Tales of PGK

[PeteB]

Great tales well writ!

[pgkevet]

A small addition to TK's story that I've just remembered.

 

During College final exams I was called in to be interrogated by Prof F for my equine oral section. As I strolled into the room I could see out of the window towards the Horse loose boxes and saw TK walking that way with his examiner. I grinned.

 

Prof F asked me why I was smirking and I told him that it was always funny to watch TK come to grief.

 

"What do you mean" Asked Prof F

 

"Well TK is about to examine that horse and I've just spotted the dung heap over there" I replied. "I'll take a bet he ends up in it."

 

"Why? What do you mean? What is he doing wrong?" Barked the Prof.

 

"Nothing" I answered "He's approaching the horse properly, he's standing correctly to pick up that foot..."

 

And right on cue out sailed TK head first into the dung heap. No-one could have known that horse had just learned to cow-kick that efficiently.

 

Fate

[pgkevet]

Coming up Roses

 

V and I discovered Jamaica in the mid 90’s courtesy of a last minute on line deal that was too good to miss. I bought a new state of the art digital camera just for the holiday. Back then memory was small and expensive so I had chosen a Sony with floppy disc drive. For its era it was pretty good.

 

Jamaica rapidly became my favourite country. In many ways I preferred it in the 90’s to the changes since then. Back then walking out at Montego Bay airport we were met with a colourful mass of hustlers and vendors trying to scrape a living from the tourists; followed by negotiating slow potholed roads on the way to our hotel.

 

These days Mo’Bay airport has expanded. One gets off a plane through a tunnel instead of steps and the airport arrivals section has no hustlers at all and just a couple of franchised cafes. And the main roads have all been repaired or bypassed with new highways. It’s far more practical but nowhere so much fun.

 

The flight out was the usual Virgin Atlantic cattle-class affair where someone my size is cramped intolerably. Hey, it was only going to be 9 hours!. Except. Except that is that halfway over a fracas broke out several rows behind and the flight ended up diverted to Norfolk, Virginia while police came aboard and the offenders were removed. We were stuck on board for those extra hours.

 

Naturally I dug the camera out and took surreptitious shots, shooting blind since I had unlimited storage on the discs I had brought and I couldn’t move in my seat. It passed the time.

 

The landing at Mo’Bay was obviously late and with the potholes the coach time to Runaway Bay was almost 4 hours.

 

We were booked into a small hotel. After registering we were shown to our room by a chap who introduced himself

 

“Hi dere, I’se Leroy. I run da security here. You wan’ Ganja or Charlie den ask for me..Yaman!”

 

V’s look at me made that offer unlikely.

 

The room was small but OK. A typical small Jamaican hotel room with wooden louvers with a fly-screen, cheap chipped bedside table but a king-size bed for the US guests, badly grouted plain white tiling in the bathroom but very clean even if the paint is chipped and the ceiling rendered to hide cracks.

 

The rest of this hotel’s grounds took about a minute to explore. There was a small kiosk, closed at this late hour and a tiny pool. A superb Ackee tree by the kiosk hung heavy with open fruit ready for the small edible part to be pulled from the purple seeds, several ornamental palms as well as the obligatory coconuts and sour sop and breadfruit and then the crotons, bougainvillea, and hibiscus shrubbed by the walkway.

 

 

 

Palm therapy works for me. I just stand under a palm tree and all my business worries wash away. But do look up and check there are no heavy nuts coming any time soon. That could ruin a holiday. What we call a ‘Germolene moment’.

 

Reception explained that beach access was via another hotel and that I could rent a safe behind reception with a fifty-dollar key deposit. I took that up. Food would mean invading the other hotels or crossing the man highway outside and chancing the takeout there. We took the takeout and found a bar.

 

I have been in some rough places in my time but the bar next to the takeout place was high on the all-time roughest list. I think it’s the only time I’ve carefully picked a table in the corner with a direct view of the front door and an exit route door to the back near me. And I didn’t look down at my drink or the table: strictly eyes on the patrons and one hand on the cane chair next to me in case I needed a shield.

