The Possum Tale, or, Pride Cometh Before the Fall

“The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.” 
― Madeleine L'Engle

When I was a kid, the rules for Show-And-Tell in public schools were, to say the least, lenient.  It was the highlight of the week, something kids looked forward to for a long time.  In Ms. Braden’s second-grade class at my now-defunct elementary school, it was an opportunity to really show off.  One particular week, fate brought me an opportunity to show off like no other elementary school kid has had before or since.

One night, my brother and I were out riding the 4-wheeler in a pasture near my parents’ house. In the glint of the headlight, we saw a small, furry creature trundling along across the pasture. It was a baby possum. The opportunity to try to catch it for a closer look was too great to resist. My brother and I hatched a plan: he would stay near the area where we last saw it while I rode off to get a plastic bucket to snag it in. I drove back to the house as fast as I could.  I quickly returned, bucket in hand.  We scooped the little guy up and carried him back to the house.  I was proud to show him off to my folks, but I had larger audience in mind.

I have to pause in the story to talk a little bit about possums.  The name “Opossum” is from an American Indian word that means something like “White Beast” if I remember right.  Seems appropriate.  They deserve the name “beast” when cornered.

Have you ever cornered a possum?  They hiss and open their mouth to show you all 50 of their teeth. I know 50 teeth seems like an exaggeration, but that’s what the reference literature cites (after my experience with this particular possum, I think it’s closer to 200).  If you’d like to see their teeth, just irritate one.  It will be happy to show them to you.

Angry possums have the attitude of a rattlesnake with a migraine. [Speaking of rattlesnakes, did you know that possums have partial (and in some cases, complete) immunity to rattlesnake and other pit viper bites? How tough do you have to be to have that ability?]  While possums may appear like cute woodland creatures, they are vicious animals anxious to gnaw any limb they can reach.  At least, that’s my experience…

Anyway, back to the story:

The day after I took the possum home just happened to be show-and-tell. I begged my parents to let me take the beast to school, and they figured that it would be something different- perhaps even educational- so they agreed. The next morning found me standing at the end of my driveway in the fog with a shoe box under my arm, waiting to board the bus.  There is no prouder person than an eight-year-old boy with a possum in a box for show-and-tell.

The anticipation that morning was nearly too much for me to bear. The occasional scratching sounds from the box inside my old metal desk faintly echoed through the morning, heightening the tension. Finally, after lunch, the big moment came.

I stood before my class and opened the lid of the box.  I basked in the adulation of my peers. The possum was the hit of the class, cute in an ugly way, peacefully staring back at the throng of children with small, black, beady eyes. I don’t believe that any of my classmates had ever seen one before, and certainly not this close.

Word got around the school about what I had brought, and requests started coming in from other teachers (who, I will assume, were looking for something interesting for their science classes) that they wanted the possum to make appearances in their classes as well. Instead of being in my class that afternoon, I was making rounds of the lower-grade classrooms, showing off the Marsupial Marvel.

I was going through the hall from one class to another when I ran into one of my buddies.  He quickly cornered me with an eye on the box.

“Is the possum in there? I want to see it!” he said.

Unable to resist the pull of elementary school stardom, I opened the box and looked at my friend’s face to see his reaction.

“Is it dead?” he asked, with a befuddled look.

I looked into the box and saw the unthinkable: the baby possum was twisted in an odd position, motionless, in the box.

‘He was fine a minute ago!” I said, as I poked him with my finger.

You can guess where this is headed, can’t you?

The tiny beast sprang to life and clamped down on my right index finger with lightning speed.  Three of its needle-like teeth went right through the fingernail. It was stuck on my hand.

I started trying to shake it off my hand, gripped with terror.  No luck.  My buddy was backing away from me, as if he didn’t know who the next intended victim was. I panicked and did the only thing I could think of.

In the hallway, there was an old steel water fountain that had been in the school since it was built in the 50’s. I swung my hand, with the woodland creature attached, as hard as I could. If you’ve ever seen a bad kung-fu movie, you know what that sounded like.  A giant GONG rang down the hallway.

The possum fell straight to the ground and immediately scuttled behind the fountain, unharmed but highly agitated. With some coaxing and careful maneuvering, my buddy and I got the possum back in the box.  But by this time all the commotion in the hall had caused a lot of classroom doors to open. Suddenly, I had more than my share of unwanted attention as we recovered the White Beast and I wrapped my throbbing hand.

