HE PUT ON A CLINIC
78-year-old retires after long career caring for pets
They had told him to bring heavy cold weather night gear. He figured he would need it to occasionally check out a sled dog that happened to show up at night. He was wrong.
It was 1986 and Dr. John A. dePlanque saw a solicitation in one of his professional magazines that veterinarians were needed for the Iditarod sled race in Alaska. He was looking for a new adventure and signed up.
“You have an impression, which turned out to be incorrect, that you are going to fly to Alaska, stay somewhere in a hotel and go out and see these dog teams as they go through,” dePlanque, 78, said recently, reflecting on 47 years of being a veterinarian. “There are no hotels in Alaska, except in Anchorage.”
The accommodations were rustic, to say the least.
Veterinarians stayed in a trapper’s or fisherman’s cabin in the middle of nowhere.
The cabins were equipped with kerosene lamps and wood-burning stoves and the “room service” was deciding which cans of food donated by Anchorage grocery stores you were going to blend together to make a stew and heat on the stove.
The Maxatawny Township resident knew what it was like to work in the cold.
DePlanque said he served in the Air Force in northern Minnesota, so he was acquainted with
the preparation needed for working outside in below-freezing temperatures.
He was not prepared for battling the cold in order to get a good night’s sleep.
“I would venture a guess that usually the temperature was zero on the floor,” he said. “They had warned us to bring serious cold weather sleeping gear.
“We had several people who quit who said ‘I didn’t sign up for this, I’m going home,’ “dePlanque said.
‘Extraordinary experience’
During his first trip — he would make another — he learned that many of the Iditarod racers run at night, which only amplified the effects of the cold.
“We were told we had to bring headlamps, but we had to hold the batteries inside our jackets
next to our bodies or they would freeze,” he recalled.
He explained that sled dogs are under a lot of stress and frequently develop stress diarrhea. One of the treatments is to give them injections of vitamins. There was just one problem — the liquid would begin to freeze in the needle after doing a few shots.
“You would have to bring a half-dozen needles with you outside in the snow,” dePlanque said.
There were other unusual scenarios as a result of the cold that dePlanque shared, but they were not for the squeamish.
Another aspect of the Alaska trip that got dePlanque’s blood pumping was flying to his destinations.
“We were at checkpoints that were roughly 75 miles apart from Anchorage up to Nome, Alaska,” dePlanque said.
To reach those remote locations necessitated hopping into bush planes, which dePlanque affectionately calls tail draggers. At one point he was advised to take his gear down to the river to board a plane. While he was waiting, another passenger came down to the river with his gear.
Their plane arrived and it was only designed for one passenger. The pilot advised them both to climb aboard, but they would have to leave their gear for another trip.
The two men, each 6 feet 2 inches, crammed themselves into the tiny plane. As they took off, the pilot yelled to them that they needed to lean forward.
“We really want to clear those trees,” dePlanque said the pilot told them.
He survived and signed up again for the 1989 Iditarod race.
“It was an extraordinary experience, just extraordinary,” dePlanque recalled.
Reflecting on a career
DePlanque has had many animal experiences since he took over the Fleetwood Dog & Cat Hospital along Heffner Road in Richmond Township in 1979.
Just six years earlier, he had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. While attending undergraduate college he worked for about a year and a half as a receptionist and assistant at a veterinary practice.
“That started me in that general direction,” dePlanque said.
He has seen many changes during his nearly half century of diagnosing and healing animals.
“The profession as a whole has been changing to be much more businesslike,” dePlanque said. “When I graduated, there was no emphasis on business at all. You were learning your trade you were going to ply and that was considered all that you needed.”
“The range of services veteri
narians have to offer has opened dramatically,” he said. “When I first came out here, trying to find a ‘specialist’ required almost universally referring people into Philadelphia to the veterinary school I attended — the University of Pennsylvania. … Being a rural practitioner, people weren’t willing to travel and/or couldn’t afford it. So, it forced me to become adept at a number of things that today’s veterinarians aren’t adept at. Whether that is surgery or other things.”
Current practice manager Vicky Sullivan, who has worked with dePlanque for 14 years, said the office changed its name to Fleetwood Dog & Cat Clinic several years ago based on American Veterinary Medical Association guidelines that call for 24-hour staff if using the word hospital in the practice name.
When asked to reflect on the most interesting cases he has seen, dePlanque recalled a case of bloat in a prominent kickboxer’s beloved St. Bernard.
The condition, a lso known as gastric torsion, can be fatal if not treated quickly.
Got a kick out of it
“I got a phone call at 8 o’clock in the morning from someone saying ‘we believe our St. Bernard has bloat,’ “dePlanque said. “He brought it in and it was bloated. I said the dog needs to have surgery and it may or may not survive surgery. If it does, there is a three-day window after surgery that he could die or normally would need to be hospitalized.’
