My Patients and Other Animals Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Suzanne Fincham-Gray

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Fincham-Gray, Suzanne, author.

  Title: My patients and other animals: a veterinarian’s stories of love, loss, and hope / by Suzanne Fincham-Gray.

  Description: New York: Spiegel & Grau, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017025329| ISBN 9780812998184 (hardback) | ISBN 9780812998191 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fincham-Gray, Suzanne. | Veterinarians—Biography.

  Classification: LCC SF613.F528 A3 2018 | DDC 636.089092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017025329

  Ebook ISBN 9780812998191

  randomhousebooks.com

  spiegelandgrau.com

  Book Design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design and illustration: Na Kim

  v5.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One: Peter and the Horse

  Chapter Two: Hercules

  Chapter Three: Monty

  Chapter Four: Fritz

  Chapter Five: Zeke

  Chapter Six: Sweetie

  Chapter Seven: Grayling

  Chapter Eight: Ned

  Chapter Nine: Monty

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  These stories are true, but memory is fallible. This memoir reflects the author’s present recollections of past events. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been re-created. Nevertheless, the author has always strived to represent the essential truth.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Peter and the Horse

  Trees lining the country lane forced the air into an irregular rhythm that buffeted my eardrum through the Land Rover’s open window. Sunlight flitted through branches, splashing the windscreen with unpredictable brilliance. The clean, savory perfume of the cow parsley clustered in the passing hedgerow mingled with the less subtle notes of manure clinging to my clothes. Beneath my stocking feet lay my lunch, along with empty syringe casings, odd scraps of paper with medical notes, and less identifiable detritus from our day’s farm calls in the Herefordshire countryside. And beside me, expertly guiding the SUV around the twists and turns of the narrow lane, sat Peter, the large-animal veterinarian with whom I was “seeing practice”—the UK term for gaining experience as a veterinary student by shadowing veterinarians in various settings.

  We slowed, and Peter maneuvered the Land Rover into a gateway with a narrow dirt turnout that led to a long paddock running next to the road. There was one small gray pony in the field. We got out and walked to the back of the SUV, where I removed a pair of khaki Wellington boots and bottle-green coveralls from the boot. Peter was already suited up and pulling on his wellies with practiced ease by the time I’d unfolded my outfit. I stuffed the too-long pant legs into my socks before stepping into my wellies, holding on to the car for balance.

  Shuffling around in the boot, he located a black case the size of a laptop beneath the piles of syringes, rectal examination gloves, medication bottles, and shiny stainless steel implements that made me want to cross my legs. Peter opened the case to reveal what looked like an old-fashioned pistol. Made from blackened metal, it was small and sturdy with a brown wooden handle. The grip had the patina of age, cured by the skin oils embedded in its crosshatch. It was the sort of thing I imagined from back in the Wild West, thousands of miles from this English field. Alongside the gun was a box of ammunition that served one specific purpose. This was a single-shot pistol, and I was about to shoot my first horse.

  * * *

  —

  I had been volunteering at the small-animal clinic in the veterinary practice that Peter co-owned since I was fourteen, when my determination to become a vet had driven me to make weekly visits to observe Peter’s small-animal partner, George, conducting his evening surgery.

  The practice was a ten-minute walk from my childhood home in Hereford, a small cathedral city nestled on the Welsh border. In autumn, the short trek to the clinic was scented by delicious, yeasty apples fermenting at the cider factory across the street. During the spring, I was accompanied by the woolly odor and noise from trucks full of sheep and cattle on their way to market.

  I’d logged hours upon hours in the small-animal clinic, watching vaccination after vaccination, cleaning hundreds of cages and walking every conceivable size of dog.

  George was a Scotsman with a booming brogue and generous stature, both of which were barely contained by the thin walls of the consulting room. The clinic was in a converted Edwardian house, and the waiting area, which had presumably once been the drawing room, was always filled with eager owners and nervous pets awaiting their turn with the “Scottish vet.” After each appointment, George would stand in the doorway, his shoulders filling the frame, and call out for his next client in the high-pitched, slightly girlish tone he used to talk to his patients. Every consultation started the same way: “Hello, Mrs. Jones. How are you and Fluffy doing this lovely evening?” And he would narrate the entire visit: “Just a wee poke,” when administering a vaccine; “We’ll be in and out in a flash,” when describing a surgery. Medications were prescribed by color and shape rather than their pharmacology. His parting words to every owner were “Take them home and love them.”

  Over the years I’d heard all of George’s jokes and grown impatient at the unscientific language he used with his clients—I aspired to learn the precise name and clinical description of every disease—but I’d bided my time in anticipation of the moment Peter would invite me into the passenger seat of his Land Rover. And, finally, after four years of formal veterinary education, I had graduated from my unobtrusive corner of the exam room to the passenger seat, ready to visit horses, cows, sheep, and any other beast too big or messy to fit into a consulting room. Now it was my turn to entertain high school volunteers in the kennel room with tales of calving successes, hoof trimming, and cesarean sections—the same stories I had once listened to with rapt, jealous attention.

