Enslaved by Ducks (28 page)

The receptionist finally banished us to an examination room. I had expected Dr. Hedley’s appearance to cheer me, but he wasn’t himself when he walked in. His usual outgoing personality had been turned inside out. He gestured at me as one might nod vaguely to an unfamiliar silhouette in the dark and he mumbled an introduction to the college-age man at his side. “This is Mr. Dalton. He’s a veterinary school student who is making the rounds with me today. You don’t mind if he observes us?” he asked.

I wanted to tell him that if he needed something to observe, he should have witnessed the scene in the waiting room, but instead I murmured a quick, “That’s fine.”

Dr. Hedley’s detached attitude puzzled me. But after having taken too many animals to too many veterinarians on too many occasions, I’ve learned not to judge the mood of a vet on any given visit too harshly. He might have lost an animal in surgery that morning, or he might have been forced to euthanize a client’s beloved pet when nothing else could be done. Maybe Mr. Dalton depressed him. Whatever had happened to Dr. Hedley earlier, his robustness had evaporated along with his enthusiasm for getting to the bottom of a problem. The mysterious burden he was carrying increased as he peered sadly at Liza, pressed a stethoscope against her chest, and told young Dalton in a teacher’s voice, “We have here a very sick little goose. Do you see how her bill opens and closes as she struggles to breathe?”

The observation took me by surprise. “I hadn’t noticed that,” I said. “I thought she just had something wrong with her leg.”

“How has her appetite been?”

“I don’t know. I assumed it was okay. She has her own bowl of food in her pen.”

“She’s very weak.” Directing his attention back to the student, he explained. “She’s suffering from pneumonia. They don’t last long in this condition.” His expression was grave, but he shaped his lips into a calming smile and told me, “I’ll give you an antibiotic to take home with you. It might possibly help, and it certainly won’t do her any harm.”

Liza hadn’t comprehended the judgment against her and felt no worse after Dr. Hedley’s virtual death sentence had been issued than before. I felt miserable, though. She was a wonderful goose, and I couldn’t imagine walking out into our yard without her and Hailey blistering my ears with their happy greeting.

Three days of giving Liza antibiotics did no discernible good. I gained little from the experience, either, other than the adventure of prying open a goose’s beak and finessing a syringe between her serrated mandibles without losing a finger in the process. Thankfully, Liza took the abuse graciously.

Linda suggested we immediately get a second opinion from Dr. Fuller, the veterinarian who had told us that Stanley was actually Stanley Sue. In the examination room, Dr. Fuller beamed at the sight of his first goose patient. Liza sat placidly on the table with her head bent sleepily toward the blue towel that I had arranged beneath her into a nest. “She’s beautiful,” he told me, stroking her neck. “What seems to be the trouble here?” he asked Liza. “Aren’t we feeling well?”

Translating and elaborating upon Liza’s honk, I told him the full story of her illness, from the first sign of her limp through her inability to walk and Dr. Hedley’s diagnosis of pneumonia. I omitted my encounter with the owl, fearing that the sordid details
might muddy his scientifically trained mind. Dr. Fuller took it all in with brisk nods of his head. Dr. Fuller was tall, rather lanky, and projected an enthusiasm worthy of an Edwardian stage actor in a musical revue. He exuded buckets of intelligence, topped a personable sense of humor with a fluttery laugh, and was an absolute stickler for process. The gears began whirring as soon as he beamed a light into Liza’s eyes and listened to her breathing.

“You hear that?” he asked me, laying down his stethoscope. “There it is again. You can hear a definite click whenever she breathes. Dr. Hedley was certainly correct prescribing Baytril for pneumonia, but I don’t think we have that here. From her labored breathing and weakened condition, I suspect she’s suffering from aspergillosis. It’s common among waterfowl and raptors. Many of them are carriers, and the acute stage can be brought on by the type of stress that the male mallards probably caused her. To be certain, we would need to perform an aspergilla titer.”

My head was swimming. “What was that you said she has?”

“She probably has aspergillosis,” he repeated. “It is a fungal infection that birds can pick up in damp conditions that favor mold growth, especially if their immune system isn’t working like it should. Wet straw usually provides favorable conditions for the fungus, which is why we sometimes see this in animals kept in barns. Humans can get aspergillosis, too, so you have to be careful if you have close contact with an infected bird. It is not something you want to get,” he cautioned. “It resembles tuberculosis and it is very stubborn to treat.”

“Is it fatal for a bird?” I asked, trying not to gulp. I stretched out a hand and placed it on Liza’s back for moral support.

“Not necessarily,” he told me, with a rise in his voice that indicated it usually was. “What I would suggest is that we keep Liza overnight for observation. She’s pretty weak, so I would like to do
a tube feeding to get some nourishment in her, and we’ll give her a vitamin injection. Aspergillosis is difficult to positively diagnose. We need to take a blood sample and send it to a lab in Chicago for an aspergilla titer. The result can take four or five days, so I would recommend that we assume she does have aspergillosis and begin the appropriate treatment immediately with an antifungal medication.”

I didn’t know what a titer was, but I nodded my head while groping for a suitably intelligent facial expression. I left Liza in Dr. Fuller’s hands with far more optimism than the situation warranted. But his thoroughness impressed me with the belief that if anyone could turn the situation around, he could.