“The fella that brought the dog in said OK to the surgery, but that the owner was in Hollywood. ‘He’s French, he’s a kickboxer and he’s negotiating to do a movie. This dog is very special to him because he has saved his life several times when he was a ski instructor in the Alps and caught in avalanches and his dog found him.’ “
The pressure was on. The kickboxer was Olivier Gruner, who fought professionally in France from 1984 to 1988 and appeared in a number of movies and television shows.
When the friend was informed that the dog made it through surgery, he said Gruner was on a flight to Berks and that they wanted to pitch a tent in the side yard of the clinic and care for the dog themselves rather than having him hospitalized.
“For three days I had Olivier and his friend camping in my side yard with their dog and it was really fairly entertaining,” he said.
DePlanque explained that his whole staff were females and they swooned each time the muscular good-looking Frenchman would walk through the building to use the restroom.
The dog recovered and lived happily ever after, dePlanque said.
Driving on
At age 78, dePlanque said he is really not ready to retire, but staffing issues necessitated his ending the practice.
“If I had my druthers and COVID was not a factor, I would continue to see people by myself,” he said. “There would be a limited number of patients I could see, a limited number of things I could do.”
He might be ending the practice but dePlanque isn’t the retiring type.
“I’ve built up a folder of possible things to do in retirement, but they all entail being around people,” dePlanque said. “Volunteering in Africa, volunteering in South America, I can’t do that. It’s really frustrating I don’t have a good answer to that question at this point with this stupid COVID stuff.”
One thing he will continue doing in retirement is driving a race car in the 24 Hours of LeMons. Not to be confused with the premier racing in Le Mans, France, the event he races in requires a decidedly less fine-tuned machine.
“It’s what they refer to as crap can racing,” dePlanque said. “Your car, without safety gear, isn’t supposed to cost more than $500.”
Teams are encouraged to develop a theme for the vehicle and members to be carried out during the weekend of endurance racing.
“This was started back in California roughly 12 years ago by some guys saying ‘racing is becoming incredibly complex and too ruleridden. We’re going to make it simple,’ “dePlanque said.
DePlanque and his teammates go all in on the themes.
Last year they took the roof off a two-door coupe and made it a station wagon.
“We cut the roof off a comparable car and grafted that on to the back end of the car,” dePlanque explained enthusiastically. “I painted the entire car yellow, we put wood-look vinyl sticky stuff on the sides, we put a roof rack on it, we tied two small surfboards to it and our theme was The Surfin’ Safari.”
The guys dressed up in board or Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirts and flipflops or other beach footwear and a sound system
also was rigged to play a continuous loop of surfing songs.
“It’s not quite ‘24 hours of LeMons,’ because we’ve had races where we have had cars that couldn’t even complete the opening laps,” dePlanque said. “They came out on the track and the car blew up.”
If the car can make it, the teams trade off driving duties with about two hours for each member on a Saturday and a little less for the four on a Sunday.
The doctor has been racing for 39 years. Prior to the LeMons series, he used to hit the road with the Sports Car Club of America.
“Their last rule book was 800 some odd pages long,” dePlanque said. “That was what the LeMons people were saying was silly.”
‘Got to like what you do’
The two staffers at deP
lanque’s clinic are trying to decide what they will do when the doors close at the end of September.
Lori Rhodes, 53, has worked for the clinic since August 1999.
The Richmond Township resident began as a house
keeper and now helps prepare animals for surgery.
“Doc has taught me a lot, and Sharon as well,” Rhodes said, referring to dePlanque’s veterinary assistant Sharon Gould, who retired a few years ago.
“I’ve seen a lot of every
thing: hit by a car, cats caught in traps and things like that and cat fights,” Rhodes said. “Sometimes these feral cats are really tough to handle and you get beat up.
“It’s not a glamorous job. You’ve got to like what you
do or it won’t work for you.”
She is not sure she wants to continue to work at a veterinary office.
“I’ve seen dogs come in as puppies and I see them going out as old dogs that we’ve euthanized because they are at the end of their life span.
“It gets hard,” she said, pausing a moment to compose herself. “You get attached to them like they’re your family. I don’t know that I want to do it any more. I’m tearing up just thinking about it.”
For Sullivan, 57, what she will be doing is still up in the air.
“I’m going to be weighing my options,” the Oley Township resident said.
She said she has loved meeting the clients that have come through the doors in the past 14 years and had a particular fondness for a Labrador retriever that got into trouble while giving birth.
“One client’s dog gave birth to one puppy at home and then stopped,” Sullivan recalled. “We delivered two more here at the office and that was very interesting and awesome to be a witness to. The family still does have one of the dogs and she’s a mom, so that’s exciting.”
Sullivan said past and present clients are invited t