Run for Your Life

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Joe always wanted Comet checked for one thing or the other. He was waiting for his turn in the exam room with Comet on his lap. Comet was a young Whippet. There was not an ounce of fat on his entire body. I could about define every muscle on him, just looking.

“What’s up with Comet today,” I asked as Joe placed him carefully on the exam table?

“I have been reading about heartworms, Doc,” Joe said. “I thought maybe I better have you check Comet and get him on some medication.”

“We have just completed a statewide heartworm survey,” I said. “One of the drug companies paid for it. Most of the clinics in the state collected blood samples from 100 dogs. They ran all those samples, and they say we have about a two percent incidence of heartworms in native Oregon dogs.” 

“That doesn’t sound like it is too serious,” Joe said. 

“Not too serious at this point, but they claim that is pretty standard for how heartworms invade an area. It will be in low numbers for several years, and then all of a sudden, it is a major problem.”

“Well, even if it is a low-risk thing, I think I want to get Comet on some medication,” Joe said. “You know how I am about him. He means as much to me as any of the kids.”

“I know, Joe, you have him with you all the time,” I said. “The kids come and go.”

“Now, don’t you tell my wife that I said that. She would be upset with me,” Joe said.

“Let me get a blood sample from Comet, and we will see if we can get him on some medication,” I said. “This new drug, Ivomectin, is a little bit of a problem with Greyhounds and Whippets. But the dose used for heartworm prevention is low enough that it is not an issue.”

“Whatever you think, Doc,” Joe said. 

“The risk of the medication causing a problem is very small, Joe. But then, the risk of infection is also minimal. At this point, where you live out on a hillside with few neighbors, I think it is your call.”

“That hillside is one of my concerns,” Joe said. “We are getting into quite a coyote problem. They are getting so brave that they come right down into the yard and bother Comet. I don’t him catching anything from them.”

Comet tested negative for heartworms, and we started him on a new preventative medication. 

“You give him one of these tablets once a month,” I said. “Try to give it on the same day of the month, but you have a few days leeway if you forget.”

It was several months later when Joe returned to the clinic. He was distraught, and his body odor told that he had not bathed in several days.

“Doc, Comet is gone,” Joe said as he leaned hard on the counter, tears welled up in his eyes. “Those coyotes ate him, I am sure.”

“What happened,” I asked?

“Three of those damn coyotes came into the yard and started to attack Comet. Before I could do anything, Comet took off like a shot. You know those Whippets can run. The coyotes were right on his tail.”

“I doubt that those coyotes could catch Comet. I know of ranchers in Colorado who keep Greyhounds to hunt coyotes. Those Greyhounds just run them down.”

“Maybe a half-hour after they left the yard, the whole pack of coyotes were yipping up a storm. I am sure they got him. And he hasn’t been home, and that was four days ago. I don’t know what I am going to do without him.”

“Joe, you need to go home and take care of yourself. Take a shower and get cleaned up. Maybe have the kids help you build a little memorial in the yard of Comet. Then go out for a good dinner. Comet would want you to have a normal life.”

“Yes, you are probably right, Doc,” Joe said. “I brought this package of pills back. I only used a few, and maybe you can give them to someone who doesn’t have the money to afford them.”

“We are not supposed to do that, but we keep a few things in the cabinet, just for such a client.”

“That poor man,” Sandy said after Joe left. “That dog was his whole life.”

“He will be okay,” I said. “It will just take a little time and some diversion.”

It was only a few days later when Joe exploded through the door. Exuberant, he had a smile from ear to ear. He had combed his hair, and he was well dressed.

“Doc, I want to thank you for your advice,” Joe said.

“You look happy,” I said.

“Let me tell you the story,” Joe said. “I went home the other day and tried to take your advice, but I couldn’t get myself up to it. I laid around another couple of days. Finally, I looked at the yard, and boy, it needed to be mowed. So I went out and started the lawnmower, mowed the yard, and then I took the boys down to Hoy’s Hardware to buy stuff for a memorial. And what do you know, when we got home, there was Comet, sitting in the middle of the driveway, waiting for us. I was so happy. I almost ran the pickup into the house.”

“That is great news,” I said. “I bet that Comet ran so fast and so far that he didn’t know the way home. When you started the lawnmower, you probably gave him some bearings on how to get home. I didn’t think a coyote could catch him.”

“You are probably correct,” Joe said. “This time of the year, I mow the lawn at least once a week, maybe twice, if I get bored. So Comet would know the sound for sure.”

“I would give you those pills back, but I gave them to an old guy this morning,” I said with a smile on my face.

“That’s okay. I will gladly buy some more,” Joe said.

