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I woke up in the cold grey morning, and steeled myself to get out of the warm cocoon of my feather doona. It was dark outside, bleak, the icy fret wafting up from the northern ocean, foggy. Newcastle upon Tyne, in the North of England, had been my home for months now, and I had […]

I rang to see if they were at home, as, for once in my life, I was actually running early. A man answered the phone, and told me his wife would be back in a few minutes, and to come straight around… \”Our road\’s a bit muddy,\” he told me. \”I graded it the other

I rolled up to the front door just as the first heavy drops of rain splatted on the windscreen. I\’d been watching the heavy grey clouds as I drove, with bright bolts of lightning flashing down to the earth now and then, and thunder was rolling all around the valleys as I ran up the

The blood kept welling up, and my heart rate was climbing with it. My fingers felt numb, awkward, fumbling around ineffectively. I was in the middle of a spey, a big dog, fat, not an easy one… About 5 minutes before, the ligature I had placed on the stump from the right ovary had slipped

\”Are you the vet?\” – Her voice was panicked, words blurring one into the next, I could hear her breath fast and ragged through the phone – \”Me dogs collapsed, and he\’s foamin\’ at the mouth, he\’s paddlin his legs like crazy, and I think he\’s gunna die!!!\” \”OK,\” I said. \”The first thing you

Benny was one of my greatest teachers with the Whole Energy Body Balancing technique. A grand old Greyhound, who won a stack of cash in his day on the track. I remember when I first met him – he was aloof, grumpy, didn\’t like being touched. He had a LOT of pain in his body,

It was a normal day in my home visit practice, until this fellow rang me up about his fish. You don\’t see too many fish as a vet- or at least I haven\’t, before or since that day! He was a demanding fellow, pushy without knowing that he was pushy, if you know what I

\”Butch has been in another fight,\” the slightly sheepish voice one the phone informed me. \”I took him to the beach, because he loves it so much, and I was watching like a hawk for other dogs, then my phone rang and distracted me for a moment. When I looked up, his tail was up,

Our lives ache today. There is a huge, cat shaped hole in my heart. Mr Patches, emperor of the house, our dear friend and companion for many years, is no more. A friend saw him last Thursday when they dropped in to pick something up. And then we didn\’t see him again for a couple

For the first week at my first job, a mixed practice in Western Australia, the vet whose place I was taking stayed on to give me a bit of support. I had arrived and settled into the  vet share house – and naturally, inevitable, but perhaps not sensibly, he took me out on the town