 

We got approached by a group of three rangy looking guys; the sorts that floss their teeth with barbed wire and bite the heads of rats as crunchy snacks. I tried to look bigger and tougher and frisked them with my eyes for weapons.

 

But it turned out they just wanted to chat, didn’t even go the heavy hustle route.They wanted to thank us for not being the sort of tourists that hide in the all-inclusive resorts. As they rightly said; that way the tourist money all goes to the American hotel owner and ordinary Jamaicans have no chance of earning. But they didn’t turn down a free beer or some of my fries. I figured they might be allies if a brawl started.

 

Oh, and did we want some ganja or Charlie?

 

V’s look at me made that offer unlikely.

 

The reality of Jamaica is that most people are really poor. The average wage is around forty pounds a week and shop prices are not cheap. Folk struggle and many live in places smaller than your garden shed. There is little excuse for going hungry on a fertile island like that but life is a daily struggle. Apart from a few insane folk every Jamaican recognises his country depends on tourism and he has no interest in damaging his income by harming a tourist. He’ll try and talk you out of money but that’s a fair game. Walk down a street at night covered in jewellery and cameras and get robbed but that will happen anywhere.

 

The real violence is gang related or political and any tourist stupid enough to get mixed up in either of those probably gets what they deserve. In some fifteen trips to Jamaica I’ve had no problems of that sort at all and V and I have driven around that island and stayed in some colourful places; even hotels that usually rent by the hour. V is the first one to admit that she feels safer walking down Negril beach alone at night than she does where we live in Surrey.

 

Jamaicans have good memories for names and faces and whenever we go back I get folk calling my name and reminding me that they know me from a previous trip.

 

Back to this story.

 

Runaway Bay hasn’t got much to commend it unless you are in one of the bigger hotels so the next day we called Island Rentals and had a car delivered and off we went sightseeing. On the way back that afternoon I spotted a public beach and fancied a swim. I pulled into the parking area out in the middle of nowhere, locked the car, pulled off my trousers with my swimsuit underneath, checked my keys and dove into the surf. Plonker! The air in my swimsuit pocket turned it inside out and the keys vanished into the sand under the breakers. Thirty minutes of diving for them and I had to give up. Those car keys and hotel safe keys are still somewhere in the Caribbean.

 

V gave me a severe haranguing for my stupidity.

 

The nearest place was a restaurant we had spotted en route about a mile and a half away and we had to plod there, hammer on the door to get an answer and beg the use of a phone to call the car rental place. They pointed out we were 3 hours from their nearest depot and sent someone.

 

We walked back to the car and I chose to take a short cut across some grass just as the sun was setting. Three paces in and a cloud of insects rose up out of the long stuff and covered us both. I am immune to such things but V could feel them biting her and she hates bugs. By the time we had got back to the car the thousands of bites were already blistering on her legs. I wasn’t marked.

 

V gave me a severe haranguing for my stupidity.

 

We hadn’t been back at the car long before Jamaicans started appearing out of the bush. The jungle drums must have been working overtime. Everyone was friendly and having a laugh at my stupidity and being sympathetic to V’s plight. I had my camera and entertained the kids and adults by taking their pictures and showing them the results on the screen. They soon had a bonfire going and my few bits of loose change was enough to go fetch supplies with although I would guess not much was actually paid for. Dinner was on the go, V’s legs were rubbed down with bush remedies she claimed didn’t help one bit and neither her temper nor the soreness responded to a ganja tea rinse. Perhaps I should have made her drink it.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed the wait for the rental car guys. I had a stomach full of food, was happily munching fruits and chatting and taking pictures of all the folks. Later I sent them a small album of the images but I have no idea if they ever got it.

