As I was walking out of the private hospital one afternoon last week, I saw a bunch of people crowded around a trolley as it was pushed through the front door.
I just couldn’t figure out what was going on. It’s not an acute hospital, there’s no A and E, so why bring someone in like this? And I couldn’t actually see a patient on the bed. As they wheeled past me, I saw what it was – an unconscious ostrich, with presumably a vet walking backwards, holding the bird’s head on its long long neck. I was gobsmacked. I longed to offer to help, to get involved, but there were so many people already crowded around the bed who had far more idea of what they were doing than I would, that I just sadly walked off and left them to it.
Later on, at post yoga burger and beersies, I asked my colleagues “Guess what I saw as I was leaving the hospital today!” and they all said “an ostrich!” which took me down a peg or two. Apparently it was all over the ICU WhatsApp chat, and they even showed me the CT scan that someone had uploaded (no confidentiality issues for non humans, evidently).
It reminded me of a penguin that was found on a Wellington beach some years ago, many kilometres north of its usual habitat. It had got sick with the unaccustomed heat and had been eating sand in lieu of ice. It spend quite a bit of time at Wellington zoo, getting fixed up before it could be released back into the wild (where it promptly got eaten, or that was the most likely scenario after its tracker stopped working). Part of its care was getting one of the local gastroenterologists to remove the sand that it had eaten with a gastroscope presumably borrowed from a hospital. That doctor has had the nickname “penguin boy” ever since.
When I was a kid, I was determined to become a vet when I grew up. This was mostly because of my favourite series of books, the loosely autobiographical “All creatures great and small” and its sequels, by James Herriot (a pseudonym as I was later devastated to discover). It was the adventures of a young vet after being demobbed from the army, joining a country practice in the Yorkshire dales. I loved those books so much. For some reason, when I left school, I completely forgot about this ambition, and went off to do astrophysics instead. A subsequent course correction led me to medicine, which has worked out well in the end although it’s been a fraught journey at times. What would my life have been like if I’d remembered my childhood dreams? I think I would have found the cost constraints of care hard to deal with, also having to put animals down. I’ve always loved hospitals, too, and that environment is less accessible as a vet. To be honest , I really haven’t thought about it much, and I’m slightly nervous about spending too much time searching my feelings for regrets. Anyway, someone wrote a poem about the path not taken, and here it is:
