Rambo and the Eagle, From the Archives

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Walking down the fifth fairway at Pineway, I was relieved that I could see ball. 

“At least I am not in the ditch,” I said to Jim as we parted toward our respective balls.

Dr. French had always told me that the if you are paying attention to your practice, you will never have the time to be a good golfer. I could see his point, I took Thursday afternoon off to play with the Pineway Men’s Club and most of the time with a group or two once on the weekend. But I really felt that athletes are born, not made. Of course, with work and coaching, we could improve and reach our potential, but some guys are just born with a ball in their hands. We all knew them, they were stars in little league, and they excelled on the basket ball court. They are the ones who didn’t go out for football until they were seniors, and they made all league. The coach always tries to take the credit, but it is just the way it is.

And my slice was a good illustration. I could beat just about anyone on any one hole. But I could never hold my concentration for the next hole.

I got to my ball, it was in the short rough, about a foot from the ditch that ran down the right side of the fairway. It was a position I knew well. I could reach the green from this position on this short 5 par hole. This position actually set me up well with my ball flight. There was a slight dogleg to the the left, with my slice, I liked to call it a fade, I could start my ball left of the hole and it would run up the front apron to the green. I just needed to fade the ball, not slice it.

As I addressed the ball, I caught sight of Jack Wright’s cart starting down the eighth fairway. Rambo, his little poodle mix, always rode on the back of the seat in Jack’s cart. Rambo had already spotted me. I could hear him throwing a fit from two fairways over. 

Jack loved it, and here he came in his cart with Rambo barking up a storm over his shoulder. Just what I needed to hold my concentration on this shot.

“Good morning, Doc,” Jack said over Rambo constant barking, louder now that they were parked just across the ditch. “How is your game this morning?”

“It has been pretty good so far,” I said. “With a little luck, I will reach this green in two.”

“Rambo spotted you and wanted to say hi,” Jack said with laugh. “I think you are the only person he knows on this entire course.”

“Yes, I notice that almost every Thursday,” I said. “I don’t know what the problem is, I have never done anything to him other than his shots and stuff.”

Jack chuckled again, “He just wants you to know what he thinks of you.”

“Well, I guess it is good to be loved by my patients,” I said.

“I’ll let you get back to your game, good luck, and fly that ball right at the stick for a change,” Jack said as he turned the cart and headed back to his fairway. Rambo on the back of the cart, facing me and barking as loud as he could.

I addressed the ball again, trying to think what it was that I had done to Rambo to make dislike me so much. Then trying to brush that thought away, I took a deep breath and started my back swing.

I swung with all my strength, and caught the ball perfectly. The ball seemed to hang on the club face briefly, then sprang into a high flight. This was my Ping 5 wood, my favorite club. Probably because I could hit the ball straighter with it than any of my other woods.

The ball started out on a line about 10 yards left of the green and then started to fade to the right. Then the fade became a slice and it was struck hard enough that distance was going to be more than usual for this club. I held my breath and leaned to the left, as if to guide the ball a little.

The green ran on a diagonal left to right and the hole was cut in the far back corner. I had hoped to land in the fairway and run the ball up on the green but this ball was going much more to the right than I had hoped. Then it came down, and stuck on back edge of the green, maybe 10 feet from the hole.

I perfect shot and it surprised everyone, including myself. “Maybe I should talk with Rambo more often,” I said to myself as I picked up my bag and started toward the green.

Bruce West was coming down the sixth fairway. He pointed at the ball near the pin and asked, “Whose ball is that?”

Jim pointed at me, “Larsen’s, good shot, don’t you think?”

“If he makes the putt,” Bruce replied.

I could still hear Rambo barking as I walked up on the green. He was out of the cart and standing under the trees over by the eighth green, only thirty yards away. He pounded his front feet with each bark in a little bounce, just to add emphasis to his distaste.

Jack had loaded him up and headed to the ninth tee box just as I addressed my putt. I was relieved that the barking was fading off in the distance. 

One small breath, and I stroked the putt, straight putt, right to the bottom of the hole. “Take that Bruce,” I said as I stepped quickly to hole to retrieve the ball.

Eagles were rare birds for me on the golf course.

Photo Credit: Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels

Piper’s Problem 

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Piper, a small black and white Springer Spaniel, had been a frequent visitor to the clinic since I opened the doors. Grace, her owner, seemed to keep Piper pregnant as much as possible. Grace didn’t operate a puppy mill, but she did use Piper to supplement her income. The good thing about her relationship with Piper was she looked after her well-being and medical care.

