Tales from a Wild Vet: Paws, claws and furry encounters. Jo Hardy
periodontal ligament which holds the root of the tooth in the socket. When the tooth is wobbly, you can wiggle it with forceps to weaken it further and carry on rotating between the two until the tooth is wobbly enough to pull it out.
After 10 minutes of applying pressure, then wiggling, the tooth was still very firmly in place, so I decided I would apply a little more pressure with the elevator, but at that moment it slipped and I sliced all the way up the gum. The clinician in charge came over to take a look.
‘Just as well this dog is dead, or you’d be doing some stitching right now. At least you didn’t take out its eye. Believe me, that’s happened. Now try again, with more patience this time,’ he said.
Remembering this, I took a deep breath as I looked down at the very much alive dog that was anaesthetised on the table in front of me. I had scaled its teeth to remove the tartar and now I needed to remove two rotten wobbly teeth before polishing all its teeth to finish. ‘Patience,’ I reminded myself as I leaned in to begin pressing with the elevator around one of the rotten teeth. I was wearing a mask to avoid inhaling bacteria from the dog’s mouth and it was hot and uncomfortable, but half an hour later the teeth were out and the greyhound had a squeaky clean polished mouth.
Two down, one to go.
My final op that morning was an anal gland flush on an elderly pug. Anal gland expression is the least glamorous part of a vet’s job and only too common. Anal glands sit at the four and eight o’clock positions in the anus, and if the faeces aren’t firm the glands can fill and become impacted. It’s the reason why dogs sometimes scoot their bottoms along the floor, and if this occurs regularly the glands can become infected.
The pug was sedated, so I cleared the glands and then flushed them out with saline before putting in some antibiotic drops. It was an extremely smelly job, but just over 20 minutes later I was done. As soon as I was sure that the pug was waking up and was fine, I made a swift exit to get some fresh air.
I began the afternoon consultations still basking in the relief of having done my first entropion surgery, got through the dental op without decapitating the dog and left a pug with a very clean bottom when a young woman in a wax jacket and wellies burst in through the door, tears rolling down her cheeks and a blood-spattered young whippet in her arms.
‘It’s Sammy,’ the woman, Mrs Jones, said. ‘She ran into a barbed wire fence, then she got tangled in it and couldn’t get out. She’s badly hurt.’
Sammy was whimpering pathetically, but whippets and any sight-hound breed such as lurchers and greyhounds have thin skins (and they’re also terrible wimps) so I hoped that, once we’d washed away the blood, she wouldn’t be as badly hurt as her owner feared.
As I worked to clean her up her owner was wailing almost as loudly as Sammy. Between the two of them they were making it pretty difficult to focus on the problem.
‘Mrs James,’ I said, in what I hoped was an authoritative yet reassuring voice, ‘Sammy is going to be fine. Please don’t worry. The wounds are very fresh so we can stitch them this afternoon and they should heal well. I’m going to have to take Sammy from you for the afternoon, and it will require an anaesthetic, but you can come to pick her up this evening once she’s woken up.’
Thankfully Mrs James calmed down, and after signing a consent form for the operation, having a last cuddle with Sammy and a final tearful hiccup she left the consulting room. Kate was in that afternoon so she came in to do the anaesthetic for me and we spent the next hour chatting while I carefully stitched Sammy up. Despite my earlier hopes that the injuries would be fairly superficial, some of her cuts were so deep that I had to stitch up the muscle layers underneath the skin first and then stitch the skin over the top.
As well as being cousins, Kate and I had another connection – her parents had moved out to Cape Town, which meant I actually had relatives in South Africa. Before that they had lived all over the world; Kate had been born in Bahrain and they had followed her dad as a family, going wherever his work took them, before finally settling in England for the best part of 20 years. However, her parents had decided that South Africa was where they wanted to retire.
Kate told me that she and her husband Matt had gone to visit her parents and had taken one of the cheap but notoriously dangerous local taxis that pile in about a dozen people along a set route. An argument had developed and one of the passengers had got out a knife and threatened one of the other passengers. The driver had screeched to a halt and yelled to everybody, ‘Pile out, pile out!’ So they did, in the middle of nowhere, and Kate and Matt had to walk miles to find their way home. I made a mental note never to take one of the local taxis, not that Jacques would ever let me!
I did the neatest job I could on Sammy, but even so, when I’d finished the poor girl resembled a patchwork quilt. She was a young dog, though, and with a little rest and care she would soon heal. Lizzie had taken over some of the afternoon consults that I was meant to do, which gave me some relief and a chance to grab something to eat.
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