“No,” I laughed. “I will grab them for you. I was pulling your leg a little.”

Photo by Mitchell Orr on Unsplash

The Lost Ball

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“I don’t know what is wrong with old Ben, Doc,” Gavin said as he picked his dog up and settled him on the exam table. “He started vomiting once in a while several weeks ago. I just didn’t think much about it. But now, he vomits everything he puts in his mouth. He takes a drink and turns around pukes it up.”

“Let’s give him a good once over, and then we will talk about what diagnostics we need to do,” I said.

Ben had obviously lost a lot of weight since I had looked at him, but everything else was pretty unremarkable.

“How long has he been vomiting, Gavin,” I asked?

“I said several weeks, Doc. But you know how time slips away. It could have been longer. I never noticed how thin he was until just now.”

I stood him up, but Ben was a little reluctant to remain standing. Finally, with Gavin holding him under his chest, I started carefully palpating his abdomen. He was thin enough, I could just about define every structure in his belly. 

The mass just sort of jumped into my hand as I palpated his mid-abdomen. Small, round, and solid, it was the perfect size to obstruct the small intestines. 

“Does he chew on rocks or anything like that,” I asked?

“No, he doesn’t do much of anything anymore. He is getting pretty stove up. He does retrieve my golf balls when I am chipping in the back yard.”

“Golf balls,” I said as I felt the mass again. “Have you lost any of those balls?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Doc. I really don’t keep track of them. Do you think that is his problem?”

“I can feel a solid round mass in the middle of his small intestines,” I said. “It is of the size that it could be a golf ball. It could be a tumor or something else.”

“What do you think we should do,” Gavin asked?

“We could send in some blood and get some x-rays to try to define the object. Or we could just do exploratory surgery. We can fix it, or it may be something that we can’t do anything about. Really, the only way to know is to go in and look.”

“Are you saying it could be cancer?”

“Could be, but I would bet on the golf ball. It was probably rolling around his stomach for a few weeks causing him to vomit. Then in the last day or two, it started down the small intestine. That is when the vomiting really got going. If it is the ball, it is a simple fix. If it is a tumor, we can probably take it out, and then it just depends on what type of tumor it is.”

“Let’s just do the surgery,” Gavin said. “When can you do it?”

“I think we can do it the first thing in the morning. We will give him some fluids overnight and get him started on some antibiotics. If everything goes well, he should be able to go home the following day.”

“Do we have any special care,” Gavin asked?

“Not much. We will keep him on fluids and nothing by mouth for 24 hours. Then he will be on a soft slurry of a diet for a week.”

The surgery went well. Finding the foreign body was not an issue. There was virtually no fat in the omentum or anywhere else in the abdomen, for that matter. Ben has had this problem for a lot longer than Gavin had recognized. I explored the intestine’s entire length and palpated the stomach for any trace of another foreign body. None was found.

When I opened the intestine and squeezed a well-worn golf ball from its lumen, it was apparent that it had been in the stomach for some time. The cover of the golf ball had lost most of its dimples.

I closed the intestinal incision, rinsed the area well, and replaced everything into the abdomen. I closed the abdominal incisions, and we recovered Ben.

Ben felt immediately better on recovered. I think he was looking for a steak dinner. “That’s okay, Ben,” I said. “We will give you some liquid steak tomorrow morning.”

When we placed a small bowl of water in Ben’s kennel in the morning, you would have thought that he had been in the desert for a week. It just disappeared. Then we followed with a small bit of dog food mixed to a slurry. Ben lapped that down and was wagging his tail for more.

Ben was bouncing around when Gavin came to pick him up. He was ready to go after having several small meals of slurry.

“He is doing well,” I said. “He is acting like he hasn’t eaten in a month. And that may have been close to the case.”

“He sure looks better. Thanks, Doc,” Gavin said.

I tossed Gavin the golf ball in a small plastic bag.

“It looks like it has been in his stomach for some time,” I said. “You want to keep it in that bag or air it out outside. It smells pretty bad. And you know the rules. It is a stroke and distance for a lost ball.”

“I think that Ben’s golf ball retrieving is over,” Gavin said as they headed out the door.

It was a couple of weeks later when Gavin brought Ben in for suture removal. Ben was a completely different dog. He had gained at least 10 pounds. You could still feel his ribs, but they were not visible, just looking for him.

“He is back better than he has been for a long time,” Gavin said. “That golf ball must have been in there for months.”

“Yes, as long as it was just bouncing around in his stomach, it was only causing him some vomiting. When it entered his intestines is when it caused him some major problems.”

