Ever by My Side (13 page)

There is no end to nightmare scenarios that will leave a surgeon breathless: operating on the wrong patient; operating on the wrong leg; operating only to find there is nothing to find.

They call this last one the “negative exploratory,” as if, by giving it a label, we can put some kind of a positive spin on an event that might otherwise be perceived as a disaster.

Invariably, it is nobody’s fault. You take an X-ray and see something is clearly wrong with the intestines—a corn cob or a peach pit blocking a loop of small intestine. You take the dog to surgery and by the time you open your patient up, the obstruction has moved on, disappeared into the large intestine, the colon, from which it will be dispatched by the patient without a hitch. Time to call the owner and try to explain how the surgery turned out to be unnecessary.

Even in this era of fiber-optic endoscopy, our ability to insert a camera into the body and have a
Fantastic Voyage
–style look-see is
restricted to only a small fraction of the very upper or lower portions of the gut. Sometimes veterinarians are forced to make a judgment call based on the limited available information, essentially what they see and feel, and faced with a deteriorating situation, they need to act, even if they risk being wrong.

I never saw the actual X-ray that sent Whiskey under the knife but I have a pretty good idea of what it looked like. Angle the X-ray beam just so, place the patient in a certain position, get the correct amount of fluid or solid in the outflow portion of the stomach (the area called the pylorus), and in cross-section a tube becomes a round, opaque structure identical to a solid ball. If this was what Ryan James saw when he held up his black-and-white image to the light, he was not the first to get it wrong, and not the last. In fact, he was probably one of hundreds, if not thousands, of veterinarians who, during this era, were seeing puppies succumbing to a mysterious, aggressive, and debilitating malady that frequently began with vomiting. These dogs were undergoing exploratory surgery and the veterinarians were finding distended, gassy loops of bowel and generalized intestinal inflammation, but nothing specific to account for the sickness. In many cases, if they had only waited a few more hours as the clinical signs progressed, they would have had their answer and a needless surgery would have been avoided.

Sometimes it feels like new diseases are a godsend for today’s media, an opportunity to generate fear and redeem a slow or silly news day. SARS, chicken flu, swine flu, whatever the next pandemic scare, you can guarantee the twenty-four-hour news networks will be busy working on ways to make you panic and believe the apocalypse is happening now. On the whole, veterinary medicine doesn’t pack the same media punch as its human counterpart, so back in 1978 the discovery of a new virus called canine parvovirus gained little attention. It took several years before this highly contagious
virus got busy with Britain’s canine population, but when it did, it had a field day, spreading easily by direct contact and indirectly via dog poop. At the time there was no vaccine, no herd immunity against an aggressive virus ready to attack a virginal unprotected canine population. Our Whiskey was destined to be one of Ryan James’s first cases.

It is not the fever or the vomiting that clues the clinician in to a case of parvovirus, it is the bloody diarrhea. Sometimes it can take a while for the virus to have its way with the lining of the guts but once it does, what comes out of these wretched creatures is unique. Veterinarians, nurses, and kennel staff the world over will tell you nothing, and I mean nothing, smells quite like the stench of a dog with parvovirus diarrhea.

“It’s not a ball in his stomach after all,” said James, speaking to my father via telephone. “It’s a new disease called parvovirus. I’m pretty sure of it. He broke with a horrible case of diarrhea.”

“Can you treat it?”

“Not really. There’s nothing we can actually do to stop the virus. The disease has to run its course. All we can do is provide intravenous fluids, stop him from getting dehydrated, and give him antibiotics to offset the possibility of infection.”

Dad looked up, saw Mum and I hanging on every word of this one-sided conversation. He deliberated for a moment before asking, “Where would he have got it from?”

I felt Mum bristle next to me.

“Other dogs. The environment. From what I understand, the virus is tough and resilient, able to hang out in contaminated fecal material for a year, maybe more. Get it on your shoe and who knows how far it will spread. We’re only just starting to see cases in the UK. This is the tip of the iceberg.”

