Dr Liza’s Vet Tales Excerpt – More After-Hours Adventures

I maintained the occasional after-hours shift even after I began working with Rose since I really enjoyed it. Months later Ash and I arrived back in New Zealand after a trip to South Africa late on a Friday night. The weather was a bit colder than when we had left a couple of weeks prior and that night trying to fall asleep I noticed (thanks to the colder air), the noise of the trains nearby to where we lived, something that I wasn’t aware of before.

We slept in on the Saturday and begun our “post holiday strategy” getting organized with shopping, sorting out the house and picking up the dogs from the kennels where they had stayed.

On Saturday night I made a few phone calls to catch up with some friends and spoke to the vet, a lovely guy, who ran the after-hours vet clinic where I loved to do the occasional shift as I wanted to find out about any work available in the weeks ahead. He told me that he had needed my help earlier on in the week as his Mum was quite ill. Anyway she was still ill and of course I said that if he needed to leave work suddenly, I’d fill in for him.

Twenty minutes later I got the phone call to say that his Mum was ailing badly and he needed me to cover for him so that he could leave work. So off I went, jet-lag and all to do what I love – help the furry creatures!

I had a busy night with quite a few serious cases and I finally crawled into bed at 3 a.m. At 7a.m. the next morning I was woken from a deep sleep hearing bells and hooters. Unworriedly I rolled over and went back into a deep sleep; in my drowsy state I assumed that I was back at home and that the train was coming past. But the noise kept up and gradually it dawned on me that I was at the vet clinic and someone was trying desperately to get my attention.

At that realization I jumped out of bed and raced downstairs. A chap had just run his German shepherd over and she was in critical condition – collapsed, pale, blood coming out of her nose and from the sound of her lungs it was clear that he’d driven over her chest. I quickly placed her on a drip and gave a host of injections to help her to stabilize. These included diuretics to get the fluid off her chest, with the bleeding into her chest she could easily drown as her lungs wouldn’t be able to get the vital oxygen from the air that she breathed. I also injected anti-inflammatories, pain relief and medications to help stop the bleeding.

Bit by bit, hour by hour as her odds of survival changed from 10% to 90% she become a bit perkier and was breathing a lot more comfortably. By the time I left to go home at lunchtime she was even wagging her tail. Her owner, a young guy who had just left home to live alone and had been at her side since he’d run her over, just shook his head, grateful that she was alive, saying, “I hate it when parents are right, they keep telling me to back out of the drive more slowly!”

To read more about my adventures, read Vet Tales available as a book or e-book from https://www.drliza.co.nz/shop/