Monsieur le Vet E-Book

Sylvain Balteau

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 265

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The hilarious, poignant and sometimes bizarre stories of an extraordinary vet in rural France Sylvain Balteau works as a village vet in the Pyrenees. Equally at home with a sick hamster as with a pregnant Charolais cow, he is permanently on call, immersed in the daily dramas of animals and their people. Since 2007 he has kept a blog, revealing the hidden side of a vet's work and the rich variety of French rural life. As well as caring for the usual puppies and elderly cats, he tries to save a man's pet piglet and patches up hunting dogs after the annual wild boar hunt. Then he can be found carrying a newborn calf into a remote farmhouse to warm up by the fire, or pleading with a farmer's wife on the verge of a heart attack who insists that the vet see her sick cow first … Through his work with their animals, Sylvain gains a privileged insight into the people who live with them. In this profound and unsentimental book, he discovers that, in order to love animals, you can't help but love people as well.

Leseprobe

Monsieur Le Vet

Originally published in French in 2015 by Éditions des Arènes under the title

Docteur Fourrure

Monsieur Le Vet

My Life with Animals in Rural France

SYLVAIN BALTEAU

Translated from the French by Barbara Mellor

Published in the UK in 2016 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

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ISBN: 978-178578-057-8

Original text copyright © Éditions des Arènes, 2015

This translation copyright © Barbara Mellor, 2016

The author has asserted his moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher

Typeset in Adobe Text Pro by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

I dedicate this book to Alice, above all, to Cécile and to Gaelle.

To my parents and my grandparents.

To all those – teachers, colleagues, doctors, friends, my brother and sisters – too numerous to mention, who have never allowed me to stagnate.

I also dedicate this book to Congélo (‘Freezer’).

To my beloved old mare Mémé.

And to Oasis.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sylvain Balteau, 36, lives and works in a village in the Haute-Garonne region of France, at the foot of the Pyrenees. He trained as a vet in Toulouse and started keeping a blog of his life in 2007. This is his first book.

Barbara Mellor has over 30 years’ experience as a literary translator and editor. Her translation of Agnès Humbert’s wartime journal, Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France (Bloomsbury, 2008), was shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and she is also the translator of A King in Hiding (Icon, 2015), longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, 2015.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The publisher and translator would like to thank Rachel Brown BVMS MRCVS of Galedin Veterinary Practice in Kelso in the Scottish Borders for her expert advice on technical matters.

Warning

This book contains graphic accounts of veterinary treatments that some readers may find upsetting.

‘I want to be a vet’

I must have been nine. I was good at school, second in my class. Top of the class was Arnaud, who always managed to scrape in just ahead of me and was forever bragging about it. He was better at this, better at that. He despised the ‘magazine for children’ that I was brought up on. He read a more sophisticated one, ‘that lets readers get behind world news’.

One day our teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. As always, Arnaud got in first: ‘I want to be a vet.’

I’d never even thought about it. Or at least I can’t recall now if I had, and I couldn’t back then either. I looked at the small dark-haired woman who’d asked the question, the teacher who lit up my last two years at primary school. And quick as a flash I said: ‘I want to be a vet.’ Arnaud gave me a hard time, obviously. It was his idea.

After that I never gave it a second thought. Not until I qualified, fourteen years later.

In the last year at secondary school, I bumped into Arnaud again. He’d moved to another town, far away from us ‘country bumpkins’. I was waiting outside school, about to sit a physics exam in which (when they eventually let me leave after sitting it out for an hour) I was to score zero per cent. He was waiting outside a different room, for an exam in history, or geography, or something like that. He went on to business school.

And I became I vet.

Did I become a vet because I love animals?

Being a vet is a vocation, it seems, like being a doctor. According to the dictionary, a vocation is ‘a specified occupation, profession, or trade; a special urge, inclination, or predisposition to a particular calling or career’.

But for me it was a calling that started as a feud between two rival nine-year-old teacher’s pets.

I’m not convinced that I became a vet ‘because I love animals’. Not that I don’t love them; for me the question doesn’t even arise. But I’m not in love with them. This is a misunderstanding that gives rise to some curious conversations with clients.

