Tuesday 27th May 2008
I never slept a wink Sunday night. I was literally awake all night waiting to get to work for nine when the vets opened so that I could book Shilma in. I’m under no illusion that she’s a very sick lizard but I had a bee in my bonnet about these antibiotics and having one last go at saving her. The more I thought about it in the wee small hours, the more I convinced myself that it would be a miracle cure.
I was on the phone at two minutes past nine and I was in for a shock. My vet works Monday, Wednesday and Friday and should have been in but she’s away on holiday and wouldn’t be back until Wednesday. They suggested that I bring Shilma in then. I explained that Shilma was seriously ill and wouldn’t last until Wednesday. Because the rest of the vets in the practise admit that they have limited knowledge about the treatment of reptiles they said that all they could do for her is euthanasia. I asked that as Shilma was dying anyway couldn’t I just buy some Batril to try her on myself. I know for a fact that Les would have allowed this because she’s done it for me in the past to save me consultation fees. I said that if it didn’t work then I’d be in immediately to have her put to sleep and it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t get the dosage right, though I’m well experienced at administering now, because she’s dying anyway. The pedantic arse wouldn’t hear of giving out antibiotics without seeing the animal. I had no choice but to go along with them and asked if I could take her down. This was a lizard that needed emergency attention but the soonest they could get me in was seven thirty and that was only after arguing because at first they tried to give me an appointment for ten o’clock Tuesday morning. I had no choice but to sit and wait.
I know now that the antibiotics would have had no affect on her anyway, she was already way beyond help. I had a phone call from Marty at eleven o’clock to say that Shilma had taken a turn for the worse. She was lying on the floor of the viv and at first he’d thought that she was dead. He said that she was barely alive. I told him to take her to the vets immediately and I’d meet him there.
I threw one of my dirty dossers out of the shop and told him that I had a medical emergency to attend to. He had no intention of buying anything anyway and was probably only killing time until the pub opened. I got to the vets a couple of minutes before Marty and went in expecting a fight, they’d already told me that they were too busy to take on any extra cases that day. I was ready to give them both barrels if necessary but I needn’t have worried when I told them that Shilma was now on her last legs they said that they’d get me in immediately. When Marty came and I saw the state of her I didn’t even ask about antibiotics, there was no point. I took her out of the carrier and held her. She had a new lease of life and found the strength to crap on me and bite me, in that order. The vet, who was lovely, got the gear together to weight her so that she could calculate how much sedative she’d need to kill her. Shilma weighed thirty-eight grams and as the vet turned to prepare the injection I told her not to bother. Shilma had just slumped in my hand and as I looked at her I could see that she had died.
Still never assume that a reptile is dead until it hasn’t moved for twenty years. The vet checked her heart… nothing, she checked for reflexes … nothing and she checked her eyes … nothing.
“I’m sorry, she’s gone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“One hundred percent?”
“Yes.”
On the way out I bought some syringes for injecting Stoker’s rats and a catheter tube for if I needed to give him an enema. I paid forty-six pounds and left with my dead lizard in a little see-through box. On the way back to the shop I passed a litterbin. I’ve said before I have no sentimentality where dead bodies are concerned. They mean nothing to me and I feel no need for ceremony and carved crosses. I almost put Shilma in the bin, but something stopped me… don’t get me started on bloody angels again. It was only that thought that dead reptiles might not always be dead despite what a vet says.
I opened up and went straight through to my back room. I put Shilma in her box on the table and lit a fag. I was pissed off and upset, first Giza then the two leos and now Shilma, where was it going to end? I’d killed off four lizards in two weeks and felt like crap. I felt sorry for Shilma, I felt sorry for me and I couldn’t decide whether I could even be bothered to have a cry or not. I was debating this with myself when…
I’d love this to be a story of inspiration and miracle and hope ... but it isn’t. Sure enough though, as I watched Shilma’s body, there was no mistaking the strong pulse that was throbbing in her neck. I grabbed up the box and she lifted her head slightly.
