

‘Sharon, one more thing.’

‘Yes, luv?’

‘Any chance you can show me that large chest of yours?’

I’m as pleased as punch that I can do irony too.

* More efficient pain-reducing ‘non steroid’ anti-inflammatory drugs will not become available for another 20 years.

3

Sensible people get pets directly from breeders and see litters of puppies or kittens with their mothers. In 1970s London, upper-class families often got their dogs from friends, the middle class got their dogs and cats mostly from pet shops, while the working class got theirs from unplanned litters or from Club Row, a Sunday street market at the top end of Brick Lane in the East End. Two pet shops, Town & Country Dogs and Harrods’ pet department, were vital customers for Brian. There were two distinct types of dogs in Britain, purebreds and mongrels. Although mutts or mongrels made up the vast majority of Britain’s dogs, at Brian’s clinic well over half of the dogs I met were purebreds. It was an era where ‘well-bred’ people provided homes only for ‘well-bred’ dogs.

‘Our most important client is Harrods,’ Brian explains in my first week working for him. ‘You will visit their pet department at lunchtime each Monday, whenever new stock arrives and whenever they ask you to. All new stock gets Epivaxed, and most important, you complete a partial vaccination certificate with the date of the animal’s next Epivax with us. Our other important client is Jane Grievson at Town & Country Dogs. Her son Christopher Grievson brings their stock here to be checked and Epivaxed.’

Harrods was a nearby upscale department store, synonymous with the British upper classes and to my eyes fustier than the people they served. It flaunted its royal warrants, to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother for china, to Queen Elizabeth herself for ‘provisions’ or what I called ‘groceries’, and to the Duke of Edinburgh for ‘outfits’. I called outfits ‘clothes’.

Brian had an appointment system at the surgery. Most vets didn’t.

‘Time is important to our clients,’ he tells me. ‘They are not used to sitting around waiting. And they don’t suffer fools gladly.’ I don’t know what he means by that. The term is too English for me, but I take it as a warning not to waste their time. ‘And we don’t socialise with our clients,’ he continues. ‘That compromises our relationship with them. No drinks after work. No dinner in their homes.’

As always, morning consultations started at 9 am and ran through to noon. It was a blazingly sunny and unexpectedly hot and humid summer Monday and I packed my medical bag with what I thought I might need for my weekly Harrods visit: stethoscope, thermometer, surgical spirit, a sterilised glass syringe, twelve needles and twelve doses of the dog vaccine Epivax.* I walked along Pont Street, across Sloane Street, through red-brick Hans Crescent to Harrods.

The pink buff terracotta building itself was so grand. Imposing, bronze-framed display windows and seven floors of expensive shopping, although not so expensive that I hadn’t already bought myself a suit at the new, fashionable Way In department on the fourth floor. The dollars I had brought with me from Canada, that I used to supplement my meagre salary, went a long way back then. I entered by the back door, at the corner of Basil Street and Hans Road, where chauffeurs stood formally by their Rolls-Royces, and took two stairs up at a time to the second-floor pet department and the Manager’s office.

The Manager, a bushy-browed, beige man in his forties in a Viyella shirt, green wool tie and tan warehouseman’s coat, with a rural accent that I sometimes found difficult to understand, formally greets me with a ‘Good morrow, Vet. Do you wish to do rounds?’

With me leading, we systematically walk the aisles of his department, stopping first at the enclosure of baby alligators, where I scan their pen for any that look skinny or have removed themselves from the general cluster.

‘The water looks a bit murky,’ I comment.

‘We are late changing it, Vet. It will be done.’

On their adjoining aisle the parrots, cockatoos, cockatiels and macaws are incredibly noisy. I look in each cage, at the inhabitants, at their food and water trays and at the floors to check the consistency of their droppings. I check the tanks of tropical fish for the health of the inhabitants and signs of excess feeding by the weekend staff, a common problem that might lead to contamination in a tank, and then on to the most enjoyable part of the department, the mammals. There are three skunks, a puma, and kennels filled with pups and kits.

‘Where did you get the skunks?’ I ask.