  Although my upbringing was essentially urban—if a city with a one-screen cinema, a handful of shops, a nightclub called Marilyn’s, and a Pizza Hut was considered urban—the countryside Peter and I traveled through was familiar. It was where my family took walks through bluebell-carpeted woods in spring, picked strawberries in summer, and stomped through piles of crunchy autumn leaves. The gamboling lambs, grazing cattle, and hard, stiff earth of a plowed winter field had once been little more than fun distractions. But riding with Peter on large-animal calls, visiting farms for TB testing, calving, and managing herd healthcare, I had come to realize how integral farming was to my home.

  Peter was well known in Herefordshire—with his muttonchops, and his cravat and collared shirt regardless of the day’s duties. He was no match for George in physical stature, but he occupied an equally substantial place in the practice and community. Peter’s energy was suited to the outdoors; his wiry forearms and strong grip were made for wrangling horses’ h
ooves, not tending to soft kittens’ paws. He carried the vaguely aloof brusqueness and rounded vowels of a country gentleman, and I felt naïve and weighed down by my need to prove myself in his presence. Over the prior two weeks of our working together we’d developed a good, if slightly distant, rapport. Compared to George and his jovial bedside manner, Peter had a more formal approach. But the rigor with which we discussed timely topics in veterinary medicine, and our meticulous daily reviews of clinical practice, more than made up for the lack of amiable banter.

  We were visiting a pony who was no longer eating. Peter, who’d examined her before, suspected lymphosarcoma, a cancer of white blood cells. Her owners had declined further diagnostics and treatment—and to be present for this final visit. I didn’t remember the pony’s name. Peter had told me a few miles back, but it had instantly skidded from my mind. My thoughts were desperately clinging to the scientific and clinical aspects of the visit. I wanted to know her name, though, to gently whisper it under my breath once I stood in front of her. But more than that, I wanted to appear calm and composed. I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

  * * *

  —

  My childhood was littered with mostly imaginary animals. Despite my best attempts to convince my parents that a dog was an essential family member, I had to make do with stuffed toys and wheeled suitcases as companions. On one summer family vacation in a remote, soggy corner of Wales, I even adopted a pet rock, complete with a collar and leash fashioned from long-abandoned red twine. Unfortunately, my parents did not share my enthusiasm for my new pet, and I was forced to abandon her at the end of the trip, leaving only my dad’s endless apocryphal stories of his childhood puppy, Patch, to satisfy my dog-owning ambition.

  Patch had been a black-and-white Border collie with a penchant for getting into trouble, and tales of him chewing through electrical cords, jumping out of a moving car’s window, and dining on the contents of the compost heap were part of our family lore. Patch had died of old age when my dad was a teenager, but even decades later, it often seemed like he was about to trot into the room.

  My dad was a dog person and, for as long as I could remember, I had wanted to be like him, right down to wishing that his exuberant caterpillar eyebrows would one day meet in the middle of my forehead. While my mum’s teaching career held no mystery—I went to school every day; I knew what teachers did—my dad was a microbiologist in a veterinary laboratory. And, because he wasn’t occupied with keeping two girls fed, clothed, and clean along with holding down a full-time job, he was the parent who taught me how to ride a bike, tell a joke, look down a microscope, and what the offside rule in football meant. He was also an eager amateur photographer, and for a time our attic contained not only the precisely-to-scale model railway he spent hours researching, painting, and setting up, but also the red-lit mystery of a darkroom. Once I was old enough to be trusted around the shallow trays of alchemical liquids, I would hover close to my dad in the small space, enthralled, while pictures developed on previously stark sheets of photographic paper.

  Ultimately, it was a simple picture that my dad took of a laboratory sink, discolored with the residue of dyes he’d used to stain microscopic specimens, that illuminated my gateway into the world of science. I remember the first exhilarating instant I saw the image, the flat grayness of the once-white sink, the swirling blues, purples, and pinks curling around the drain in confusing whorls. I was fascinated, hooked. It was a visual representation of the days my dad spent culturing microscopic organisms on agar plates and in flasks of nutrient broth—the type of scientific life I wanted to be a part of.

  When I was fourteen, my interest crystallized into a determination to join the world of veterinary medicine. The mystery of abdominal cavities revealed by a scalpel and the secrets of bones discovered on X-rays were calling to me. I was entranced by the science of physiology and disease—how bodies work, get broken, and are fixed again. I wasn’t inspired by a family pet saved from the brink of death by a plucky veterinarian—my rock was indubitably resilient—and I couldn’t tell heartening stories of baby birds I’d nursed back to life from certain doom. My motivation came down to a picture of a dirty sink and a wonder at what lay beyond the plug hole.

