For the first week at my first job, a mixed practice in Western Australia, the vet whose place I was taking stayed on to give me a bit of support. I had arrived and settled into the vet share house – and naturally, inevitable, but perhaps not sensibly, he took me out on the town (to celebrate) on the Sunday night before the Monday on which I was to begin my life as a real, qualified veterinarian. We went onto the nearest sizable town, Bunbury. A strange place, with some rather divey nightclubs, and a lot of seedy pubs, plenty of big cement buildings, and not much else. I had met Buzza at a vet student conference a couple of years before. Though the term \”conference\” was more than a slight exaggeration. The few lectures were tiny glimpses of hung over and reluctant sobriety in the mornings, a mere punctuation before we all got back to the serious business of competitive drinking. Needless to say, we went to a pub, then another pub, then a club, and finally home to another new found friends house to guzzle a couple of bottles of red wine.
The phone rang, a shrill and hideous harbinger of doom, in the early morning. And it kept on ringing, and ringing. Where the hell was I? Oh – right, in the the middle of hangover central, head pounding, stomach a seething pool of acid and bile, trying to bubble it\’s way up and out my throat. Mouth tasting like the resting ground of a long dead rodent with very poor personal hygiene. Buzza had picked up the phone, still in last nights clothes, stained with wine, hair a wild and scattered tangle, eyes like two big red blisters in a picture of suffering.
\”Shit, right, thanks for waking us. We are on our way…\”
\”Hey Ed – we gotta go. If we really rumble, we\’ll have time for the quickest shower in the history of time, and still maybe be able to get to work on time.\”
We gulped a glass of water each, and made tracks. Pushing the speed limit well past sensible all the way home. A lightning shower, and a piece of toast gobbled on the way out of the door. We were maybe 10 minutes late, and Buzza clicked on the static of the two way radio.
\”This is Buzza, calling in… Where do we have to go? What\’s on today?\” he asked the practice manager (the bosses wife).
\”About time you called in,\” she said. \”You\’ve got one visit on the way in, a cow with retained membranes.\” She rattled of the name and address.
We pulled in the gate. Buzza was obviously well known to the farmer, and introduced me. There was a cow with retained membranes, post calving. Not the prettiest job man has ever known. After calving, sometimes the placenta doesn\’t come away, and after a few days, it is as rotten as a chop, and stinks to high heaven. I looked at Buzza.
\”Don\’t look at me,\” he said, with an evil smile. \”I don\’t work here any more, this is your job.\”
I gave him a look back that eloquently let him know he was all bastard, and went to the back of the truck. I put my overalls on, and pulled out a pair of arm length disposable gloves, and a couple of utozyme pessaries. The cow was already in the race, and the farmer pushed her into the crush and caught her head in the bail. A few strands of the membranes were hanging out. A whiff of the smell crawled up my nostrils and declared war on my stomach. I felt myself go pale, and a wave of nausea nearly got me, but I clenched my jaw and took a deep breath.
\”Big night last night eh?\” the farmer said, giving me a knowing look, tinged with a hint of sympathy. \”Many\’s the time I\’ve see Buzza go all sorts of green, too.\”
I gritted my teeth and got on with it, gently working my hand in, and taking a firm grip on the membranes before gently applying traction. Slowly, the placenta let go, and I pulled the rubber stinking mass of tissue out and dropped it in a bucket, before checking to see it was all clear. The I opened the utozyme pessaries, big fat yellow antibiotic tablets fizzing in the fluids on my glove, and popped them deep inside to help clear up the infection. I stripped off the gloves and dropped them in the bucket too, as the sun beat down like a fiery sledgehammer on my head. I could smell the stale rum oozing out of every pore of my body. I got a big syringe, primed it with some long acting antibiotics, and thumped the cows rump twice before banging the needle in. Then I attached the syringe and squeezed the white, thick liquid into her muscle as she wriggled and twitched at the discomfort. We said our farewells, and headed in to the clinic.
After a while, I realised that the smell was still with me. I\’d given my arms a damned good scrub, but the smell, the awful, awful smell, had seemingly become a part of me.
\”Buzza! I still stink! This is not good, mate. How long does it last?\”
\”Should be gone in a week or so,\” he said.
\”No! – you must be pulling my leg,\” I replied, desperately.
\”Gotya there, didn\’t I,\” he chuckled. \”There\’s only one way to get that stink off, and that\’s to wash your arms with toothpaste.\”
\”Really?\” I asked, suspiciously. I was thinking he was going to set me up, get me to do something silly that didn\’t help.
\”No, really!\”
The cabin was a silence of shared misery for the rest of the journey.
We arrived, and dragged ourselves through the door. The Practice manager, or co-boss, was sitting behind the couneter. She took one look at us and the expression on her face grew a whole lot sourer. This was no mean feat, as I\’d never seen a more doggedly unhappy expression in the first place, lines graven deep and bitter, a lemon of a face. Thankfully it was a quiet day, so Buzza and I raided the dispensary for some anti inflammatories and sat in a miserable silence, waiting the morning out, punctuated by a couple of nice, easy, routine small animal consults.