And so it goes. Sometimes, the brighter a star is, the faster it burns out.

From that point forward, there were no live animals allowed at show and tell. I guess that the powers that be decided it wasn’t the kind of educational experience they wanted kids to have. It was certainly educational for me.

-RAB

On Being a Vet's Wife

The blog this time is from Karen, Dr. Bean's wife.  It's a different perspective on the life of a small town vet.

This was not what I had planned.

It was 9:00PM on New Year’s Eve night and I was holding two pieces of small intestine while my husband was trying to stitch them together.  We were standing on either side of the surgery table over a dog that was on the losing side of a dogfight.  In the background, we could hear our two kids watching a movie in his office (they were ecstatic… a movie and delayed bedtime in the same night!).  My husband, Dr. Bean, had just removed an eighteen inch section of bowel that had been too severely injured.  This type of surgery is called a resection.  The body has an amazing way of healing itself and functioning without the extra length of bowel.  I was helping with the surgery because it was a holiday night and our hardworking staff deserve some time with their families.  I had assisted in surgery several times before and I usually enjoy it.  But, this night was different.

This night, Dr. Bean was reaching the end of the procedure, the only thing left was to stitch the two ends of bowel back together and close the surgery site.  However, he was having trouble with this because his target kept moving.  It was my fault- I no longer had my eyes on the bowel.  He thought boredom had set in and I wasn’t paying attention (it had been a long night and a long surgery).  This was not the case.  I was looking anywhere but down as I tried my best not to pass out and hit the floor.  The edges of my field of vision had begun to darken and I could hear the telltale ringing in my ears.  I was on my way to a full fledged faint, but was too proud to admit it.

At this time, I would like to point out that I don’t have a weak stomach.  I have cleaned up after several dogs and cats plus lived with two kids.  I have helped clean fish and deliver puppies.  I’ve assisted in surgery plenty of times.  However, something about that night and that operation sent me over the edge.

I was able to hold on a little longer.  Thankfully, Dr. Bean had come to a point where I could take a break.  I took the chance to sit on the floor where I could watch the dog’s breathing and monitor the anesthesia machine, all while resting my head on my knees.

He thought this was amusing.  I thought it was humiliating.

This was definitely not what I had planned.  It was not what I had planned for a late New Year’s Eve night.  It was not what we had originally planned for our careers over fifteen years ago when we got married. 

I must say though, that I love our life.  I love having a family business where we can work together and where our kids can visit.  I love that we have built a business that can provide for us and our employees.  I love that we get to work with a great group of folks: our employees and our clients.  I love being part of a small town where complete strangers stop me to tell me that my husband is wonderful.  I do love this.

There are some things about being a vet’s wife that are not so great.  We take separate cars to church in case he gets an emergency call during service.  Family vacations have to be carefully planned away from major holidays, spring break, or summer since we normally have a lot of boarders at those times.  We’ve spent many restless nights with a howling dog or cat in our laundry room at home when my husband was too worried to leave it alone at the clinic overnight.

These are the types of things that we never had to deal with in our previous life.  Twelve years ago, we were both working in an Atlanta suburb.  He was an associate at a small animal clinic, I was a research engineer for a large consumer products company.  The future was mapped out: we would both work our way up with our employers with no significant changes ahead.  Our lives revolved around our careers and fighting traffic and we didn’t mind too much.  We worked our eight to ten hours a day and went home leaving the office behind us.

Then we had our son in 2002 and suddenly hour long commutes were no longer so much fun.  By the time our son was 2, we were looking for a way out.  The idea of owning a practice had not previously appealed to Dr. Bean- the hours are long and the financial risk is high.  But owning a practice would allow us to move back to Alabama, near our families, and keep me at home, at least part-time, with the kids.  We were soon exploring the idea of opening a clinic and building a new life in a small town.

So fast forward to 2012…. we’ve traded the corporate world for the world of small business in a small town.  We no longer have a boss to gripe about; we are the bosses.  We’ve swapped the hour long commutes for school carpooling and walking dogs.  Work now follows us home and sometimes it seems like it’s all we talk about.  And we love it.

Scully, the World’s Best Dog, part 2.

In one of the previous installments of this blog, we told you about Scully, one of the animals we have treated for cancer.  Her type of cancer, lymphoma, is one of the few that are treated in the private practice setting on a regular basis.  You may remember from the earlier blog, that typical life expectancy after lymphoma treatment was 6 to 12 months and Scully had just passed the 16 month mark.  It may not sound long, but sixteen months means a lot of walks and doggie treats.

