The next week was February 14th – St Valentine’s day. The nurses at the practice had picked up on Candy’s amorous advances and had prepared a spoof Valentine’s card for me. However, this trick backfired when I received two cards from Candy – one real and one from them, although I never did discover which one was from whom. Later that day, Candy made an appointment and duly arrived with the cat.
She was a little more modestly dressed this time, perhaps sensing that the up-front (so to speak) tactics were not working and, I have to say, she looked the more attractive for it. Having apparently decided to dispense with the not so subtle advances, she finally took the plunge and made a proposition. She invited me round to her house for dinner and followed it with these immortal words; “don’t worry – it will be just you, me and my pussy”. Despite her obvious deficiencies in the good taste department, I still honestly believe that she meant the cat. After all that euphemism for a certain part of the female anatomy was not in common usage then! Having recovered my composure I quickly made my excuses and thanked her for her kind offer, but had to decline as I was taking my girlfriend out for dinner that very night (which was true).
Clearly undaunted by this setback to her ambitions, Candy tried one last throw of the dice. She once again appeared with the cat at the surgery. This time there was at least something to observe as there were several small, itchy, scaly patches on the cat’s head. I darkened the consulting room and plugged in the diagnostic Wood’s light to examine the lesions in a darkened room. Sure enough, they glowed a satisfying green under the lamp and the diagnosis of ringworm was made.
Candy then mentioned that she had a couple of lesions herself and would be interested to see if they glowed also. Expecting these to be on her hands or arms, I agreed to have a look, at which point she took off her top. At this very moment, a nurse walked unannounced through the door to be faced with the bizarre sight of me examining Candy’s ample breasts through an illuminated magnifying glass in the dark.
This incident could have been very embarrassing, but instead went down into the folklore of the surgery with the boss of the practice the most amused of all (similar things had probably, after all, happened to him when he was a younger man). I can say for the record that there were several suspicious lesions in the area examined, but I declined Candy’s offer to apply the ringworm cream to them. It transpired that not only did Candy let the cat sleep on her bed, but that its favourite position was on her naked chest. I didn’t like to ask which patient had developed the lesions first. I did once have a client who nearly had her cat euthanased on the doctor’s advice because she thought her child had caught ringworm from the cat until I asked the simple question, “which got the symptoms first?” that the doctor had apparently neglected to ask. It turned out to be the child that had developed the problem before the cat.
This also brings to mind the interesting fact that while lice are generally host-specific, human pubic hair lice are the same as gorilla lice because they’ve adapted to live in coarse hair, which gorillas have in abundance. At some point in our early history, with the great apes being close to us on the evolutionary tree, they appear to have jumped species. I once read a review by A. A. Gill in the Sunday Times in which, clearly sharing a similar thought process as that which you – the reader – are now having, he quipped that it wasn’t how the first human caught the lice that intrigued him, but how the gorilla took it when he told her he wasn’t going to see her anymore.
Less of this divergence – Candy must have finally taken the hint and given up her pursuit, or perhaps she found a more receptive target elsewhere, as that is the last I recall of seeing her. Fortunately, I do not remember having to examine the python and I never did find out where that slept at night – perish the thought.
The good old days
Back in the day when I first set out into practice on my own, I moved into the somewhat ramshackle old branch surgery that I’d bought from the previous practice. This basically consisted of two wooden outbuildings in the garden of a detached house, sheds you might call them if you were being unkind, although I would prefer to call them compact clinical units! It nevertheless quickly became a busy little one man practice. I was making a tidy profit that would soon be enough to pay for a purpose-built clinic to be extended onto the back of the surgery house, which was, at the time, also my family accommodation.
Nonetheless, in these days of plush practice premises, it is quite surprising to think what we could achieve with pretty basic facilities back then. We had to depend on good clinical skills rather than relying on several thousand pounds worth of apparently indispensable high-tech equipment to back it up and not being able to make a diagnosis without it (sorry if it sounds like the “in my day” soliloquy from a grumpy old man).
Needless to say, the health and safety considerations of my predecessors were not what they are now and, although they weren’t exactly sending little boys up chimneys any longer, matters like the storage of cadavers and disposal of clinical waste were not as paramount in their thought processes as they are in ours today. I inherited the infrastructure of the previous practice and set about changing procedures as quickly as was practical, but this took a little time.
Whereas my surgery has long since had a mortuary room with a large chest freezer, the bodies of deceased animals were then deposited in what really amounted to a glorified external coal bunker with no chilling facility. This was pretty standard procedure back then and was probably fair enough in the winter (we had real winters in those days!), but you can imagine what the smell of putrefying flesh was like after a week in the summer.
This was mitigated to some extent by the fact that the pet crematorium would collect rather more frequently in those days and didn’t charge quite so much for the privilege (more maudlin after the past). Nonetheless, this was unacceptable both to me and to my clients, who expected more care for their beloved pets once they had come to the end of their lives and was amongst the first of the facilities to be upgraded.
There was an arrangement for collecting and disposing of sharps and heavily contaminated materials safely, but X-ray chemicals went down the drain and lightly soiled items of clinical waste basically went out with the household rubbish into land fill, although the local council did charge for the extra bulk and classified it as business waste.
However, from time to time it seemed the best way to dispose of large quantities of rubbish was to light a bonfire in the surgery garden and burn it and, having performed a spring cleaning exercise shortly after taking up occupation of my premises, that is exactly what I did.
A pile of rubbish was duly accumulated into a pyre in the surgery garden, but first attempts at ignition in a steady drizzle were unsuccessful. Rather foolishly, I decided to use an accelerant on what appeared to be a dead fire (this is the ‘don’t try this at home’ bit), namely some petrol. This resulted in a significant flashback with me temporarily thinking I’d set alight to myself but, after realising I wasn’t feeling any pain and that the smell of burning protein was only my lightly singed eyebrows, I was relieved that it was just the petrol on my gloves and boots and the spout of the petrol can that had ignited.
A suitable conflagration was soon under way. I stood by the fire for some time, gradually adding more tinder until I reckoned it wasn’t going to get out of control, before I finally could not resist the need to empty my bursting bladder any longer. I slipped off my muddy boots and gloves, leaving them next to the bonfire and retreated to the house.
Then, as I stood in the bathroom responding to the call of nature, I heard a tremendous explosion.