What do we mean when we talk about loving animals, in any case? They share our lives. They are our witnesses, sometimes our confidants, and they never judge us. They are our companions, at work and play. We put our trust in them, and they have their own personalities, their own qualities and defects of character, whether real or imagined. They are much more than personal belongings, but at the same time – even if sometimes they comfort our loneliness or serve as surrogate family members – they are not people. We may eat them, or we may encourage them to curl up in a ball on our laps. We may bask in the reflected glory of their looks, their intelligence or their breeding.

Do we love them the way we love other people? Or the way we love a good wine? How should we love animals? Many people are besotted with them. Lots of people project their own feelings on to them. Some people used to worship them. So let’s say that, yes, I respect and appreciate animals. I love them for what they are. Animals.

I’m not convinced you can be a vet just because you love animals unconditionally. I’m not convinced you can be a vet if you love animals unconditionally: as we often hear clients say, ‘I could never have been a vet, I love animals too much’. But I am convinced that you can’t be a vet if you don’t love people. Or else you end up as a cynical, embittered alcoholic. So, a vocation? Well, maybe.

In any case, by the time I considered this question seriously it was already too late. I did well enough at school, so I didn’t have to have second thoughts about what I wanted to do. I got into vet school at first go, and from then on everything was programmed to go smoothly: if you succeed in getting a place at vet school there’s no way they’ll let you fail. My vocation consisted, quite simply, of an absence of reflection. Just because you’re a straight A student doesn’t mean you can’t also be a total idiot.

What sort of vet?

So I made it to vet school, but as ever I didn’t indulge in any self-reflection. When it came to the first work placements, I turned up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. In my first year it was a large equine clinic. I wanted to be a horse vet: I was good at riding and I really liked horses, so naturally I was going to be a horse vet. Then I discovered what a ruthless world it was. Not the horses, but the humans who populate this microcosm of hypocrisy and pettiness. I would never be, could never be, an ‘equine’ vet; I couldn’t ever imagine working in that pretentious and oh-so-exclusive world. Then and there I decided that in future I’d stick to common-or-garden horses and old nags.

So, if I wasn’t going to be a horse vet, then I’d be a rural vet. I’d look after cows, do something that mattered. Because it really does matter, in the sense that you’re treating animals in order to enable other people to earn a living; you’re treating them on a case-by-case basis, without any fuss or nonsense, and – most important of all – with humanity. You’re working alongside livestock farmers who owe their living to their animals, who live through them and often for them. I wanted to be there for these people who are always there, to go the extra mile with these people who are constantly going the extra mile.

I lasted a year. Just a year of practice before chance, a powerful yearning to get a full night’s sleep, and a lack of interest in treating entire herds rather than diagnosing individual animals took me in a different direction. I wanted to look after cows, not herds. I longed for human contact, not Excel spreadsheets.

So it was then that I went into mixed practice. A genuinely mixed practice, working with cows and horses, dogs and cats and any other creatures, great or small, that people might bring in. It had all started off as a childish infatuation. Now I was going to try to go back to fundamentals, to be the kind of vet I’d fantasised about. I wasn’t going to be stingy with my time, with either animals or people. And lastly – and this was a long way from being certain – I was going to try to enjoy my work. When I see how many of my colleagues have qualified and then thrown it all in, I see that I’m far from being the only one who questions – frequently – what I’m doing here. I don’t blame anyone for leaving the profession: even if you love it, there’s stuff that makes you want to run away. I can’t imagine what it would be like if you weren’t even that interested.

Being a vet

I’m a vet. I’m the archetype of a vet, the sort of vet you see in films and read about in books, the sort of vet who treats every kind of animal.

I look after domestic pets, and I also look after farm animals: cows, pigs, poultry and horses. I may vaccinate a dog, then operate on a bitch with a uterine infection. I may neuter a tomcat, then whisk the cover off the microscope to diagnose a case of the tick-borne disease piroplasmosis. I may X-ray a fracture and then set it, before referring the animal to a specialist vet for surgery. I’m my clients’ first resort, and often their last. If they call me out at two o’clock in the morning I’m there every time, no questions asked. To deliver a calf, to do a transfusion on one, to treat a horse with colic.