We removed the sutures and patted Ben on the head as I sat him on the floor. He was straining at the leash to get out the door. 

“They never give me any credit,” I said as Gavin was being pulled along toward the door. “They just know this is not a pleasant place to be for any amount of time.”

Photo by Siddharth Narasimhan on Unsplash

The Plank Road, My First Job

D. E. Larsen, DVM

We had moved to a small (160 acres) farm up the river from Broadbent in December of 1949. There was a lot of snow that winter. We probably had a foot of snow on the ground that January. That was unusual for Southwestern Oregon. With 2 older brothers, I learned every corner of the farm, exploring the hill in the snow.

I learned when a grouse is roasted over an open fire, you don’t want to eat too close to the bone. Drinking from a bubbling brook was a new experience for me. Finding a long dead sheep in the same stream a short distance up the hill taught me to drink upstream from the herd.

By the spring of 1950, I was a hardy 5-year-old farm boy. Left at home by myself and Mom while the other kids were in school, I was allowed to roam the farm’s lower reaches by myself. I was not supposed to go to the creek, and I could not cross the road to the fields by the river.

That spring, I acquired a new job. I became the construction supervisor of the plank road going to the mill being built up the creek. In those days, they often would build a small mill at the timber source, harvest the timber, and saw the lumber right there. When the job was done, they would pull the mill’s hardware and move to the next location.

  The creek road was gravel, but the lower road that crossed the field was a plank road. This road was being built along the fence on the neighbor’s place. I could scurry across that fence in a flash.

Ernie Bryant was building the road. He was a friend of my folks. They had been in school together, years ago. 

Ernie knew who I was before I introduced myself. I had him explain everything he was doing on that first day. I wanted to know everything if I was going to be supervising the rest of the job.  

Ernie laid out two parallel rows of railroad ties, staggered, so the joints between the ties were never lined up with the opposite joint. Then he would lay the large planks across the ties. These planks were large, rough-cut planks, probably 3 by 12 inches. Ernie nailed the planks down with large nails that looked about 6 inches long. The planks were 8 feet long. They extended out from the railroad ties about a foot on each side. I am sure the work was hard. Ernie built the entire plank road by himself.

Most of the time, Ernie showed up at 8:00 AM. That gave me plenty of time to see the brothers and sister off to the school bus and finish breakfast. The first day I didn’t pack a lunch and had to run back to the house when Ernie stopped to eat his lunch. 

After that first day, I always showed up with my lunch in a paper sack and a thermos of milk. I stowed these in the old stump on the fence line. This was an old cedar stump with a rather large cedar tree growing out of its center. All the time after that first day, I would sit and eat my lunch with Ernie. We would discuss the progress we expected to make on the road in the coming afternoon during lunch. Sometimes we would talk about Mom in her school days so many years before. After lunch, I would stand partway around the stump as Ernie and I would pee on the stump.

One morning when the plank road was getting close to the gravel road, I showed up at 8:00 AM, and Ernie was not there. I had learned from my Grandfather and Uncle Ern that to be late for anything was terrible and to be late for work was the worst thing you could do on a job. 

I sat down on the ground by the stump. I would sit on the plank road, but the planks were very rough, and I thought it would probably give me splinters in my butt. I had had splinters in my hands before. I didn’t want Mom to be digging a splinter out of my butt with one of her sewing needles.

Finally, Ernie came driving up the plank road. I stood up and greeted him as he came to a stop and got out of his pickup.

“You’re late for work,” I said. “My Grandpa says you should never show up late for work.”

“I bet you have a time clock in that pocket of yours,” he replied with a smile on his face. “I figure that if I work hard today that I could finish this road. Then you are not going to have anything to do.”

Ernie was right. This had been a fun couple of weeks. I had not thought about the fact the job would be over one day.

“I have lots of stuff to do,” I replied. “One of these days, I was going to convince Mom that I am big enough to fish in the creek by myself.”

Ernie finished the plank road that afternoon. He was picking up his tools when I came running down the road with a small bag of the large spikes that had been left on the old cedar stump. Ernie finished, reached in his pocket, and pulled out his wallet. He handed me two dollars.

“Here you go, young man. I appreciate all your help. We will have trucks using this road next week. You make sure you stay out of their way,” he said as he handed me the two bills.

Two dollars was a small fortune to a 5-year-old in 1950. I had nickels and dimes before, but I don’t think I ever had a dollar bill, let alone 2 of them. Ernie was driving down the plank road on his way home when I scrambled across the fence. I stopped and returned to retrieve my lunch sack and thermos from the stump. Then I was off again to show Mom that I was a rich young man.

Photo by Antranias on Pixabay.