Piper was seated on the exam table when I entered the room. She was usually standing and wagging her tail. 

“What’s up with Piper today?” I asked Grace will I patted Piper’s head.

“She is nursing a litter of six puppies this time,” Grace said. “They are almost two weeks old and starting to get active. I noticed that Piper was cross with the puppies this morning, and you know, that’s not like her. So when I got to looking, she had a breast that was swollen and hot to the touch. And this afternoon, it is discolored.”

Looking at the record, Piper’s temperature was a hundred and five. I rolled her over on the exam table. She laid there with her hind legs splayed out. I rubbed her belly, and she wagged her tail a bit. I ran my hand down her breasts on the left side, and there was no response. When I did the same thing on the right side, Piper growled as I got to her last breast between her legs. This was entirely out of character for Piper.

I rolled Piper to her left side so I could see the lateral surface of her breast. It was swollen and dark purple on most of the lateral surface, and there was an area the size of a quarter that was dark purple, almost black, and bulging.

“It looks like Piper is cooking a pretty good mastitis in this right inguinal breast,” I said.

“Yes, I see it now, and for her to growl at you like that, it must be pretty painful,” Grace said. “What do we need to do for her?”

Mastitis in the dog runs a pretty typical course,” I said. “We need to get her on some antibiotics and pain medication first off. But this breast will rupture and drain a bunch of bloody pus.”

“Oh! That sounds terrible,” Grace said. “Can we prevent that from happening?”

“Sometimes, in the early stages, we might be able to head off a rupture of the breast,” I said. “But when we have a dark, bulging spot like we see on Piper’s breast, in ninety-five percent of the cases, it is just going to rupture.”

“Are the puppies going to be okay if that breaks open?” Grace asked.

“Actually, the best way to manage this is for me to sedate Piper and open this breast and flush it out,” I said. “That way, it will be a little cleaner for the pups.”

“But, what if it heals without breaking open?” Grace asked.

“I want to be honest here,” I said. “This is going to break open, period. If we put her on antibiotics and some anti-inflammatories, we will make things more comfortable for her. But in the dog, most mastitis cases resolve with a rupture of the involved breast unless they are treated very early in the course of the disease.”

“Let’s put her on some medication,” Grace said. “I will watch it close, and maybe we will get lucky.”

So Piper went out the door on medication and with a hope and a prayer.

“Why don’t they listen to what you tell them?” Dixie asked after Grace and Piper were gone.

“I made the mistake of giving Grace odds,” I said. “If you tell someone there is a five percent chance of complications with a treatment, they will think it will never happen to them. But tell them there is only a five percent chance that the results will be favorable, and they will believe they will be the lucky ones. With mastitis in the dog, they never believe that the breast will burst if they haven’t been through it before.”

“So what’s going to happen when it breaks?” Dixie asked.

“My bet is she will call at three in the morning, hysterical over the mess and wanting Piper looked at right away,” I said.

“And I suppose you will do it,” Dixie said.

“I will try to convince her that she should wait until the morning, but I will probably end up looking at Piper early,” I said. “Money won’t be an object then.” 

***

When the phone rang the second time, I looked at the clock, four in the morning. I rolled over and looked at Sandy.

“Piper’s breast just exploded,” I said.

“How do you know that,” Sandy said.

I picked up the phone, “This is Doctor Larsen. How are you this morning, Grace,” I said.

“Oh! Doctor Larsen, you knew I would be calling,” Grace said. “Piper’s breast exploded sometime during the night, and bloody pus is everywhere in her box. I have the puppies all cleaned up, but can you look at Piper now, please.”

“I can look at her, but it will be a whole lot cheaper if you wait until eight,” I said. “And, it will be safer for Piper if I have some help. She will be fine. Just separate the puppies from her.”

“Are you sure?” Grace said. “It looks like it is still draining some bloody stuff.”

“As long as it is not bleeding bright red blood, she will be fine,” I said. “This is how nature solves the problem in the dog. I will clean the wound, remove dead tissue, and pack it with antibiotics. But, I will likely leave that wound open. It will heal better that way.”

“I guess I can wait until eight if it is safer for Piper,” Grace said. “I was hoping that you could close that ugly hole.”

“The problem, Grace, if we close that hole, we might trap some bugs and dead tissue in there,” I said. “Then it will just abscess again. By leaving it open, we can make sure that it will heal from the inside out. Sometimes, I can do a partial closure and place a drain. It depends on how it looks, but puppies tend to pull those drains out or break them off.”

“Okay, I will have Piper at your front door at eight,” Grace said. “I hope we won’t have to wait long.”

