A veterinarian’s view informs ‘My Patients’
Within the first 60 pages of her memoir of life as a veterinarian, Suzy Fincham-Gray has shot an ailing horse, handled a dog with a gunshot wound and treated a cat impaled by an arrow.
As a teenager in England, FinchamGray was enchanted by the TV adaptations of James Herriot’s best-selling books, which made a vet’s life seem as easygoing as a country stroll. She has grown up to write My Patients
and Other Animals (Spiegel & Grau, 267 pp., ★★★☆) an engrossing, visceral counterpoint.
Her “baptism by fire” began at the University of Pennsylvania, where long hours as an intern introduced her to all manner of animal crises, including but not limited to dogs that have ingested “socks and wallets, cassette tapes, balls and other toys, unopened ten-pound bags of dog, cat, and even bird food, and disgusting rotten trash can contents best left unidentified.”
Within a few years, at stints in Philadelphia, Baltimore and San Diego, Fincham-Gray mastered the art of diagnosing life-threatening ailments of a variety of pets, and much of the book is dedicated to her more challenging cases.
A miniature dachshund is in rapid decline from pancreatitis brought on a steady diet of table scraps. An ornery house cat named Tiger is laid low by an enlarged bladder but keeps trying to live up to his name. A dog has an inexplicable infection whose source would be easier to discern if he weren’t a hard-to-move 140-pound Irish wolfhound.
Fincham-Gray delivers each of these pets’ stories episodically, as if arranging them for her own TV series. But underlying every animal story are two human themes: Fincham-Gray’s struggle to improve her relationships with pet owners, and the way treatment is usually influenced (or walled off ) by their ability to pay. One of Sweetie’s owners is disinterested and the other is financially strapped, which means Fincham-Gray has to cut tests and treatments.
“My frustration was familiar and inextricable,” she writes. “What I wanted to do and what I could do for my patient were not the same.”
Indeed, compromise is a central element of her diagnostic process. For a veterinarian like Fincham-Gray, constantly moved to save an animal at whatever cost, price tags for treatment are a frustration. But in time she learns to keep her testiness in check and improve her bedside manner:
“Just as I had discovered how best to approach an aggressive dog or nervous cat,” she writes, “I also had to modify my tone, manner, and vocabulary based on the people sitting across the exam room.”
Fincham-Gray quotes a T-shirt that reads: “Real doctors treat more than one species.” The downside for veterinarians, though, is the brevity of the lives they treat, and the particular agony of owners who must decide to euthanize their pets — or who decide not to, “leading their beloved companions down a futile and painful path.”
My Patients and Other Animals is at its best when the author is at her nerviest, removing the romantic sheen from her profession and replacing it with a more realistic and complicated portrait. If it’s sometimes tragic, it’s also consistently rooted in compassion.