Bob had already lifted Rex onto the exam table by the time I entered the exam room. Rex was an Australian Shepherd. At one time, he had been a cow dog, but Bob sold the cows. Now Rex had little to do except to patrol his property.
“Hi, Bob, what brings you and Rex in today?” I asked as I shook hands with Bob.
Rex is really painful this morning,” Bob said. “Something around his head really hurts.”
I raised Rex’s head with my hand under his chin. I could sense a reluctance for him to allow this. I looked close and could only see a slight swelling around his left eye.
Rex pulled away when I reached to feel the area.
“He is really painful, Doc,” Bob said. “He really yipped when I just brushed the side of his face this morning.”
I tried to feel the eye again, Rex recoiled and growled this time. He was not going to tolerate any palpation around the left side of his face.
The pupil of the left eye was constricted to a pinpoint. I instilled a couple of drops of medication to dilate the pupil.
“Do you know of anything that could have injured this eye?” I asked Bob.
“No, he was in the house last night and doing fine,” Bob said. “Then this morning, he is really painful.”
With the pupil dilated, I carefully held Rex by the chin and looked at the back of the eye with my ophthalmoscope. Starting from a distance and then slowly closing in close to his face to avoid alarming him.
It took me a couple of seconds to figure out what I was looking at. Projecting from the back of the eye, near the optic disc (that spot where the optic nerve connects with the retina), was a porcupine quill. It was probably penetrating over a centimeter into the eye.
“Bob, has Rex ever had porcupine quills?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” Bob said. “We had quite a struggle pulling a mouthful of quills out of him a couple of months ago.”
“Will, it looks like you must have missed one,” I said. “It has entered his eye through the back of the eye. This one is for the books. I always hear stories of the quills that are left in the tissues migrating to odd places. But I have never read of one puncturing the eye from behind.”
“Can you get it out?” Bob asked.
“I can’t, and I don’t know if a specialist could or not,” I replied. “Getting to that area behind the eye would be extremely difficult. And after removing the quill, you might lose the eye anyway.”
“I don’t have the cows anymore,” Bob said, “And old Rex doesn’t have much to do. He just lays around the house and chases a stick once in a while. I don’t think a specialist is in the cards for him.”
“I think the best thing to do is to remove this eye,” I said. “He will do fine with one eye. We will get rid of the pain.”
With that, we set up to remove Rex’s left eye. Enucleation of an eye in the dog was relatively straightforward surgery. I incised around the margin of the eyelids and dissected to the surface of the globe behind the conjunctiva. Then working around the globe, I severed the ocular muscle at their attachment to the globe. I was able to keep bleeding to a minimum this way. Finally, ligating the optic stalk and removing the eye. This was complicated just a bit by the presence of the quill.
Once the eye was removed, I closed the dense fascia over the eye socket so the socket would remain smooth, rather than sinking back into the head when the muscles atrophied. The skin was then closed, and if you didn’t look twice, you might not notice the missing eye.
Rex recovered uneventfully and immediately felt better. Opening the eyeball after it was removed, the quill was halfway into the eye. The track was infected, I doubt if the eyeball could have been saved under any circumstances.
Late that afternoon, Rex bounced out of the clinic with Bob and the kids, acting like nothing was wrong.
Mr. Hansen was leaning on the corral fence when I pulled into the barnyard. He had a half dozen young bulls in the corral.
“Doc, I hope you are ready for these guys,” Mr. Hansen said. “They might be a handful.”
“We can handle them quickly with the chute,” I said.
Mr. Hansen, a Norwegian farmer outside of Enumclaw, had called to have these bulls castrated. I had wondered why he didn’t do it when they were small calves.
“You could have done this surgery much easier about 6 months ago,” I said. “This procedure is okay, but if you castrate enough of these guys, you will lose one. It is just the nature of the procedure, we use a tissue crush to control bleeding. That works fine unless a calf has been on clover pasture or has some other clotting disorder.”
“Well, Doc, I do all this stuff by the moon,” Mr. Hansen said. “It is pretty hard to get you guys out here on my schedule sometimes.”
I worked through the bulls with no problems. When I was cleaning up afterward, Mr. Hansen turned the bulls, now steers, out to pasture.
“See, Doc, not a problem one, see how easy it is when you do things by the moon,” Mr. Hansen said.
That was my first experience with the moon. Growing up, I had heard several men talk about the moon having an influence on castrations and dehorning. Still, I had never paid attention to it. It was easy to allow these folks to believe what they wanted, as long it did no harm.
There were events, however, that made a person wonder if there wasn’t some outside influence.
Uterine prolapse in the cat was one of those things that were considered rare. Some said it was a once in a lifetime for most veterinarians.
Alice called on Sunday morning. This was my first weekend to take emergencies after taking a job in Enumclaw, Washington.