I work 50 to 60 hours a week. And on top of that I’m on the duty rota, which sometimes means I’m permanently on call.

I employ five people, which I find terrifying. When the accounts are in the red, I wonder how I’m going to pay their wages. And then there are the suppliers. And I’m the one who has to make arrangements when people are off sick, organise maternity cover, and work round locums-who-aren’t-as-good-as-the-people-they’re-covering-for (but who-are-better-than-nothing-even-so).

I pamper my clients. They all have their expectations, their needs, their personalities and their foibles. I have to know how to listen as they tell me why they’ve come, then work out the real reason why they’re there. They have their preconceptions and their hopes. Their animal may be a badly brought-up toddler. Or a professional tool. Or simply a companion, a pet. It might have come for its first vaccination, it might have come to die. My clients may be intelligent, sensitive, understanding, utterly lost or completely dumb. They may be well off or even wealthy, or they may live in modest circumstances or even on the street. They may be prompt in settling their bills or they may always be late, but they pay my wages. They are often happy with the treatment they receive, and when they aren’t, this may be for a very good reason, whether justified or not: when your animal dies you have a right to be angry, even if the vet has done nothing wrong.

People ask me to be a guardian and a witness: my signature and official stamps serve to certify and witness, to all intents and purposes, truly, sincerely and legally. I carry out my duties, whatever the circumstances.

I’m a vet.

I pass on cases to my colleagues, and they pass on cases to me – fortunately. I wouldn’t be able to cope on my own. And when I’m at the end of my tether, I seek refuge in the cocoon of my family, or I share my pain online, in the public arena, on my blog.

In this book.

The lottery of life

It was just like any other Monday morning. Rushed, hassled, with the customary bunch of more or less imaginary emergencies that have waited the whole of Sunday because people don’t want to call the out-of-hours service, or don’t know about it. With the cases admitted over the weekend. With visits, appointments and two operations.

As for me, I was out of the surgery as fast as I could go. It was only a relative emergency, but if I didn’t deal with it then and there it would only get worse. When I returned an hour later, I found a scene of chaos: one vet still in the operating theatre and likely to be stuck there for at least another half-hour, another called out to a calving, the waiting room heaving with puppies (whose bright idea was it to book in a litter of puppies for their vaccinations on a Monday morning?), two nurses rushing in all directions, with the constant ringing of the telephone providing a musical accompaniment. I checked the appointments book: Monsieur Gimone had been booked in to have his dog put down an hour earlier.

An hour. An hour that this elderly man had to wait for his dog to die. An hour that he’d been waiting amid all this mayhem for us to put his companion down. I felt quite sick with shame. Quickly I skirted round the waiting room, ignoring the dog breeder and saying hello to another client, and quietly signalled to the old gentleman to come out with me to the car park, where I knew Démon was waiting in the boot of his car.

*

I’d been treating Démon, a Beauceron, for ten years. A year ago, I diagnosed a deadly hemangiosarcoma, a highly invasive form of cancer, in his spleen: it had spread to his liver and was causing bleeding in his abdomen. I’d given him a few days to live. Six months later Monsieur Gimone brought him back, happy to prove me wrong, and I examined a metastatic skin tumour. He was ‘getting along fine’. His back was sore and he was too fat – as he had only a few days left I’d told his master to spoil him. But he was ‘getting along fine’, and as far as Monsieur Gimone was concerned I was a hero, a healer – because I had palpated his dog’s abdomen, done a scan and diagnosed cancer, and palpated again; because when I had diagnosed his lumbar pain, I had let my hands linger over the muscles of his back, feeling for spasms and tension.

Afterwards he’d got better. For the hemangiosarcoma I could do nothing. For the arthritic pain it was chiefly my anti-inflammatories that we had to thank. I’d explained this to Monsieur Gimone, but he hadn’t listened. When he came to the surgery he would see only me and no one else, because – well, because I was a healer. He had even warned me to be careful, so as to avoid the evil eye. I’d tried to set his mind at rest, with a little quip about how arthritis would be bound to get me in the end.