“The girls will be checking in a few morning surgeries, but we will bring Piper right back to the exam room,” I said. “I will want to get her taken care of first thing in the morning. She should be able to go home by noon or so.”

“Are the puppies going to be okay?” Grace asked. “I mean, can they be away from Piper that long?”

“They won’t think so, but they will be fine,” I said. “I will discuss some feeding changes for the pups when we see you in the morning.”

Grace was waiting at the door when I pulled into the parking lot at quarter till eight.

Grace’s hair was uncombed, and I think her blouse was on the wrong side out. But Piper was wagging her tail, obviously feeling better following the rupture of her abscessed breast.

“I’m sorry, Doctor Larsen, I’m a mess this morning,” Grace said. “I have been up with Piper since I called last night, and I am worried to death.”

“Piper is looking chipper,” I said. “Once that abscessed breast broke open, she probably started feeling better right away.”

“Yes, I realize that now,” Grace said. “I wish I had listened to you in the first place, then none of this stress would have happened.”

“That’s all behind us now,” I said. “If you can leave Piper with us now, we will sedate her briefly, just enough to allow us to flush this breast out and get all the dead tissue out of there. She will heal fine, and this hole will shrivel up in a few days, and Piper will act like nothing ever happened.”

“So you don’t want to close that ugly hole?” Grace asked. 

“It will heal much better and much quicker if we leave it open,” I said. “Remember, you wished you had listened to me before.”

“What should I do with the puppies?” Grace asked.

“When Piper goes home, I think you can put the puppies back with her,” I said. “You might want to start supplementing the pups with a weaning formula. Just mix it up, put it in a low bowl like a pie pan, and let them wallow through it. They will get more on them than into them at first, but if you start doing that now, they will be ready to wean much earlier, and they won’t be after Piper to nurse them all the time.”

“Is this breast going to return to function?” Grace asked.

“I don’t think so, but it won’t be much of a bother to her. She has many others,” I said. “She has had quite a few litters. It might be time to think about getting her spayed.”

Grace looked at Piper for a moment. “Yes, you are probably right. She has been such a good mom, but she deserves some quiet time now. She doesn’t have to be like my grandmother and die pregnant at forty-eight.”

“Some people don’t have that history to fall back on,” I said. “We are only a couple of generations away from very different times in the lives of women. And many dogs are still living in those times. Once Piper is healed up and the puppies are weaned, we should schedule her for some surgery. I will put a reminder in your file.”

We sedated Piper and flushed out a lot of pus and chunks of dead mammary tissue from the open wound on the side of her breast. After cleaning things up, I instilled some antibiotic powder into the wound.

We sent Piper home at noon. She was dancing on the floor when she saw Grace. 

“Let me look at this next week and call if you have any concerns about the puppies,” I said as Grace was being pulled out the door by Piper.

***

On her recheck, the breast was almost completely healed with only a tiny area of scab where the large gaping hole had been the week before.

“The puppies are doing great,” Grace said. “I wish that I had supplemented all her litters like I did this one. The pups are happier, and Piper actually gets some time to rest.”

True to her word, Grace presented Piper for a spay as soon as the pups were weaned and her breasts were back to normal.

Photo by Rubinstein Rebello on Pexels.

The Dreaded F

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Many people probably go through their school years without ever receiving a failing grade. In my twenty years of school, I had three failing grades.

I started early. My first F was given on a page of a writing book in the second grade.

Mrs. Yokum was a vial woman, in my view. She pulled my hair on more than one occasion, and paddling boys with a book seemed to be her hobby. To my knowledge, she never paddled a girl, and I think there was some discrimination there.

“On this page, I want you to practice your letters, staying within the lines and making your letters like the ones at the top of the page,” Mrs. Yokum said as she explained the assignment. These were new writing booklets, and we were reminded often of how lucky we were to have them. “And on this page, I want you to skip a line before starting a new line.”

That was simple enough, but if these were such precious booklets, why waste all that paper by skipping a line. Besides, I could use every line and still get it done with the other kids.

We were at the writing table. The entire second-grade class, all eight of us, were lined up on each side of the table. We were busy writing, just like the teacher had instructed. Mrs. Yokum came along behind us and watched over our shoulders.

When she came up behind me, she stopped and leaned over to look at how I had made full use of the page by using every line. She grabbed my hair and yanked my head back and forth several times. I was used to having my head batted by Dad once in a while, and I could duck and avoid those blows most of the time. This old witch cheated and grabbed my hair.

“I told you to skip a line,” Mrs. Yokum almost shouted.