 

The rental guys brought us a new car and added $100 to our bill after breaking the lock on the one we had had and giving me access to my credit card. Back at the hotel they had to call out a locksmith to drill the safety deposit box; another $50 charge.

 

V gave me a severe haranguing for my stupidity.

 

The next morning V stayed in bed. Her legs did look nasty. I plodded up the road for some cortisone cream and then sat in the hotel grounds reading a paper back and staying out of earshot. It didn’t look like that $150 was going to get forgotten anytime soon.

 

Around mid morning I was approached by a couple of people that turned out to be TV reporters. They said that I was the only passenger on the flight that they had managed to track down and would I do an interview? I said ‘No’. I’ve done TV interviews before, hadn’t seen much on the plane and I was on holiday. They persisted. I wasn’t interested and then they offered $50. We settled for $100.

 

I did the interview for them and then asked if they might be interested in the pictures I’d taken.

 

For anyone that remembers the TV special on the major air-rage scandal with a montage of stills on the screen; well they were mine.

 

V’s legs were responding to the cortisone when I went back to the room and threw $175 at her and she claimed I was the only one she knew who really could fall into a cess-pit and come up fresh.

[pgkevet]

George the swan was brought in with a broken leg. Somehow he had managed to catch it flying over some wires. Swans are huge when you get close up and there are some interestingly big bugs crawling around on them too. But George was a patient and my job was to fix them. That was why I joined up and I never cared whether something was vermin or common or whatever. If I could fix it then I would have a go. So we mended George’s leg and he was carefully penned by the wildlife rescues folk while he healed up and then went back to Mrs George.

He cam back in the next year with a broken wing. That has to be the most embarrassing thing for a swan. Not so much the broken wing but the fact that this time he’d hit a bright red double-decker bus. “Doh! Didn’t see it.”

 

Around April we used to get the fox cubs being brought in. I didn’t always trust the wildlife rescue to devote the time needed and most years my daughters had a fox cub or two to nurse. My youngest daughter became quite good at it. First the basics of picking all the external parasites off it and bathing it so it would be fit to sleep on her pillow! Body shop dewberry shampoo probably isn’t a natural fox smell but daughter liked to use that and none of the cubs ever complained. She would take the job seriously and every 2 to 4 hours depending on the age of foxy she would have the alarm wake her and feed the baby. Of course the rescue folk argued that the cubs would be too tame but this way they got to live.

 

One year we had a young fox with a weird problem I never did solve and he would lose his sight for a few hours or days and then recover vision again. He spent the first couple of weeks in the dining room but that started getting a bit too rancid-fox-smell. By then the dogs had got used to him being around so he had the run of the house.

He went missing in the kitchen one day when something spooked him and the kids were heartbroken that this foxy had vanished.. We searched the whole house and for some reason I included the cellar. It turned out there was a hole in the floorboard under the kitchen units and foxy had fallen through. He was curled up fast asleep on the cellar floor when I found him. Because of his intermittent vision problems we figured we might as well keep him as a pet fox. They do tend to lose the strong smell as pets although house training is an issue. This story ended in tragedy though and a few weeks later I found him floating dead in our pond.

 

Baby squirrels were regular houseguest patients too. They are really cute and friendly when hand reared until they get to a certain age and pee all over you and scream and bite so release them as soon as possible. One young squirrel my daughter was hand rearing she became particularly fond of. She had to go away one weekend and I promised to watch Squidge. It was easiest to keep him in a shirt pocket and attend to his needs regularly that way and carry on working. It was a puzzled cat and owner when Squidge popped his head out to see me attending to the emergency cat. I had completely forgotten he was there and he had head and front paws on the shirt pocket lip and chattered at kitty.

 

Betty the badger baby has her own story but remains one of my favourites and while I’m sure that treats of jam sponge aren’t a natural diet for young girl badgers she had to have something to make up for walking around with dressings on two legs.

