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.

The Lone Toad

D. E. Larsen, DVM

My eighth-grade year was a significant learning year for me. I had moved from the small community of Broadbent at the end of my seventh grade. We moved to a dairy farm on Catching Creek, outside of the big city of Myrtle Point. I went from a class of 8 kids to an actual junior high school with an eighth grade class of probably 50 kids, taught in two classrooms.

At home, I had a creek to hunt in and a large marsh to learn, first hand, about biodiversity and biomass. This marsh dried to scattered pools in the summer months. These pools teemed with life: catfish, bullfrogs, polliwogs, muskrats, dragonfly larva, and more. And I learned them all.

In the classroom, I found teachers who actually thought I needed to do homework. This was utterly foreign to me. I felt that if I could do well on the tests, I had no need to do the daily work. It had worked well for me up to that time, and I could see no reason for it to be different now.

“I want each of you to pick a topic from the list and write a three-page research paper on that topic,” Mrs. Meyers said. “That means you need to go to the library and find information about the topic and write the paper. And you need to list your references at the end of the paper. I expect everyone to have at least 3 references.”

I raised my hand. “Mrs. Meyers, does the list of references count toward the three pages,” I asked?

“David, you can write more than three pages if you want, but if those references fill the third page, that counts.”

That was all I needed to hear. I would do what I had to do, none of those extra pages stuff for me.

Then, this group of girls in the class wanted to meet at the city library to do the research. And so it was agreed. I am not entirely sure who was all involved, but they were city kids.

For me, a trip to the city library was a big ordeal. My mother dropped me off. I would have to start walking the two miles home that night, and Mom would pick me up. She would plan to be in town at 8:00, so how far I had to walk just depended on when we finished.

Us boys were all seated at a large table in the library. We were working hard on our topics. We each had pulled our 3 reference books and were busy getting information down. I was trying to make sure that I listed as much information on the reference books as possible. My reference list filled half of the last page.

We boys talked in hushed tones, understanding that we were in a public library and not disturbing the other patrons. The girls were in and out of the book racks and not seated at their table. They kept coming to our table and talking a bit before rushing back to the rows of books and jabbering there.

It was not long, and the old lady running the library came by and told us we would have to be quiet. We explained that it was the girls who were making all the noise.

It was not long, and the old lady came by again.

“If you boys and girls can’t do your work quietly, I am going to have to ask you to leave,” The old lady said.

I am not sure that the girls had ever been disciplined in their lives. They didn’t change their conduct one bit.

“Okay, I gave you boys and girls two warnings,” the old lady said. “You are not showing any respect for the others here in the library. I am asking you to gather your stuff and leave now.”

Leave now, I thought, I will have to walk all the way home. We gathered our stuff, and the old lady ushered us out the front door.

There we were, standing on the sidewalk, trying to figure out why we boys got kicked out when we were not the ones making the noise. The girls were still giggling about the whole thing. I don’t think I had ever been kicked out of anything in my entire life. And now I was going to have to walk two miles home, in the dark.

Then the unexpected happened.

“What is that,” Rick asked?

Coming down the sidewalk was the largest and the ugliest toad that I had ever seen. It was close to a bullfrog’s size and had nobs like projections protruding from its head and back.

“That is the biggest toad I have ever seen,” I said.

“I have never seen anything like it,” one of the girls said.

I scooped up the toad to get a better look at it. I had seen a few smaller toads before, but nothing near this size. The toad did not seem afraid at all and sort of nestled in my hand. 

“What are you going to do with him,” one of the noisiest girls asked?

“I think we should put him in the book return and give that old lady a thrill tonight,” I said.

I had noticed that she had retrieved several books earlier when she heard the lid on the book return clank.

“When she hears the lid, she will hurry over to get the book and put it away,” I explained. “Then she will have to spend the rest of the evening getting someone to get the toad out of there.”

And so it was agreed. And I opened the book return lid and carefully placed the toad in the bottom of the bin. I did not slam the cover, but I closed it in a loud enough manner that I was confident the old lady would hear it. 

Then we laughed and scattered, each heading home. I started a slow walk. I wasn’t sure what time it was, but it must have been well before 8:00.

When I reached the bridge on the edge of town that crosses the railroad tracks and the river, I stopped and watched the shack belonging to Shy the Panther. He was the town bum. There were a lot of stories about him. He was said to have got his name from his days as a boxer. There was no activity at the shack this night.

I was lucky. Mom showed up before I was across the bridge.

“Did you get done early,” Mom asked?

“We got kicked out of the library because the girls would not keep quiet,” I said.

“Are you sure it was just the girls making the noise?”

“Pretty sure, but that’s okay. I put a toad in the book return for the old lady who kicked us out,”

“David, you didn’t!” 

“Yes, it was the biggest toad I have ever seen. It just came jumping down the sidewalk. I bet it made that old lady jump when she opened the bin on the inside.”

“I bet,” Mom said with a smile on her face.

In the years following, when I needed a  laugh, I conjured up the image of that night. I pictured a hysterical reaction of that old lady when she retrieved the ‘book’ from the book return. Only to find the poor toad. It was probably unfair to the toad, but a very fitting payback to the old lady.

Photo by Lucas van Oort on Unsplash