  Despite my uncommon inspiration, my dream of becoming a veterinarian was not unusual. The bucolic, very English portrayal of veterinary medicine in All Creatures Great and Small, a 1980s BBC series based on James Herriot’s books, inspired millions every Sunday evening to consider the same path. The show was set during the 1940s and ’50s in a fictional North Yorkshire village. The countryside was rolling and unspoiled, and the heroes—James and the younger Tristan Farnon—dashing and brave. It was a halcyon place of small, neat stone cottages with meticulously planted gardens, and a pub where the gents drank pints of local ale while the ladies sipped tea at the vicarage.

  Herriot’s veterinarian was the center of a thriving agricultural community, driving from farm to farm delivering calves, treating lame horses, and performing the occasional house call for a rich landowner’s over-pampered Pekingese. Women were wives and assistants, and veterinary medicine, in Herriot’s time, was a male-dominated, large-animal-focused profession. It was, after all, only a few decades earlier, in 1922, that Aleen Cust, the first British female veterinarian, was finally permitted to practice, twenty-five years after she’d completed her studies.

  The tide, however, was turning. And by the mid-1990s, when I began veterinary school, two-thirds of my classmates were female. Despite this shift, the majority of the veterinarians I met seeing practice, and the senior lecturers and clinicians at university, were male. When I went on farm calls with Peter, my presence and my introduction as a vet student were sometimes met with skepticism and outright sexism. Peter and George showed no such prejudice, but I desperately wanted to avoid giving anyone proof that I couldn’t do a man’s job, especially when it came to holding a gun against a horse’s head and pulling the trigger.

  When I started seeing practice with Peter—the summer before the final year of my veterinary education—I had not yet killed an animal. Although I’d stood a respectful distance from the cats and dogs I’d seen euthanized, passively witnessing their last breath, I had chosen not to look too closely at this aspect of my future career. I knew it was something I would do—would have to do—and I’d heard veterinarians talk about how it was the best decision for a suffering pet. But I’d never pictured myself administering the fatal bullet to a sick horse. I was so caught up in studying the factual, scientific nature of disease that I’d barely had time to consider the practical applications for my patients.

  Four years of vet school separated the teenager who’d hovered in the corner of the examination room from the student who stood in that field. When I moved to London for my first year at university I’d just turned nineteen. I was staying in Commonwealth Hall, a large intercollegiate residence. My dad had driven me the three hours east from Hereford to London. As the view through the car window changed from the countryside of my childhood to the monotonous gray of the motorway, my excitement shifted into a tugging dread that made me want to beg him to turn the car around. Instead, I complained about his taste in music and argued with him about which cassette to put in the player.

  After we’d decanted the contents of the boot and backseat into my cupboard of a room, I realized that the clod that had been slowly thickening in my throat all afternoon was going to make it difficult to say goodbye. A swift survey of my home for the next year had done little to raise my spirits—a single bed with institutional sheets and a thin, lumpy duvet; a radiator covered in multiple layers of peeling paint; a small wardrobe that smelled of other people’s clothes; a faux wood desk with the edges chipped and cracked; and, wedged in the corner, a tiny sink I preferred to think had been used only for washing hands and faces. My dad stood awkwardly in the only square foot of floor not occupied by suitcases or boxes.

  “All right, you�
��ve got everything?” he said.

  “I think so,” I replied, unable to look him in the eye. I knew his black caterpillar eyebrows were drawn into a continuous questioning line.

  “I suppose I’ll be off, then, before the traffic gets too bad.”

  “Okay,” I paused. “Shall I come to the car with you?”

  “No, no need, you get settled here.”

  “Okay.” My small relief that I wouldn’t have to walk back from the car alone with a press of tears behind my eyelids was soon tempered by the realization that this was goodbye.

  “Give us a call and let us know how you’re doing,” he said.

  “Will do.”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you, too,” I said.

  And then he was gone.

  Sitting on my barely-twin bed, I listened to the excited bustle and chatter of other students moving in, making friends. I’d never quite fit in at high school; my peculiar dedication to academic excellence and rule following had branded me a “swot.” I didn’t have time for parties, illicit cigarettes behind the bike shed, or dating, which was just as well, because I was never invited. My extracurricular activities were more sedate—playing flute in the orchestra, singing in the school choir, and competing on the swim team. And my singular determination to get into vet school made it easier to ignore the whispered slights in the changing room after PE.

  I’d harbored a shy hope that I would finally find my place at university, but not long after my arrival in London it became clear that my state-school education and just-about middle-class upbringing separated me from my classmates, the majority of whom had spent childhoods cantering around country estates while on holiday from private boarding school. I managed to find a small group of friends with backgrounds similar to my own to meet for meals in the dining hall—six girls who also lived in Commonwealth Hall and didn’t have pet ponies—but still, my need to spend one more hour revising biochemical pathways set me apart.