 

It amazes me how tame most of the wildlife it. I’ve had mature 2 year old foxes brought in in baskets and a little patience and talking to them and it’s usually possible to scruff them and then stroke them. Mature badgers will just keep chewing your fingers until they come off, though, so well worth treating with respect.

 

I had one panicky woman wanting an emergency call one Sunday after hitting a frog with her lawnmower and cutting its head. I went out see it. The cut didn’t look too bad so I ran the tap and put him under the jet to wash the wound and have a better look when the owner screamed at me “You’ll drown him”. ..

 

Another woman came in one morning with a wounded blackbird. “Vets treat wildlife for nothing so I want this blackbird mended. I’ll pick him up at five o’clock because he belongs in my garden. And of course I shan’t pay”

 

That really isn’t the most diplomatic request. That client was a bit odd. She once rang me up to ask if cats were waterproof because hers wouldn’t come in from the rain. I told her to ring me back if the cat started to dissolve.

 

Probably my all time favourite for being unusual was the small black and white bird someone brought in. We hadn’t got a clue what it was either but it was the pinnacle of cute. It walked around upright more like a penguin than a duck and was just very friendly. Whenever I went near its cage it would come to the door to be stroked and picked up. I got the wildlife folk down to identify it and a bit of bookwork and their assistance and it turned out to be a young little auk. It must have got blown thoroughly off course from the Arctic Circle. One of the airlines did us a favour and flew him to Iceland as a freebie.

 

We have had a couple of deer brought in too although we really aren’t geared up for looking after them. The police brought the first fallow deer in after being hit by a car. I had only just started to examine it when it died from internal injuries. Still that gave me the opportunity to charge for the call out and disposal . Disposal involved my dressing it out and jointing it for the freezer. The trouble was that I couldn’t eat it. Somehow the fact that it had been a patient just made that wrong. So my vegetarian wife, V, ate it instead. It wasn’t against her principles.

[pgkevet]

Night Calls

 

The veterinary classic joke was the young vet who was rung up by a client concerned that her two dogs were tied together mating and she couldn’t get them apart. After offering many suggestions such as throwing a bucket of water at them, making loud noises or offering food: the owner insisted the vet had to do something.

 

“OK,” he says “Give me your phone number and I’ll ring them right back.”

“How is that going to stop them mating!” Shouts the angry owner.

“It worked here ” sighs the vet.

 

One call I had was a very aggressive woman who demanded I see her dog immediately because it has a fifteen inch gash down it’s shoulder. I would never refuse to see anything like that and was trying to ask more about the wound but this woman threw a tirade against vets who don’t want to come out at night and all manner of resentments.

 

“My daughter is a final year medical student and she says it must be stitched at once!” was one of many shouted statements.

 

I was quite happy to see the dog and arranged to meet at the clinic. The woman turned up with a happy yellow Labrador with a long red crusty line down it’s shoulder. I started cleaning it from the bottom and simply washed the dried blood away until we ended up with a tiny puncture wound at the top.

 

“I think you will agree there’s not much to suture.” I offered while giving her some antibiotics.

 

“Of course not. How much do I owe you” She was still angry.

 

“Fifteen pounds please.” This was some years ago.

 

“Fifteen pounds just for that!” She shouted

 

“No Madam” I answered “I have charged you one pound for disturbing my sleep, getting me out of bed, driving to the surgery, opening up the building and waiting for you to get here. I have included my fee for examining the patient, cleaning the wound, dispensing the medication and all taxes and fees associated with that. The other fourteen pounds is for your daughter’s education and I think you will find that is better value than she’s been getting.”

 

I can be sarcastic too.

 

Then there was the man who rang late one night. “My dog has half a rose bush stuck up his nose”

 

Now that sounded fun and definitely worth a look. Thorns up the nose aren’t going to be nice. Again I arranged to meet them at the clinic.

 

It was a dark night when I got the there and met three men waiting outside. One was carrying the dog and the other two were struggling to hold the rose bush steady in a huge plastic bag of soil!