Scully had come in a couple of times during early November.  Things started to look progressively worse as the weeks passed, and her lymph nodes were getting larger.  We re-started chemotherapy in hopes that we could buy her even more time, despite the fact that she was well beyond average survival times already.

The day before Thanksgiving, Scully’s Mom brought her in and let me check her over once more.  The news wasn’t good: her disease simply wasn’t responding to the drugs anymore.

As I ran my hands over her, feeling the changes that the cancer was making, the right decision became clear.  I turned to Scully’s owner and recommended that they discontinue treatment. They did.

Things went along relatively normally until a couple of days before Christmas.  Scully had started to have some bad days.  She had an episode of weakness on Christmas Eve in the afternoon and evening, and I wound up talking to and checking in on them a couple of times that night.

I called back Christmas morning and found out that she had passed away the night before.  She had followed her owners outside to the mailbox that evening as she always did- it was sort of a ritual- and on her way back into the house she simply collapsed.  She passed away in her owner’s arms.

It was the best way I could have imagined it happening, really- She was at home doing the simple things that made her happy, and she was with the people she loved.  Her owners had been wrestling with the decision to euthanize ever since her turn for the worse. The stress of that decision hanging over their heads was a real burden for them, and understandably so.  As it happened, they didn’t have to make that call.

Whenever we get into the more intensive medical treatments in animals with a questionable prognosis, we always have to ask ourselves a series of questions.  What are the most likely outcomes if we proceed?  What are the risks?  Is the price something that the owner has the ability and desire to take on?

These types of decisions can become complex quickly; emotions have a heavy influence in how we approach things.  In Scully’s case, it turns out that the decision to treat her did have a good payoff.  She had well over a year of extra life, with the majority of it spent feeling good and being with the family she had always been with.  I feel good about that.

My wife is doing a guest blog about being married to a veterinarian, which should be interesting.  She’ll publish it in a week or two.

 

A teaser for my next blog:

Remember show and tell at your elementary school?  Me too.
Did you ever take a live possum?  I did.
It turned out to be more exciting than I had planned…-RAB

First Christmas with Sam

About a year after we got married, my wife and I adopted a little fuzzball of a kitten from the barn next door to my parents’ farm. We named him Sam, and he came to live with us in Auburn. By December of that year, Sam was a few months old and well on his way to being pure pandemonium.

It was my second year of vet school and we were getting ready to wind things down for the Christmas break.  I remember walking through the pine straw in the yard and up the steps to my front door.  I had just finished a 2 hour Parasitology lab and I was ready to come home and relax for the evening.

When I opened the front door, my wife was standing there with tears streaming down her face.

Initially, I thought something terrible had happened: a death in the family, trouble with her coursework (she is an engineer by training, and her classes at the time were intense to say the least), obviously it had to be something terrible and unforeseen…

She looked up at me and said “I’m going to kill that cat. Don’t let me see him.” And then she walked away. Over her shoulder, I saw the trouble at last: the Christmas tree, ornaments and all, had gone down in flames like the Hindenburg. I could only assume that the cat was to blame. Oh, the humanity.

I picked my way across the living room through the ornaments, fragments of ornaments, and shattered Christmas Cheer to get closer to the scene. The tree was lying full length on the floor in a significantly less idyllic state than it was the night before.

What was left of it looked a lot like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree- a sad arrangement of stem and twigs held together by nothing more than hope. There were ornaments and pieces of ornaments strewn from the bathroom door, through the den, and into the kitchen. The whole scene was so ridiculous that I laughed out loud. Then I realized that I hadn’t seen the cat since I walked in. He had vanished.

I pieced this part of it together later, after an interview with the only witness to the crime:

When my wife came in from class, she saw the tree immediately when she opened the door. She stood looking at it for a second, dumbstruck, when Sam blazed by her. He was tearing through the living room, rolling an ornament ahead of him with his paws like a soccer player on his way to an uncontested goal. She immediately put together what had happened, and the chase was on.

Being the stealthy creature he was, Sam quickly decided that the best tactic was to get under a piece of furniture and hide until he was found, then sprint beneath another one when his pursuer got within arms’ reach. This apparently went on for a while. My wife eventually lost track of him. Sam escaped capture, which is a good thing for him. If she had caught him at that moment, no power in the universe could have saved him.