“Doctor, I have a momma cat who had a litter of kittens last night or this morning,” Alice said. “I am not sure what I am seeing, but something hanging out of her is not right.”
“It sounds like I should get a look at her,” I said. “When can you meet me at the clinic?”
“I was hoping that we could take care of her right away,” Alice said. “I am not really interested in hand-feeding this bunch of kittens for any length of time.”
We agreed to meet at the clinic in a few minutes. I was excited to have a genuine small animal emergency this weekend.
Alice came through the door with her momma cat and her kittens in a cardboard box. Momma was a young cat. She was mostly white, and so were the kittens. She was nursing the kittens, oblivious to her own problem.
Setting the box on the exam table, I lifted Momma out of the box. A complete prolapsed uterus hung from her vulva.
“What are we looking at, Doctor,” Alice asked. “I have never seen such a thing.
I didn’t think it would instill any confidence in me if I told Alice that I had never seen such a thing.
“It is a prolapsed uterus,” I said with confidence. “This is considered rare in the cat. It is something that we often see in cows. In cows, we replace the uterus. In this cat, the easiest thing would be to remove it. That will solve her immediate problem, and it would keep her from having more kittens.”
“Am I going to have to take care of these kittens tonight?” Alice asked.
“I think that I can get my wife to help, and I can get this surgery done this morning,” I said. “I should be able to send her home this afternoon. These kittens have been nursing well this morning, they should be fine until mom is home.”
I placed Momma in a kennel, and Alice departed with the kittens. When I got back to the house, Sandy was less than enthusiastic about the task of helping with the surgery.
“All you have to do is be there, just in case I need you to hand me something,” I explained. “The girls can come along, they might enjoy watching.”
We placed a short bench alongside the surgery table and lined the girls up to watch. They were excited, however, other than Brenda, I don’t think they had any idea what was going to happen.
I had no idea what to expect with this surgery, but it turned out to be easier than I thought it would be.
Momma was given a small dose of IV Rompun and Ketamine for anesthesia. Opening her abdomen, I found her ovaries stretched down into the posterior abdomen. I grasped the ovarian ligaments and pulled the uterus back into a normal position with moderate traction. After that, it was just a standard spay. Sandy survived the experience well, as did the girls.
Momma recovered well, and Alice was happy to pick her up in the late afternoon.
So what about the moon business?
The odd thing about the coming week was that I had this case within weeks of getting out of school. Don, the other associate veterinarian in the practice, treated a cat with a prolapsed uterus on Tuesday of that week. That was the first prolapsed uterus in a cat that he had seen in his 8 years of practice. Then on Friday, Jack, the practice owner, had a cat with a prolapsed uterus also. It was the first time he had seen the problem in a cat is his 32 years of practice.
That was 3, once in a lifetime events, in a single week in a predominantly cattle practice.
What are the odds of that, without some outside influence? I never worried about the moon, but after that week, I never argued with anyone who did things by the moon.
August 20th was an unusually warm day for Northern West Germany. Our operations building and the attached maintenance shop had our small air conditioners running full blast. They were only needed on rare occasions here. Still, some of the equipment was temperature-sensitive, and on these rare hot days we needed some air conditioning. I had just assumed the position of NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) of the maintenance section at Wobeck, a small Army Security Agency outpost for monitoring the East German and Russian Armies. Wobeck, situated on the East German border, was considered the best “ears” in Europe. Wobeck was located in an isolated clearing in the ancient Elm forest on a hill outside Schöningen, West Germany.
The day had been an uneventful Tuesday. Everyone on the day shift was dreading leaving for the day because there was no air conditioning in Schöningen. As we were getting ready to leave, Jim said he thought we should go to Braunschweig for dinner and some beer. I didn’t require any arm twisting. Braunschweig was the nearest large town to us. Maybe 25 miles south and west. We visited reasonably often.
Our first stop was a large Chinese restaurant in the center of town. Not only a good restaurant but one with air conditioning. After dinner, we took a brief stroll down the nearby Strass. The Strass, a gated street lined with old apartment-like buildings on each side, where girls of the trade could peddle their virtues in a controlled environment, behind display windows, in all states of dress and undress. It was pure old fashioned prostitution and didn’t interest me a great deal. But window shopping was fun and killed some time.
Then we visited a popular little bar down the street. The bartenders were a set of twin girls from Norway. These two girls were lots of fun and sought after by more than a couple of GIs. Both girls were blond with short hair and very petite. They probably would have to stretch with their heels off the floor to be called five feet. Paola was thin and spoke the best English. Pina was just a little plump.
Pina spotted as we were picking a table. She brought us a couple of beers. We watched the crowd thin out as we drank the stout German beer. It wasn’t long before I saw Pina throw her apron into the hamper behind the bar, Paola followed. They were quite the matched pair, short, blond with pixie style haircuts, they were wearing matching light green dresses. Their aprons had obscured just how short their dresses were.