‘We find homes for surplus stock from zoos,’ the Manager explains. ‘Three years ago we sold an elephant to the King of Albania.’

‘I didn’t know Albania had a king,’ I say.

‘I thought it was a posh area at the bottom of Savile Row,’ he replies with a chuckle. A bit of irony there. ‘But it’s a country, and King Zog or his son lives in Switzerland. I know it’s Zog because it rhymes with snog.’ He chuckles again.

The skunks looks like they are six to eight weeks old. I am somewhat familiar with them, not just from their odour on my family’s Yorkies after the dogs had been sprayed while chasing them, but from one I had found falling over in a creek and had brought home to nurse back to health. ‘It probably has rabies,’ my father told me when he came home from work, and he phoned Animal Control and had the skunk removed from our backyard.

‘Did the zoo vaccinate them?’ I ask.

‘I will check on that, Vet,’ the Manager says.

‘What are you feeding them?’

‘PAL and vegetables, Vet.’

‘Good. Don’t give them cat food. It’s too rich for their livers. And the puma?’

‘It’s also surplus. We get them frequently. They sell well. This one arrived with the skunks.’

‘What does it eat?’ I ask.

‘Fresh beef from the Food Halls, Vet.’

‘Make sure it’s beef on the bone,’ I add. ‘She needs calcium. And give her a tablespoonful of cod liver oil each day.’ I had learned at London Zoo that big cats can suffer from Vitamin A deficiency, and cod liver oil was a well-balanced supplement.

I get down on my haunches, and the puma comes over and rubs her head against the inside of her enclosure. I put my fingers through the cage and feel the silkiness of her hair. ‘That’s a cat I’d be proud to be seen in public with,’ I say.

‘We had a lion cub here last year. I sold him for 250 guineas. Mind you, I would have given him away.’

‘Why’s that?’ I ask.

‘Sly creature, Vet. He got out one night and I found him over there in Carpets the next day. He’d shredded the goatskins.’

The last part of rounds today is the kitten and puppy kennels. There are no additions since my visit the previous week.

‘The Persians sell well, but I am finding it difficult to obtain kittens, Vet. The breeders now want to sell them directly.’

The cat kennels are sparse, with one remaining Persian, two Siamese and two blue Burmese.

‘Two litters of Yorkshire terriers arrive today, Vet. I hope they are here before you leave.’

Of the six Old English Sheepdogs I had vaccinated the week before, only two remain. They look surprisingly lonesome without their siblings, and stand on their hind legs wagging and smiling as I visually check them over. Beside them are four Dachshund pups, curled tightly together, and in the next kennel two Pug pups.

‘Vet, the Pugs are sniffling.’

I rinse my hands with disinfectant, lift out the first Pug and listen to its chest. The heart and lungs are fine, and I hear referred noises coming from the throat.

‘Her nostrils are so tight she has to breathe through her mouth,’ I tell him. ‘It’s causing irritation in the back of her throat, and that’s leading to her snorts and sniffles.’

Her littermate also has small nostrils.

‘Do breeders send you Polaroids before you buy pups?’ I ask.

‘No, Vet. I know what sells best and I put in orders, although breeders ring me up when they have surplus stock they can’t shift. If they’re the right breeds, I’ll buy them.’

‘Okay, then. That’s it?’

‘As I say, I’d like you to see the Yorkshire terrier pups before you leave. Would you like a cup of tea? The train is due in at Paddington at half past the hour so they should be here momentarily.’

‘Yes, fine. Thank you,’ I answer and we walk through the ‘Staff Only’ door into a corridor leading to his office.

‘Where are the pups coming from?’ I ask.

‘Most livestock comes from Wales, Vet.’

The Manager boils water in a kettle warmed on an electric ring and as it heats he adds several teaspoons of Harrods English Breakfast tea to a white teapot. He swirls the tea in the pot then pours it through a strainer into two flower-decorated teacups, and as he does so one of his shop assistants, a lean woman in her early twenties, with a brown fringe hanging over an intelligent face, comes to his door and says, ‘The puppies have arrived, Sir. They’re in the corridor.’