Dad had to sense Mum straining to overhear the answer. He
closed his eyes and shook his head as if to let her know this had nothing to do with her. If he wondered about the day trip to school or the recent acquisition of Bess, a dog of unknown provenance, he never mentioned it out loud.

“What are his chances?”

Ryan James came straight back at him.

“I’ll be honest, Duncan, they’re not great. Untreated it is almost always fatal. I’m hoping we got to him soon enough to give the little man a fair shot. The next few days will be critical.”

This was the line my father delivered—uncertainty, an uphill battle, but there was still a chance. The cost of all this care was never mentioned. Why would it be? Whiskey had been with us for little more than a week but he was already family.

For the next few days my father was our conduit to a drama playing out in a small cage, in a small veterinary hospital a couple of miles away. An innocent creature had been taken down by an invisible killer, attacking him from the inside out, sucking the life from a dog who wanted nothing more than to play and engage and be happy. Dad spoke to Ryan James at least twice a day, sometimes more, getting an update, riding the emotional seesaw of a disease that kept you bracing for the worst and hoping for the best. The hospital was not a twenty-four-hour facility, but Ryan James would check on Whiskey in the middle of the night, make sure his fluids were running on time, change the bloody and soiled bedding, dropper some fresh water into his dry and parched mouth. Dad even had James’s unlisted home phone number and was invited to call for a final update every night before bed.

That week all of us were on tenterhooks every time the phone rang and then one morning a call came in before I left for school. We were all gathered in the kitchen when Fiona picked it up.

“Just one minute please,” she said. And then, “Dad, it’s for you. It’s Ryan James.”

Ryan had never called at this early hour. In fact it was always the other way round, Dad calling him.

Reluctantly Dad picked up the handset and, as if he already knew what he was going to be told, he braced for the worst, his words softening, decelerating before they fell out of his mouth.

“Yes. Yes. Yes. I understand. This afternoon. Yes. Thank you for everything.”

It must have been the state of shock overwhelming his speech, because he looked up and was taken aback when he saw the angst and disappointment written all over our faces. Only then did he smile and realize his mistake.

“It’s okay. He’s rallied. Whiskey’s going to be fine. Mr. James says we can pick him up this afternoon.”

The news of Whiskey’s recovery instantly erased the pall that had hung over all of us. I’m not suggesting there was fist-pumping or high fives or that Duncan cracked open the champagne. But it was definitely more than relief. It felt as though we could finally allow ourselves to let this dog into our hearts and imagine a future with him.

Dad and I drove over to Ryan’s practice, thrilled to be reclaiming our golden retriever, having not seen him for over a week.

Nothing could have prepared us for what we found when we got there. We hadn’t known Whiskey for very long, but the Whiskey we had first met, the chubby, love-handled, boisterous, fresh, golden ball of terror, was gone. He was no more. In his place was a gangly, leggy, dazed, and tentative creature that bore him no resemblance whatsoever. In the moment he wobbled into the waiting room to greet us I saw how close we had come to losing him, how beating parvovirus had sapped every ounce of energy and fight this ballsy little puppy possessed. All that was left was a golden husk still in need of significant nursing to get him back to full strength.

“I didn’t think he was going to make it, Duncan,” said James.
“But one thing’s for sure about this new dog of yours, he’s a lion-hearted little fellow. No two ways about it.”

And as Dad pumped Ryan’s hand, I witnessed a mixture of gratitude and pride welling up in my father’s eyes, triggered by the shock of what his dog had become, and by the fitting label “lion-hearted little fellow.”

Here, for the first time, in this moment, it seemed all so personal, this business of healing pets, the way veterinary medicine can have such a profound effect on both humans and animals. Naturally, hanging out with James, I had observed the response of countless grateful owners, but here, with everything so close, with my dad and Ryan James, it was as if I could straddle both sides of the doctor–patient relationship, breathe in the sense of accomplishment, the power of what James had done, completely tangible and within reach. It was awesome. I just stood there speechless and ate it up.

