It was hot, hot and dry, baked like an oven, all the grass dead, crunchy under foot. The sandy soils raised dust with any movement, the sun was like a glaring hot hammer in the sky. Any movement raised a sweat, which evaporated before it could even make you feel damp. My lips were dry, cracked, all the moisture was sucked out of me, no matter how many litres of water I guzzled every day. The height of summer in Western Australia. I was draped over a chair, waiting for my next small animal consult to arrive, limp and wrung out, panting like a dog. They were late.
\”Looks like these people aren\’t going to turn up,\” the bosses wife grimaced. \”Some people just don\’t have any manners, I tell you! You\’d better go out and make sure your truck is all stocked up and ready to go. I\’ve just had a call come in for a horse with a sore eye, so you\’d better go to that one first.\” She winced, as if it was physically painful to have to send me out to see a horse. \”I wouldn\’t send you, only Frank (the Boss) is tied up with a calving – so you make sure you don\’t make any mistakes!\”
I escaped into the searing heat of the sun. Anything was better than her sour attitude, and the grating paper cut feeling of our mutual dislike for each other. I knew I had everything I needed, but I popped up all three doors on the canopy of the old Nissan ute and ferreted through everything, doing my best to look busy. A bit of a breeze kicked up, but it was no relief at all, it felt like a heater blowing on me. I tidied up a bit of the mess, pulled out all the rubbish, chucked it in the bin, and then went inside to grab a few needles and syringes that I didn\’t really need, just to keep her happy. She grunted at me, waving a list while talking to someone on the phone. I took it – only 3 calls today, a quiet one before coming back for another bracket of small animal consults in the afternoon. No surgery today either – everyone must be hiding in the coolest spot they could find.
I climbed into the even hotter oven that was the cabin of the ute, fired the old girl up and turned the air-con on to full blast. Every pore of my body flooded with streams of sweat, and I got rolling just as fast as I could, with the windows down to allow some breeze to try and cool me down. It took a while before the air-con got cool enough to wind the window up. I could relax, out of the grinding tension of being in the clinic. It was like shaking a grain of sand out of my shoe!
I pulled out onto the highway, the horizon a dancing heat shimmer, the edges of the sky hazed and grubby with distant fires and dust. I followed the directions, listening to the road hum away underneath me. A horse! I still had ambitions to be a specialist horse vet in those days. I\’d been working here for a good 6 months now, and I could count the number of horses I\’d seen on my fingers and toes. Bugger all! I was confused, and wondered why I saw so few cases, when the practice did so much horse work. I stuffed all that back into the background, and ejoyed the peace and quiet of the drive.
\”Are you there yet???\” Her voice spat at me out of the two-way radio, and I jumped.
I picked up the hand piece, clicked the button, and replied: \”Nearly there, nearly there…\”
\”Well hurry up! He\’s just rang me to see where you are, he\’s waiting!\”
I gritted my teeth, and pushed my right foot down a little harder. Not that it made a world of difference. This old truck was not built for speed. Aha! I saw the road I needed to take, rattled along a dirt road for a few hundred metres, trailing a plume of dust, and pulled up at the gate. A man was leaning on the post, holding a horse.
\”G\’day mate,\” he said, with a lazy smile. \”Good to see ya!\”
I shook his hand, hard, strong and leathery.
\”This old girl\’s all bunged up in the eye,\” he explained. \”She was fine yesterday…\”
The horse had one eye clenched shut, with a dark wet stream of tears and gunky discharge running down her face. I greeted her gently, then had a look. I gently pried her eyelid open, and could see what looked like a nasty ulcer on the cornea.
\”Looks like an ulcer,\” I explained. \”I\’ll just pop a stain in it to be sure.\”
I pried her eye open again, and gently popped the bright orange fluorescein paper strip under her eyelid. She tossed her head a little in protest, and within a minute or so her eye started to drip a bright green colour. I gently opened here eye again, and could see a big bright green patch where the ulcer was.
\”Yep – a nasty ulcer – I\’ll give you some antibiotic ointment to pop in twice daily to control the infection, and some atropine ointment once daily to help with pain relief. You\’ll need to do that for a week, but be sure to give us a yell if it\’s not looking better within 24-48 hours, eh?\”
\”No worries, I can do that,\” came the laconic reply. Obviously a man of few words!
I headed off to my next call, a lame cow, feeling all warm and happy about having seen a horse.