Dr Liza’s Vet Tales Excerpt – More After-Hour Adventures!
I marvelled at the contrast of working at the after-hours clinic based in a lower socio-economic area on the one side of town vs the other based in a higher socio-economic area on the other side and the different skills needed to look after the diverse client bases. Clients from the former would often phone late at night stating that they had a sick dog that hadn’t eaten for the last week; it needed to see a vet badly as it wasn’t looking good but they had no money to pay for its treatment.
Clients from the latter would rush in with their animal terribly worried about something relatively minor like the lady who came in with her ragdoll cat (a type of breed) late one night. She was terribly worried because she had just been brushing him and out came a big chunk of fur. She was most grateful to pay the afterhours consult fee (at least twice the price of a normal vet visit) for me to tell her that it’s perfectly normal that her precious pussycat finally shed a clump of dead fur!
One night I had a call from the fire department. They had just spent a couple of hours cutting a St Bernard out of a cat door that he had gotten his head stuck in. Apparently Gulliver (an 8 month old pup weighing in at 80kg!) was chasing his favourite friend Cosmo the Cornish Rex cat who decided that a quick escape from the big lug would be through the cat door. Gulliver, not being as intellectually endowed as his feline counterpart, believed that he could follow and had his head stuck for a fair amount of time before the nice firemen destroyed the door to set him free. Gulliver came in to the clinic quite unperturbed about the whole situation and I sent him home with a clean bill of health aside for some bruising around his ears.
Not long after I had my first encounter with a weta, well kind of! A Japanese lady come in with her cat which she said had a weta attached to its tongue—or the head half of the weta, anyway! Wetas are a type of native insect and basically a big cricket-like creature with a sharp pincer-like mouth. In South Africa we have parktown prawns which are similar but they are bright red and a lot uglier than a weta and to me they are one of the scariest creatures on Earth!
The cat must have been playing with the weta when it grabbed hold of the cat’s tongue with its pincer-like mouth in defence and wouldn’t let go. The cat had tried to pull it off—but had only succeeded in detaching the front end of the weta (head and pincer) from the back end (abdomen and legs).
Before I opened the carry cage to examine the cat and see how I could help, the Japanese lady told me with her accent, “Be vewy vewy caweful as cat is vewy vicious—other vet who see her say to sedate.” These types of scenarios can be tricky and it’s not too uncommon to have cats with these qualities named “Sweety” or “Angel”!
Anyway, thank goodness, the cat behaved herself and I managed to detach the strong mouthparts of the weta without the need for a sedative or an anaesthetic and the kitty cat was most relieved to be separated from the play toy to which she had become so attached!!!
To read more about my adventures, read Vet Tales available as a book or e-book from https://www.drliza.co.nz/shop/