Lion-hearted little fellow!

It wasn’t long, though, before remnants of the old Whiskey began to resurface—trying to steal Bess’s food, barreling her out of the way in order to be first through an open door, and, as testosterone began to kick in, a tentative experiment in meaningful mounting.

Unfortunately Whiskey’s resurgence coincided with the appearance of some objectionable traits related to male dominance and what worried me most was the way his early brush with death was being used as some sort of a defense for his most unsavory misogynistic behavior. In short, my mum and dad were acting like the ineffective parents of a kid trapped in the terrible twos, crying out for a
Supernanny
makeover. While I was lost in the nuances of quadratic
equations, organic isomers, and Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction, they were enabling their new “golden” boy to get away with murder. Whiskey may not have possessed the same protective streak as Patch, but his manners were already on a slippery slope, and he was likely to wind up with similar social foibles if we weren’t more careful.

“I’m taking Bess in to see Ryan James on Monday,” announced my father. “It’s time to get her fixed.”

“Why Bess,” I said, “why not get Whiskey neutered instead, or even, as well as?”

Dad practically chuckled at my naiveté.

“Now, son,” he said, bending down to tickle his prodigal son’s belly, “remember what Mr. James said, parvovirus can cause damage to his heart. It’s not worth the risk of a general anesthetic unless absolutely necessary. He may be a lion-hearted little fellow, but we still need to handle him with kid gloves.”

By now both Fiona and I had moved well beyond rolling our eyes in response to what had quickly shifted from an endearing to an irritating line. We had heard it so many times, essentially whenever Dad gushed over his golden, which was often. Please, I wouldn’t want you to think he played favorites. He doted equally on Bess. It was just that Whiskey always seemed to earn an excuse for his shenanigans. Stealing dirty socks from the laundry basket was simply a retrieval exercise. When he chewed the corner of one of my textbooks it was my fault for leaving it accessible on the bedroom floor. To me, it always seemed as though Bess got a hasty trial and a stern sentence, and she was a smart dog, quick to learn a valuable lesson. Whiskey, meanwhile, appeared to be blessed with the canine equivalent of diplomatic immunity, untouchable, as if his behavioral blunders were justified as merely rascally or acceptably rakish.

And so, despite my protestations, it was poor Bess who sacrificed
her uterus and ovaries in order to avoid procreation, while frisky Whiskey got to retain his gonads. The “Labra-triever” threat had gone away, but, as Mum and Dad were about to discover, there can be other consequences to preserving a dog’s virility.

The old and familiar habit of early morning walks had started up again. There was more to it than ritual and dusting off the obligatory flat cap, walking stick, and Wellington boots. To Dad it simply felt right, no better way to begin each day. This time, however, with Whiskey and Bess, his justification for getting up at four in the morning was quite different from the transparent excuses he had made with Patch. From his humble beginnings as a TV repairman he had ultimately attained his goal of becoming a lecturer in electrical engineering, but on those bottom rungs of the academic ladder, this meant working unsociable hours and included teaching night classes. He was determined to give “the pups” (a label all his dogs kept even into their dotage) at least a two-hour walk in the morning, knowing there wouldn’t be much time (or inclination) when he finally came home from work.

To my surprise Dad began straying far from those nearby open fields of my childhood, choosing a lengthy, somewhat convoluted route around town that included playing fields and public gardens. Why change a formula that worked so well with Patch? The only possible explanation I could come up with was his pride in the better-socialized behavior of these new pups. Dad might have been hanging on to their leashes like the reins of a runaway stage coach when Bess and Whiskey insisted on saying hello, but embarrassing vocal standoffs, wrinkled lips, and displays of dental prowess were rarely a problem with this duo.