*

I carried the dog from the car to the examination table. Monsieur Gimone could barely speak. Démon was leaning on his side and breathing with difficulty, his abdomen sagging and misshapen. Monsieur Gimone was weeping. He just said a few last words. Then he asked me to take care of the body, and he left. Cancer, bleeding, the end.

I inserted the catheter, holding Démon’s great head under my left arm, stroking him and talking to him. On my own, as the veterinary nurses were still caught up in a whirl of activity. Démon was stirring a little. I tried to move away from the table to get the anaesthetic drugs, but straight away came back without them as I was afraid he might fall off. I called Julie, one of the nurses, and asked her to put the phone on silent for a couple of minutes. By the time I’d fetched the drugs, Démon had managed to manoeuvre himself into a slightly more upright position.

As Julie held him, she said:

‘Monsieur Gimone wanted it to be you, that was why he waited, he said that if anything needed to be done it had to be you.’

‘If anything needed to be done? He told me that he’d stopped eating, that it was the end.’

Silence. Should I examine him? Yes of course I should take the time to examine him.

Even in the midst of all that chaos.

So we got Démon up on his paws. He was wobbly, but he managed to stand up. He was panting. But his mucous membranes were pink. His abdomen was sagging, as though distended with liquid. I pierced it with my needle, the one that I’d been going to use to put him to sleep. No blood. I tried again. Still no blood. Fat. I did proprioceptive tests, to rule out any neurological disorder. Excellent. I pinched his loin muscles hard. He fell over. His blood count was normal. His tumour hadn’t bled.

Indecision.

I put the anaesthetic drugs down, picked up the anti-inflammatories: an intravenous injection, since the catheter was in place.

‘I’ll give him till tonight. Don’t tell Monsieur Gimone. If he gets up on his feet, I’ll keep an eye on him.’

Julie smiled, and helped me to carry Démon to the small courtyard behind the surgery.

Hours passed, and Démon didn’t get up. Worn out by the day, I didn’t pay too much attention to him, just giving him a quick glance now and then on my way to the kennels. He wasn’t moving, just lying on his front with his proud head held high, alert, panting.

I gave my colleagues a brief rundown: ‘I didn’t put Démon to sleep, I think he was suffering from severe arthritic pain.’

They signalled their approval without a word, smiling in acknowledgement of the unlikeliness of the story. They run on hope, like I do.

‘Hold off on banking Monsieur Gimone’s cheque, let’s wait till tomorrow!’

*

It was 7.30 that evening, and I was wrapping up the appointments while one nurse did the accounts and another flung the doors open to tackle the cleaning. And then there was a shout:

‘Hey, that’s your Beauceron! He’s got out!’

One of my colleagues was just back from a visit. He was turning the ignition off when he caught sight of the old dog that was now returning our stares from the waste ground behind the surgery. My colleague laughed out loud. It hadn’t even occurred to me to tie Démon up. It took me 30 metres to catch up with him; he wouldn’t let me get close.

My colleague was creased up: ‘Now you’ll have to call old Gimone!’

He’d be happy, of course he would. But I felt a bit shabby all the same, because I hadn’t honoured the agreement I had with my client, because I’d lied to him, because … because the old boy had been at home crying since that morning. Since the day before, probably.

There was a lump in my throat. I didn’t really know what I was going to say. I concocted a few phrases. The ringing tone stopped as someone picked up. A woman’s voice, very elderly.

‘Madame Gimone?’

‘Yes?’

‘Hello, this is Sylvain, the vet. I’m calling about … about something odd that’s happened. I’m calling because this morning your husband brought Démon in for me to put him down, and then he left again straight away, and now it turns out that, um … well, Démon’s got better, he’s just eaten, and he’s run around a bit.’

‘Wait, I’ll get my husband!’

I’d said it all very quickly, so she wouldn’t have a chance to interrupt.

‘Roger, it’s the vet, he says Démon’s been running around, that he’s been eating!’

I waited for a moment, feeling a bit emotional, a bit of an idiot, and rather pleased with myself.

‘Hello, yes?’