I started my search for the half-grown cat in all his usual hangouts, and found no sign of him. About half an hour later, I found him backed into a corner behind a toilet, shaking, with his eyes as big as saucers. Sam and I had a talk, and we decided that it would be best if he steered clear of Mommy for a few days.

Sam is 15 now.  He no longer plays the way he used to and his eyesight is patchy at best.  Thankfully with age comes wisdom and Sam has learned to leave the Christmas tree alone. We won’t have many more Christmases with him, but he made his first one very, very memorable.

-RAB

Random Trivia

courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com



I’ve met some interesting people and seen some interesting things in the 22 years I’ve been working in veterinary practices. A lot of them are too short to justify a whole blog entry, so I decided to put a few into a trivia-style blog. Some things are just too strange to not pass along…

1. I once broke into a vet clinic when I was a teenager… to walk the dogs on a Thanksgiving morning. I didn’t have a key, and the person who had the key and was supposed to help me was over an hour late. I had to scale a wall to access the door to the kennels. All the dogs got their Thanksgiving treats, and I got home in time for Thanksgiving Lunch with my family. And my co-worker?  She showed up just as I was walking the last dog.

2. I worked at a clinic that had one of America’s few female serial killers as a client. Her name was Audrey Marie Hilley, and she was from Anniston, Alabama. Her nickname was The Black Widow. She even bounced a check at the clinic. They didn’t pursue her for payment… I wonder why… If you want to know more about her, Wiki has a pretty good article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Marie_Hilley

3. Have you ever ultrasounded a llama to see if it was pregnant while it spat on you repeatedly in protest?  I have.

4. Scared Straight: I have seen one rabid animal. It was a bat found climbing up a screen door to someone’s back porch in the middle of the day.  I didn’t take the appropriate precautions for my personal safety when I sent the sample to the State for testing. This was a bad decision on my part, because I wound up having to list myself as a “potentially exposed” individual with the State of Alabama Department of Public Health. That led to a significant amount of paperwork.  I was 17 years old.  I’ve never taken a potentially rabid animal lightly since.

5. Just after Branchville Animal Hospital opened, I had a very nice lady bring me a snake to identify. It was in her basement, and she and a neighbor had captured it in a 20-ounce drink bottle. You should have seen her face when I told her it was poisonous. I have no idea how they got it into the bottle without getting bitten.

6. My worst on-the-job injury was a bite not from a dog or a cat, but from a gerbil named Zippy.  It was awful and I might have to write a whole blog about it later.

If any of you guys want to hear more about the incidents I wrote about this time, drop me a line and let me know. Thanks, everybody, and have a safe Halloween!

-RAB

Current Events - October 2011

I decided to postpone the promised horse blog to do a “current events” blog. It’s been an unusual week around here… pretty memorable.

Monday of this week, I neutered a rat. Yes, a pet rat. It was something I’ve never done before, and wouldn’t have agreed to it except that:

1. A staffer here asked me to do it, and
2. We had a sincere but brief conversation about anesthetic risk with small rodents a few days before I did it (I also made her promise not to tell her daughter about the new pet rat until after the surgery & recovery).

We have the benefit of having a couple of techs on staff that have had some experience dealing with more unusual pets. One of them ran anesthesia for me while I did the surgery as fast as possible to get Dudley awake ASAP. It went off without a hitch, but I have to admit I was sweating bullets the whole time.

On Tuesday, someone “donated” an injured bird to us. As best we can figure, it’s a Rail of some sort- a spindly-legged marsh bird. It was addled at first, and was therefore easy to deal with. As we fed it and it came back to its senses, it began to act like you would expect any wild creature to act: It tried to kill the people working with it. Thank goodness, its abilities in that area are somewhat limited by the fact that it weighs about 2 ounces. Here’s a picture of him before he turned into the avian version of The Incredible Hulk:

After almost a full day of rehab here at the clinic, the bird is destined for a local wildlife rescue group.  I think he’ll enjoy having a new group of folks to thrash.

Finally, we took in some boarders yesterday that are a little out of the norm for us. Here’s a picture of the crew:

I have to say that I think this is fun. I grew up on a poultry farm with tens of thousands of chickens at a time, so eight is a different ballgame entirely. They’ll be with us until next week until their owners get back into town. Until then, I’ll be entertained by the occasional “peep” mixed in with the barking from the kennels.

