There’s no agony like seeing your beloved pet fall ill ...
Sleepless nights, frantic internet searches for the symptoms — and don’t even mention the vet bills
We never realise how fortunate we are to be well until we get ill — and that goes for animals, too.
Perhaps the only wise remark Boris Johnson ever made was not about people, but about our four-legged friends: ‘ My father always said that with sheep, they are either alive or they are dead.’
What Boris’s dad Stanley meant is that when a sheep makes up its mind to pop its clogs, no power on earth — and certainly no vet — can do anything to dissuade it.
I can testify to the truth of this from my own sheep-owning days.
Something of the same can be said about dogs. When they start looking sad; curl up in a heap in the corner; affect a dry rather than a wet nose; decline to go for walkies, then owners like us collapse into a state of blue funk, terrified that they might leave the set.
Our labrador, Ludo, customarily goes at his rations like a tiger at a missionary. Indeed, one aspect of his training in which I have failed miserably is to get him to heed Nanny’s advice that eating too quickly is bad for both the digestion and the immortal soul.
I have often told my wife Penny that despite all the sentiment she lavishes on him and, indeed, all our animals, given a chance they would eat us, if we smeared a little mayonnaise on.
Thus, last Sunday, it was cause for astonishment when feeding time came, and Ludo’s bowl remained untouched. That night he was comprehensively sick, producing some exceptionally livid green grunge.
After he had refused rations a couple more times, and lay on his bed looking like a Tory MP the morning after the last election, Penny took him to the vet.
I like vets, because they like animals and are unfailingly courteous to their owners. They flatter outrageously by telling each of us that our pets are the most handsome and best cared-for of their kind that they have ever seen. They know which way their bread is buttered, more or less literally.
They realise that the more that we view our loved ones as potential Crufts champions, the less likely we are to moan about the bills for curing their ailments — or not, as the case may be.
A few years ago, an earlier labrador of ours had back trouble. When surgery by some TV super-vet was recommended, I said sadly to Penny: ‘At the age of 11, is it really kind to put him through all that?’
After I had, with difficulty, persuaded her to come down from the ceiling, she said: ‘you just want to murder that poor dog!’
Suffice to say that we paid a bill requiring a second mortgage on the house. Stanley lived on contentedly for a further year and a half, at an average monthly cost of... no, we had better not go there.
As for Ludo, the young vet who saw him diagnosed swollen glands, a possible abscess in his jaw: she prescribed antibiotics and painkillers and we thought ourselves lucky to get out for £100.
Unfortunately, Ludo was sick again as soon as we got the first instalment of medication down him. After he had refused nourishment for a further 24 hours, I returned him to the vet as an in-patient.
The next few days and nights are incomprehensible to a non-animalowner, hideously familiar to everyone who keeps anything larger than a harvest mouse. Penny and I discussed almost nothing else but the state of this dog, in a mood of hysteria that worsened as blood tests, X-rays and scans failed to reveal anything whatsoever except that he lay in a kennel refusing to eat chicken, tuna or biscuits.
Scarcely any work was done. I awoke at 3.30am one morning and lay for three hours exploring every conceivable possibility.
Could he have picked up poison, by accident or intent?
Unlikely, because neither of our dogs is ever out of our sight or garden except on strictly supervised walks across almost virgin countryside.
And if Ludo ate anything horrible, Scrabble the spaniel would have got there ahead of him, being even greedier and quicker at the trough. Was it a virus? I tormented myself by exploring on the internet every fell disease that can afflict labradors, which is almost as bad for morale as studying human symptoms.
By Thursday, Penny and I were so depressed that we had no heart for social life even with our nearest and dearest. Because we are responsible for these animals and direct their every motion, when things go amiss one feels a failure.
Both of us became convinced that Ludo would soon be a goner, aged four.
he is not brain of West Berkshire, but he has an exemplarily amiable, placid temperament, probably induced by the fact that he has no idea what a mess the country is in.
On Thursday afternoon, the veterinary nurse reported that he had reluctantly swallowed a few mouthfuls of tuna. Next day we went to the surgery, having been unwilling to do so earlier for fear of upsetting the dog.
A reassuringly cuddly middleaged vet said he was cautiously optimistic that Ludo — having caught a nasty virus that nobody had been able to identify, and thus prescribe for — had now turned a corner and might start getting better. He SUGGESTED taking him home for the weekend. I paid a bill large enough to fund a new wing at an NhS hospital, without daring to ask if we could have a refund for the original misdiagnosis.
We took Ludo home and Penny embarked on a designer catering programme such as she has never offered to me, either in sickness or in health.
The invalid proved willing to be hand-fed biscuits, then hesitantly accept a little tuna. Mouthful by mouthful, we got food down him, in slowly increasing quantities. Penny cooked him breast of chicken with rice, which he liked, while sternly rejecting dog food.
She cut up slices of toast and butter which he wolfed from the breakfast table, defying warnings that bread is not good for dogs.
A low, or high, point came on an evening when we ourselves were having lasagne. We discovered that Ludo likes lasagne. Penny made herself an omelette.
We think that he is now definitely on the mend, with much more tailwagging, though still a certain lethargy on walks. We feel so grateful, not to mention able to sleep again, that I do not even repine about the vet’s bill, inconclusive though all those tests were.
We know that Ludo is a mere dog, and thus that it is sacrilegious to expend so much emotion upon him.
dr Johnson would never allow his servant Francis Barber to fetch hodge, his favourite cat, because the great savant thought it ‘wrong to employ a human being in the service of an animal’.
But I scarcely know a serious dog-owner who does not get into the same pitiful state as us about sick loved ones, even though we take them for granted as part of the furniture when they are well.
This evening, I scent something especially delicious brewing in the kitchen. I am not foolish enough to imagine that this has anything to do with our supper.
Ludo, however, is gazing up at the stove, once more with a wet nose and well-justified confidence that his own bowl will be filled from the a la carte menu.