‘It’s Sylvain. I’m calling because … this morning, after you left, Julie told me that you wanted me to examine Démon, and I hadn’t done that, so I did, and, well, um, it’s not his cancer that’s the cause of the trouble, it’s his arthritis. He was in a lot of pain.’

‘Démon’s in pain?’

‘Not now, not much, I’ve given him some injections, and now he’s better – I mean I haven’t cured his cancer, but he’s feeling better, he’s managed to eat, and he even tried to run away.’

‘To run away? Démon?’

Incredulity.

‘Errrm … yes, we’d forgotten to shut the doors, but I caught him. I had to run after him.’

‘He had to run after him!’ He was shouting now.

Then he spoke into the receiver again:

‘And he’s eaten?’

‘Yes, he’s had a bowl of food, and a drink, and a pee, and, well, there you are, I’m very sorry, I didn’t want to call you earlier as I didn’t want to raise your hopes, just in case it didn’t work out.’

‘And he can come home?’

‘Yes, with some pills, yes. Because, well, he’s still got cancer, but it’s like it was before: since the bleeding stopped a year ago he could go on for another day, or another week, or another six months.’

*

Monsieur Gimone came back to collect his dog.

He thanked me, in tears, grumbling as always about the cost of the medication, saying that living was no cheaper than dying.

Then he shook my hand, holding it in his for a long time.

*

If it hadn’t been for the nurse, Démon would have been put to sleep.

Pirate

A woman of about 30 comes into the surgery. She looks confused and a little embarrassed.

She’s elegantly dressed in a short skirt and blouse, her long hair is immaculately styled, and she’s carrying a shoebox.

‘Excuse me, I have an appointment for, um …’

‘Yes, for the rat? No problem, follow me.’

I take the lid off the box and pick up the creature. A fine large variegated male, a nice old boy. I hold him under his shoulders, my thumb and first finger around his thorax, his back paws dangling. His long tail gyrates while his nose quivers on a level with mine. He makes vague efforts to get away by pushing with his front paws. One of his eyes is punctured. Blood has seeped under the socket and coagulated. He’s cleaned some of it away.

‘Um, I … It’s not my rat. It belongs to my neighbour’s son. He came round to my house just now with the creature in his hands. He’s eight. His father had told him that if he wanted to make it better he should take it to the woods and let it go.’

*

The bastard.

He’s not the first. One day a little girl of six came running in with her hamster, all on her own. The hamster was dying. I was obliged to have a consultation with a six-year-old child, explain to her that her hamster was certainly going to die, try all the same to save it because I couldn’t just let it die, talk to her about death. Tell her that we would give it an injection to stop the pain, and then let it slip away. Dither between hollow and inaccurate clichés – ‘It’ll go to sleep’ – and the blunt truth for which I would have to accept the consequences. Was it my job to explain to a six-year-old child that no, the vet couldn’t save her hamster, that he couldn’t even suggest anything except killing it? To explain to her about death?

Anyway, so I made her a sweet little coffin for her hamster, from a small cardboard box for antibiotics.

To make matters worse she insisted on paying, holding out her pocket money, a heap of small change. I told her that in this surgery it was grown-ups who paid. I wasn’t going to let her father off the hook.

*

As I listen to this woman, I’m shaking with anger. She notices, says she’s sorry. I tell her I’m sorry, quickly tell her the story of the little girl and the hamster.

‘You know I’m happy to pay, I mean it’s not my rat, he’s not even my son, but please don’t send the bill to his father …’

*

So I decide to do everything I can, which shouldn’t cost too much. A rat shouldn’t suffer too badly from losing an eye. Anyway, it seems blithely unconcerned, wriggling about and running up and down my arm, not exactly what you’d call disabled. She’ll come back for it tonight.

We keep it, clean it up, put it in a gauze-lined cage to sleep, take time to give it a proper clean-up – and I’m not convinced that any of this is justified. Antibiotics. A dressing, a bandage over its eye and round its head. It looks like a pirate.

As for the bill, she can pay as much or as little as she wants. Whatever. The rat will be just fine, anyway.