“Yes, but!” I started to say before she pulled me out of my chair by my arm, grabbed my writing book, and hauled me up to her desk.

“I told you to skip a line, and you wrote on every line,” Mrs. Yokum said, still talking in a loud and cross voice. “You need to learn to follow instructions.”

She took her red pencil and put a large red x that covered the entire page. Then she marked the page with a large F.

“Now, take this book back to your desk and wait for the other kids to finish their assignment,” Mrs. Yokum instructed.

I bore those scars for weeks. Well, at least for an hour or two. 

It was several weeks later that we had completed the booklets. We were given the books to take home for our parents to see. On the bus ride home, I tore out that offending page and tossed it out the window. And that was that.

My next F came in the spring quarter of my senior year in high school. It was in my mechanical drawing class. I had straight As in that class, and after three quarters, I had completed the year’s course work. 

“This last quarter, I want you to do a project of a commercial nature,” Mr. Hayes said as he stood in front of my drawing table. “That will give you a glimpse of working for a client and doing a complex project.”

“I have a lot of things going on with the end of the school year,” I said. “Maybe it would be better if I just helped with the other kids in the classroom.”

“The French class needs a cabinet for holding their tapes,” Mr. Hayes said. “I think you would get more out of doing that project than you would by fiddling around in class. You can go up there tomorrow and talk with Mr. Sorenson. You will need to make some notes as to their needs and go from there.”

That sounded simple, but the guy wanted a large complex cabinet with a lazy susan and a lot of drawers. It was more of a project than I wanted to do, and I doubted if the wood shop would be up to making it.

So I made some notes and fiddled with some sketches, and in those last nine weeks of my senior year, I didn’t accomplish must on that project.

Mr. Hayes gave me an F for the quarter. That lowered my semester grade to a C, which came close to preventing me from having an honor cord at graduation. 

Everyone with a three-point grade point average or above was given an honor cord. My final GPA ended up as 3.001. I was the last one on the list to get an honor cord. Mrs. Starr, the senior English teacher and senior advisor had a tear in her eye when she handed me a cord.

My last F was in a History of Western Civilization class when I ventured to Colorado State University in 1964. It resulted from my inexperience in dealing with adding and dropping courses.

I knew from the moment the professor walked out on the stage of the large auditorium classroom that he was a dud. He was dressed to the hilt with a tailored suit and patent leather shoes. He was groomed to be a pretty boy.

Here in a classroom of nearly six hundred students, we were assigned seats. Each of his graduate students was given the task of taking a roll at each lecture. You were marked absent if you were not in your assigned seat at the start of class. Five absences, and you would fail the course.

That wasn’t the worse of it. The guy was a terrible lecturer, and the reading assignments were as dull as they could get. But I endured. Had I known better, I would have dropped the class. 

Then came the first midterm exam. It was an all multiple choice test. I usually do reasonably well on such tests, but this one proved difficult.

The results of the midterm test were disastrous. A full eighty percent of the class failed the midterm. This joker of a professor went ballistic, and he blamed everyone except himself.

“If you jokers don’t want to come to class, that is fine,” the derelict professor says as he throws his attendance book across the stage, with pages flying everywhere. “I don’t care if you never come to class.”

Don’t come to class. I didn’t need to be told twice. That was it for me. Had I been thinking, I would have dropped the course, but I just quit going to the lectures and quit reading. Life was better.

Maybe a month later, I thought I had better drop by the class and see what was happening. Wouldn’t you know, it was the day for the second midterm. I listened to some of the chatter in the hall before going into the class. Apparently, the lectures had not improved.

I sat in the row I had been assigned at the start of the term. I took the midterm.

I was pleasantly surprised when I passed with a low C. Pretty good, I thought, for not doing a thing. The professor was a little more pleasant with the improved results.

“I am going to make a deal with all of you people who failed the first midterm and passed this midterm,” the professor said. “I will give you whatever you get on the final exam as your grade in this class.”

That seemed reasonable, I thought. I might even read a few chapters, but I wasn’t going to listen to this joker. I continued to avoid the lectures.

Even with the deal, I wasn’t smart enough to make an effort in this class. I apparently didn’t do so good on the final. My grade for the course was an F.

After I was out of the Army, I still needed a history class. At Oregon State University, I took American History. A friend told me to just go to the book store and buy one of those plastic study sheets.

“Just learn everything on the study sheet,” Steve said. “It’s only two pages, don’t worry about the lectures. I think this guy does his tests off of these sheets.”

I followed Steve’s suggestion. Committing two pages to memory was no problem for me, and I got an A in that class.

Photo by Yinan Chen on Pixabay.