I’ve talked before about not knowing exactly what you’ll be doing every morning when you go into work as a veterinarian. This week has proven that variety is the spice of life- it’s been a blast.

-RAB

Queenie and the Highway 5 Incident

courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com

Q: “Do you work on horses, too?”

A: “No, ma’am, I don’t.”

It’s a question I get asked frequently by clients when they meet me for the first time. The next couple of blogs will tell the stories that could be considered stepping stones on my path to writing horses off as a species I would deal with professionally:

When I was a kid, I would go to my grandparents’ house every summer for a week or so.  My brother and I would spend time with them, and usually my cousins as well, in one of the most rural settings Alabama has to offer. Through my young eyes, it was a magical time. The days were filled with exploring the woods, fishing, fireworks, shuffleboard at the community club, and swimming.  And then there was the horse.

Her name was Queenie, and her expressionless brown eyes hid the cold flames of her hatred for children.

I’ll spare you the details of the times that she would step on my bare feet and attempt to grind me into the ground (“I’m sure she didn’t mean to!”, the adults would say.  Riiiight.) No, we’ll go straight into The Highway 5 Incident.  I was about 7 years old at the time.

My grandfather wanted all of us grandkids to grow up riding horses.  I never had the desire, really, but was cajoled into riding double behind an older cousin.  I knew that my grandfather had been riding Queenie to keep her used to the concept and this made me a little more comfortable.  Before I agreed to get on, I watched my cousin ride her solo.

So, what could go wrong?  Almost everything.

My cousin and I together probably weighed about 150 lbs., which was far less than what Queenie was used to when she carried my granddad.  As my grandfather let go the reins and turned control over to my cousin, things were going well.  The plan was to take a slow ride down the roadside in front of the house, on the flat packed surface made from dirt and gravel from the nearby Cahaba River.

The “slow ride” portion lasted for about 10 seconds. That’s when the “hang-on-for-dear-life” part began.

Queenie picked up speed, first getting up to a trot, then deciding to go faster. As my adult family members watched us speed away, my cousin tried to regain control with what appeared to be a pretty fair level of skill for someone about 10 years old. It may have actually been desperation seasoned with a little bit of panic, but from my vantage point, it looked like skill. These are the kinds of observations one makes when one is a second grader on the back of a horse that has just decided to go off the reservation.

[I was probably suffering from what a psychologist would call a case of Normalcy Bias, or maybe just Denial.  My child’s mind was trying to convince me that everything was going to go back to normal, and everything was going to be just fine. Well, it wasn’t.]

 After about 100 yards, Queenie put on the brakes, and then reared up. This threw my cousin off… which was trouble for me in two ways.  First, it meant that there was nobody was holding the reins.  Second, as you will remember, she had been sitting in front of me.  When she fell off, she went backwards. This knocked me flat on my back while still sitting on the horse.  I was gripping with my legs, unable to sit back up.  Queenie had started trotting again, heading away from my Grandparents’ house and toward the biggest local road- Highway 5. I was still onboard, and with each stride she took, my back slapped against the top of her rump while I held a death grip with my legs.

Even as I struggled to get upright, I knew that it was never going to happen.  I was getting jostled too hard to ever overcome it.  It was at this moment that I accepted my fate.

 It had been a short life, but a good one, I said to myself. Then, I released my grip on Queenie’s flanks and waited for whatever would happen next.

I discovered that freefall is an interesting, peaceful sensation in the few heartbeats it took for me to reach the ground. I hit flat on my back, which knocked the wind out of me. Normally, this would have been a bad thing, but I was so grateful to be off the horse that I simply didn’t care. Slamming into hard-packed river gravel never felt so good.

My only worry at this point was that Queenie was going to double back to try to finish the job she had started- maybe stomping me into paste while I struggled to get up - but she didn’t. She did, however, make it to Highway 5 before my grandfather could catch her and get her back to the barn.

So, my cousin and I survived. I’ll never forget what my uncle (a towering, mischievous, mustachioed man) said to me later. As we sat on the front porch of my grandparents’ house, he barely hid a smile. “You mean to tell me you just let go? Why didn’t you hold on? It seemed like you had things under control to me.”

Later, I wondered why Queenie chose the course of action she did that day. She had never thrown anyone off before. The only conclusion I could come to is that she had been biding her time, waiting for an opportunity to eliminate two kids at once. Despite the fact that she tried to end me, I had to admire her cunning and patience in the pursuit of her targets.

More horse stories next time-

-RAB