Midnight

The cow is jammed between a barrier and the wall of an old building off the cowshed where there’s a stone feeding trough and a gnarled wooden manger. A thick carpet of fresh straw, light from two big yellow bulbs. It’s warm, hot almost. Somewhere in one of the hay bales a kitten mews. The blonde cow has been straining for hours, but to no avail, a fine large cow that has seen other births and that shouldn’t need any help. What will I find this time? There’s no let-up between calvings, all of them different, constant, relentless and exhausting. There won’t be any rest for a few weeks yet, not until the season’s over.

I’m inside the softness of a cow’s birth canal again, silent, too tired to talk. I might have made a bit of small talk on auto-pilot, but my head’s somewhere else, at the end of my arm, at the tips of my fingers as they explore the vagina and then the cervix, while the cow starts to strain again. I’m not really concentrating, just confident and relaxed. I enjoy calving on this farm. And in any case, with a pelvis like this it hardly matters what’s inside, it will emerge in the natural way. I’d put money on a uterine torsion, a twisting of the uterus that’s not uncommon in cows.

I push my arm in deeper and turn my hand anti-clockwise until it’s resting on the calf ’s head, still enveloped in the placental membranes. It’s alive, I’ve got a good hold, this should be quick. The uterus, with its hundreds of litres of calf, mucus and damp membranes, suspended by two ligaments that are too lax, has spun on itself. The twisted uterus is constricting the birth passage and preventing the calf from passing through it, but by a stroke of luck the cervix seems to be dilated.

The mother pants and pushes, twists her body and stamps her hooves; the farmer holds her tail while I lay my hand quite flat on the calf ’s neck. Its mother must weigh 700 kilos. Luckily I’m tall.

It’s a knack you learn that becomes habitual, a powerful, continuous movement that culminates in a final push, using the combined strength of your arm and your back. Sometimes for a moment, as now, sometimes for ten minutes or so. With one last rocking movement the calf is facing down the birth canal, feet down and head between its front legs; I rupture the sac and allow the fluids to flow with the contractions. The cervix is well dilated, the canal is very wide, I’m guessing the calf ’s a female, a good size but not too big. She’ll pass through.

My hands are on her cannon bones and I can feel her trembling, tiny spasms as though she were shaking her head. No time to lose. Gently, powerfully, I pull the little hooves towards the vulva, damp yellow and ivory against the slippery coat, with a sickly sweet smell. A little blood and a lot of amniotic fluid on my overalls and all down my arms. It’s fine, it’s warm, I feel good, so good, here, holding this newborn in position while the farmer runs to fetch the calving ropes that I wrap around her legs. It’s a good hold. He positions the calving jack, while I very slowly pass the neck of the uterus over the newborn’s head. The hooves have now emerged, and I suspend myself from the ropes, my body completely straight, my feet wedged in the straw between the cow’s hind legs. I imagine I’m holding the strings of a kite, effortlessly, my head 70 centimetres from the ground and nearly horizontal, pulling downwards and backwards, in time with the mother’s contractions.

Above me, barely a metre away from my eyes, I can see the lips of the vulva spreading to reveal the tip of a tongue, then a wet nose and a muzzle covered in mucus, eyes, a forehead, ears … The farmer hurries to position the jack, but there’s no need, the calf is being drawn out by the traction of my weight, as I bend my legs a little to stop myself from falling over.

Out come the shoulders, then the thorax. The farmer has left the jack in the straw and is getting ready to hold the calf ’s hind legs, while I kneel to receive the newborn. She breathes in, exhales a damp and mucous breath, and shakes her head as we hang her upside down to expel the last of the mucus. Her mother moans and lows, calls her and looks over her shoulder at these two bipeds tending to her calf.

One last descent into the birth canal, empty now: a little blood, a cervix in perfect condition, a soft vagina with no tears, no damage to arteries. After a last look once we’ve cleaned up, I can go home to bed. The calf is already trying to stand up, her mother dribbles and froths as she licks her in a trance, watching us out of the corner of her eye while the farm dogs curl up on their straw bed behind the wall. An owl hoots. In the feeding trough the kitten mews again. The calves are nearly all asleep; two of them follow me with their great cow eyes. Time for bed.

Barter

I