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pull through,’ she kept saying.
    I didn’t like to put a damper on her hopes, but I couldn’t forget the mess of intestine beneath the neat row of stitches.
    When Teresa and the gang arrived to collect Gemma, the enormous bouquet of flowers almost hid the three small girls as Sarah and Kate struggled to carry them. Mary brought up the rear with a card not unlike the one Gemma had got.
    ‘We love you. Thank you for making our dog better. From Sarah, Mary and Kate.’
    While thanking them profusely, I cautioned Teresa. ‘It’s not all over yet. It takes at least five days for the wound to heal. There’s an awful lot of damage inside.’
    ‘I know, but just look at her. She looks so well.’
    I said nothing but hoped, as I had never hoped before, that my doubts were mislaid.
    I heard nothing for two days.
    I was just beginning to relax when on Friday morning, I opened the waiting room door to see Teresa, Gemma and the girls inside. I quickly ushered the kids off to Roger with the promise of a lollipop if they didn’t try to kidnap him.
    ‘She’s been in absolutely brilliant form, better than ever before. But she didn’t eat very well this morning. I thought you’d like to see her.’
    I cursed to myself as I read her temperature. One hundred and three. This was just what I had been dreading. Gemma winced as I palpated her abdomen. I could justimagine the contaminating fluids leaking from the sieve-like gut into the abdomen, and the resultant peritonitis. I shook my head slowly at Teresa.
    ‘This is what I was afraid of. We’ll have to keep her in again.’
    The lollipops consoled the three girls enormously when I explained to them that Gemma would have to stay with me again.
    ‘She must like you an awful lot,’ said Kate nodding her head wisely.
    I hoped they would still like me when this was over.
    I rang an older and more experienced colleague to look for advice.
    ‘Should I try opening her up again?’
    ‘Good Lord, no. There’s nothing more you can do than what you’re doing already. By the sounds of it, the whole thing was a disaster from the start. I think you’ll lose her, but still, you never know …’
    I wished I hadn’t rung him.
    I seemed to spend the next three days either with Gemma or on the phone to Teresa. Gemma was getting steadily worse.
    ‘If she’s no better by tomorrow, we’ll have to start thinking if it’s fair to let her go on much longer,’ I said quietly to Teresa.
    She wasn’t able to answer me.
    The next morning, Gemma was dead.
    I couldn’t believe it as I stared at what remained of the once majestic animal, the ‘big sister’ to three bright and happy young girls.
    I broke down when I rang Teresa to tell her.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, so aware of the inadequacy of the words.
    I never saw Teresa or her three little girls again. I don’t know if they ever got another dog or if they had lost faith in me – either way, I couldn’t blame them.

CHAPTER FOUR
A HELPING HAND
    I am fully convinced that to the day I die I will be absolutely useless at dehorning cattle. From the time I first qualified, it seemed that the simple act of detaching cattle from their horns was not for me. After a few hopeless attempts high up in the Dublin mountains during my first year in practice, I wasn’t too concerned at my seeming lack of natural aptitude for the job – after all, at the time I didn’t seem to have a natural aptitude for anything veterinary related! But, as time passed, I gradually found myself becoming less useless at certain jobs, and on certain occasions I really thought I was becoming in some way competent . But with dehorning cattle – or ‘skulling’ as it was known – I seemed to make little progress. Within a short time, I became proficient at injecting the local anaesthetic to numb the nerve supply to the horn. I enjoyed carefully inserting the needle in under the ridge of bone knowing that any further resentment on the part of the animal would be