Oh my God, she was alive. I ran into the shop and phoned a taxi. Five minutes later I was shutting my shop again and high-tailing it home. The pulse in her neck was still moving strongly. Shaking like a leaf I made up a five-mil syringe of Critical care. If Shilma was going to fight this to the bitter end then I was going to help her. She couldn’t even die without a bloody drama. I emptied that into her and prepared a second one. While I was busy making up the second syringe Shlma lifted her head high and opened her mouth. She was choking. She had inhaled the critical care into her lungs and as I watched she drowned on the fluid. I turned her upside down and tried to aspirate her lungs but it was no good. She was gone. She’d been as good as dead on her first death. The Lasarus impersonation was only to show me that she wasn’t going down until she was good and ready. That tiny little gecko fought it to the bitter end and even when she was dead she couldn’t lay down gracefully and had to come back to bloody life. She had one hell of a spirit and I’m sure that lives on somewhere and she’ll be biting the hand that feeds her in some other life now.
I took another taxi back to work. See now if Shilma hadn’t been such a stubborn little bugger and had died at home through the night I could have saved a forty six pound vet bill, nearly three hours in total off work, ten pounds in taxi fares and a whole hell of a lot of grief ... but that’s my girl.
And I play hell at Darren for shutting up shop.
Jessy continues to come round several evenings a week bringing all manner of people with her. I’m going to have a plaque made for my front door saying ‘Jessy’s Zoo’. It annoys me but it is good for the animals because she delights in getting them out and giving them loads of attention. She never comes empty-handed and always has a few bananas or apples. And one day last week she came with a bin bag literally full of grapes. It was that heavy that I could barely lift it. Nigel works for Morrisons and managed to blag a waste load of grapes. Sadly most of them had to be thrown out after giving the guys three feeds from them but they really helped out. Even if Frog did get to the point where she looked at me as though to say, “Not grapes again.”
Yesterday the people who wanted to sell me Roma’s sister came around. They asked me if I could incubate thirteen corn snake eggs for them and as my incubator is sitting doing nothing I agreed. It doesn’t even look as though I’m going to have success with somebody else’s eggs as they were laid in water. Reptile eggs are porous and any laid in a water dish are usually waterlogged and useless. Add to that the fact that they carried them out in the night air in an open hamster cage lying on a bath towel and we can pretty much write them off. Still I’m going to give them a go and see what happens.
So that I can’t be accused of ripping them off I’ve said that if they fail (which they almost certainly will) I won’t do anything with them until they’ve come back and seen for themselves that the eggs have perished. If on the million to one chance that we do get some healthy snakes from the clutch, they offered me one of the young for my trouble but of course I’m not allowed to have any more snakes so I’ve declined and said that I’m happy to do it as a favour to them.
Russ has been absolutely brilliant lately. He knows I’m in a mess financially and has been helping out more. I was pissed off when I lowered myself to ask for more money and he refused, but he has been doing little bits of shopping and refusing reimbursement for them. If we run short of milk or toilet rolls for instance he’ll go out and get them. Also when we go out I pay twenty pounds for every night out. That’s nowhere near half of what we spend on an average night by the time we’ve done taxis and the like and Russ always covers the rest.
He also went out to buy me my new computer today. It’s only thanks to him that I’ve got it. We had a nice surprise in that we asked for the three hundred and fifty pounds cost of a new one … but they allowed for inflation on the same model and sent us four hundred pounds so Russ was able to get me a better model again. I’ve only had to pay the thirty-five pounds excess. Now I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Daz has done me a favour by dropping my old one. I’ve been without for two weeks, which has driven me loopy, but I’ve got a better laptop for it. Thankfully this time I had all my writing backed up but I did loose hundreds of family and reptile photos that can’t ever be replaced. And it still sticks in my craw that Daz got off scott free.