We sat and talked for a time. Pina was trying to tell me something.
“Pina is trying to tell you that we are planning to go home to Norway for 2 weeks over Christmas.”, Paola said. “She thinks it would be an excellent trip for you. You could meet our family and see your home country.”
“I’ll have to see if I can work that out,” I replied.
On the drive back to Schöningen, Jim made a lot of small talk. As usual, I was mostly quiet. Finally, out of the blue, Jim says, “That trip thing is sort of scary.”
“Damn scary to me,” I replied.
It was getting close to 3:00 AM when I finally crawled into bed. I looked at the clock and told myself 7:30. The entire time in the Army, I never used an alarm clock. I could say to myself what time to wake up, and I would bound out of bed within a minute or two of that time. I had learned that I could pull a 24-hour shift with 5 hours of sleep. Tonight should be 4 and a half hours, tomorrow should be an easy day, I will be fine.
Bam, Bam, Bam! Somebody is at the door, I thought. I looked at the clock It was 4:30.
“What?” I yelled.
“This is Marsden, we need you on-site, stat! All hell is breaking loose,” he said.
Marsden was my right hand in the shop. He had asked to work at night just last week. Marsden was very involved with a local girl and was trying to match her schedule a little better. He didn’t get along with people well and thought he could work better at night. Marsden had thinning red hair and an average build. His uniform was always just a little sloppy, just his way of letting everyone know he would do his job, but he would not play Army games. From Ohio, we often argued over how he considered Ohio as being the “West.”
I got up, pulled on a pair of pants, and opened the door.
“Things are really going crazy at the site, Russia has just invaded Czechoslovakia,” Marsden said in a hushed voice. He seemed short of breath. “It looks like we will be sending about half the site down to the Czech border. We have about 3 weeks of work to do in the next few hours, and everyone is yelling at me over the phone. I need you to handle things.”
“I’ll be ready in a couple of minutes,” I said as I started pulling on my combat boots.
“I will get Jim up and meet you up at the site,” Marsden said as he started to leave.
“Let him sleep,” I said. Someone is going to need to be awake tonight.”
I was not the only one headed to the site early. There was a small caravan of cars headed into The Elm at a few minutes before 5:00 AM. There was an extra MP at the guard shack, and they had my badge ready when I finally got up to the gate. I had trouble finding a parking spot, it seemed like everybody was on site.
When I stepped through the door, the whole place was in chaos. The First Sergeant walked passed in a rapid stride. He tapped me on my chest and said, “In my office now! I have your list!” He said. “Or book,” he added with a smile.
And a book it was, Marsden was correct, 3 weeks work, and we had only hours. This was going to be fun. The top of the list was the MLQ-24. This was a mobile radar intercept and electronic intelligence unit. The only problem was it has been on blocks and connected to our antenna tower antennas for at least 5 years. Now we had to reconnect the mobile antennas, and make sure the cabin was watertight when the holes were patched from the tower antenna cables. I doubt that the motor pool has kept up with the maintenance schedule on the truck. And the tires have not touched the ground in years.
Ron, our motor pool guy, came through the shop door about then. A tall thin kid from Arkansas with dark hair and dark eyes. You couldn’t see his complexion because he was always covered with grease, oil, and a light coating of dust.
“We need the MLQ-24 truck on the ground and ready to run the Czech border by the end of the day”, I stated flatly. “Do you think the tires are okay?”
“They changed the tires last year. The rest of it should be in pretty good shape. You get it unhooked, and I will have it ready to go before dark.”
We had guys working on the tower cables and on the installation of replacement stations in operations. That equipment had not been used in a couple of years. Most of the crew were coming through the door.
“We have some busy hours ahead of us, Jim is sleeping in this morning so he can be the sharp one at the end of the stretch. He is not going to miss out on any of the workloads,” I explained. “As of right now, nobody leaves the site until this tick sheet is complete. We are sending a lot of this site to the Czech border, and 3 guys from this shop go with it. Maybe for 3 weeks, maybe for the rest of your tour.”
We had a good group of guys, and we completed the task within the allotted time. When our convoy drove out of the gate, most of us started melting. I had been on-site for many hours on less than 2 hours sleep. Marsden had worked the night before the this stretch. Jim fared well and handled most of the administration details at the end when my eyes would hardly focus.
As our contribution for the 3 guys from the shop, I was able to get the home base to accept Geib, assigned temporarily to Wobeck, Blackwell, the motor pool guy whose time was nearly up, and a new guy, who had not arrived yet.
That left most of the crew relieved that their lives were not going to be disrupted. All I could think about was sleep, my concerns over the Christmas trip were a distant memory at this point.
Memoirs of a Country Vet 