 

It had never occurred to them to cut the bit stuck into the dogs nose off!

 

I pruned him free but had to anaesthatise him to remove the barbs – painful.

 

A young colleague I employed rang me late evening. She wanted some advise about a pregnant bitch that was overdue. The owner was some sort of grand lady that usually went to the supposed up-market practice a few miles away but they were not answering their phone.

 

I went to the clinic to have a look and just when I got there another emergency turned up. This was one of my normal types of clients, simple earthy folk worried about their puppy. And then yet another emergency with a road accident cat.

 

This really was a triage situation sorting the problems into an order of urgency and coping with them in rotation. We got the cat stabilised and on fluids and comfortable. We could get back to fixing his injuries once stable. The pregnant bitch was examined and we decided to try and induce her and while we were waiting for the results for that we got on with investigating the puppy who tuned out to have a foreign object wedged in it’s bowel.

 

Between prepping that and getting the whelping bitch started on her deliveries and the puppy x-rayed and opened up, the object removed and the pups delivered it was getting to be a long night and somewhere around 1 am I started getting hungry.

 

I was instructing my colleague about the bitch and suturing up the puppy when I suggested my colleague rang the owner and asked them to bring some food.

 

My colleague argued that she was embarrassed to ask such a thing but I pointed out that we were helping these folk out, I was getting grumpy hungry and we were all going to be up for a lot longer. People don’t mind being asked under these circumstances. So she rang.

 

We had all the animals stable and doing well when the doorbell went and I answered it. I was expecting my sensible earthy clients to be there with some munchies. But, no, It was the grand lady clutching a small bag.

 

“I hope these are all right.” She said “The help was away and I have never made sandwiches before.”

[Sam Thompson]

We have had a couple of deer brought in too although we really aren’t geared up for looking after them. The police brought the first fallow deer in after being hit by a car. I had only just started to examine it when it died from internal injuries. Still that gave me the opportunity to charge for the call out and disposal . Disposal involved my dressing it out and jointing it for the freezer. The trouble was that I couldn’t eat it. Somehow the fact that it had been a patient just made that wrong. So my vegetarian wife, V, ate it instead. It wasn’t against her principles.

 

What a good job the wife didn't die Eating roadkill is madness

[pgkevet]

What a good job the wife didn't die Eating roadkill is madness

 

Why? It died in front of me by bleeding out into its own pelvis from multiple fractures and there were no signs to point to a public health risk when I dressed it out. I'll admit my meat inspection course was some 15 years before that came in but I'll still spot the major diseases...

[Sam Thompson]

Why? It died in front of me by bleeding out into its own pelvis from multiple fractures and there were no signs to point to a public health risk when I dressed it out. I'll admit my meat inspection course was some 15 years before that came in but I'll still spot the major diseases...

 

If that beast was a park or farmed deer (reasonable chance) it could have been treated by a vet, some (including some of the main ones used in deer farming, not that I am wanting to teach you to suck eggs) tranquilizers etc. are deadly to human health, and that animal would have never entered the food chain UNLESS it escapes,. But you take it home and feed it to the memisahib? Risky business i think bwana.

[treesnatcher]

Bit odd. We eat roadkill deer if fresh and looking healthy. Never had any problem

Delicious:biggrin:

[pgkevet]

If that beast was a park or farmed deer (reasonable chance) it could have been treated by a vet, some (including some of the main ones used in deer farming, not that I am wanting to teach you to suck eggs) tranquilizers etc. are deadly to human health, and that animal would have never entered the food chain UNLESS it escapes,. But you take it home and feed it to the memisahib? Risky business i think bwana.

 

I wondered what your concern was... No, it was one of the many wild deer from Epsom Downs and no deer farming around here. If farmed deer it should have identification anyway to comply with disease, movement and medication regs:001_smile:

..and I hadn't got around to shoving anything into it.. was loaded and ready but died beforehand..