Back home I hopped onto the Internet and posted a question on a pet-bird newsgroup, asking if anyone had successfully treated a bird stricken with aspergillosis. A few hours later I received an e-mail from a woman who called herself Toucanlady. “I treated an Amazon parrot that had the acute generalized form of aspergillosis. He was emaciated and very ill. He eventually recovered, but it is a long hard road. Good luck.”

I headed back to the vet’s the next day to pick her up. The staff was all smiles once I stated my name and was recognized as the goose person. “We just love Liza,” a technician told me. “She’s so sweet.”

“She didn’t try to bite anyone?” I asked.

“Liza?” asked the technician incredulously. She reacted as if I had disparaged a lifelong friend with whom she used to share a carton of milk in kindergarten. “Liza wouldn’t bite anybody.”

“No, no, of course not,” I assured her, recalling the muddy beak prints she had embossed on various shirts I owned. “Not Liza.”

Dr. Fuller greeted me in the examination room, then led me through a secret doorway and into the inner recesses of the clinic.
Guided by flickering torchlight, we trudged through miles of winding corridors before ending up in a squeaky-clean hospital area where hard-luck cases received constant care. Liza trumpeted a hello before I spotted her in the second tier of a shiny aluminum-sided high-rise of pens that somehow reminded me of restaurant ovens. I half expected to find our goose resting on a bed of wild rice.

“Liza has been doing very well, haven’t you, Liza?” Dr. Fuller asked. She answered with an enthusiastic volley of staccato notes. The technician handed him a clipboard, which he glanced at briefly. “She took the tube feeding with no problem, and she’s been eating on her own. Aside from her getting her medication on schedule, her recovery depends on making sure she receives sufficient nourishment each day.”

“Linda has already set up living quarters for her on our porch,” I told him. “Or maybe those are for me, and she’ll be moving into the house. At any rate, we’ll wait on her hand and foot until she’s well.”

“In that case,” he said, while writing on the lab report, “I would list her prognosis as ‘Guarded’ upgraded to ‘Fair’”—he circled both words with ballpoint whorls—“as long as she receives the proper care. And I see that she’ll be getting that.”

“She is our golden goose from now on,” I replied.

That remark proved frighteningly accurate once I totaled up the bill for Liza’s treatment and lab tests, then added the cost of a pricey prescription that we couldn’t get filled just anywhere. Her antifungal medication wasn’t an off-the-shelf item. It needed to be compounded, meaning its chemical constituents had to be carefully measured and mixed by hand. Apparently, few pharmacists in the area did anything more ambitious than transferring pills from large containers to small bottles and filling out insurance forms. The
closest drug store staffed by pharmaceutical initiates skilled in the ancient alchemical principles of compounding turned out to be a drug store located on a nearly impossible-to-access triangle-shaped block of businesses in the Grand Rapids suburb of Walker. Cars whizzed past me as I gathered cobwebs in the shadow of a stop sign on the busiest side street in America. From the condition of the drug store’s archaic glass-brick façade, its neon sign promising a soda fountain, and a yellowed portrait of Speedy Alka-Seltzer, few motorists apparently braved the left-hand turn to the Park Hills parking lot.

The slatted wood floors inside the Park Hills Drug Store squeaked and groaned like a patient in a sickbed as I threaded my way through narrow aisles stocked with unfamiliar palliatives and elixirs. Ahead of me in line at the pharmacy counter stood an elderly woman so frail of frame, I wondered how she had ever darted through the traffic out front until I realized from the slow pace at which Park Hills conducted its business that she had undoubtedly been waiting for her prescription since Reagan’s first inaugural. When my turn finally came and I informed the pudgy pharmacist, “I’m here to pick up a prescription for Tarte,” he couldn’t have been more excited to meet me.

“You’re here for the goose?” he asked, blinking his large eyes.

“Yes, prescription for Tarte, please,” I repeated.

“Matty,” he called to the sixty-something woman rattling glass vials behind him. “It’s the man with the goose.”

“How’s the goose doing?” Matty brightly asked me.

“We put her medication in a liquid medium as your veterinarian requested,” the pharmacist explained, as he removed a small plastic bottle from a refrigerator next to the cash register. “I tried to choose a flavor that I thought your goose would like. This one is liver. We had a fish-flavor base, but I didn’t know if geese cared for fish.”

“Not as much as they love liver,” I assured him. “Anyway, she won’t have much of an opportunity to taste it. I pretty much squirt it straight into her crop with a syringe.”

“You use a syringe?” he asked in wonderment, widening his eyes so far, he seemed positively owlish. Who cooks for you, I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t want any trouble. “I guess you couldn’t use a spoon.” He chuckled as he popped the medicine into a bag with a handful of pro bono syringes.

“I hope your goose gets better,” Matty told me. “We’ve done cats before, but never somebody’s goose.”

“That would explain the liver and fish flavorings,” I replied, as I edged away.

Linda set up living quarters for Liza on our enclosed porch that would have been the envy of any housebound goose. Filling a wading pool with straw, she topped it with one of several bed sheets that she changed and washed throughout the day. After dark, she tossed a lightweight blanket over Liza’s back and would have offered her a pillow if she could have wrested mine away from me. A space heater took the chill off the May nighttime temperatures.

Within easy reach of Liza’s pool were bowls containing water, scratch feed, and mud, though she preferred us to hold the bowls whenever she ate. She required dirt for the strictly utilitarian purpose of grinding and predigesting the raw corn kernels in her gizzard, but she attacked it with the vigor of a gourmand devouring a sinfully rich dessert. Half submerged in mud, her beak snapped open and shut almost too rapidly for the eye the follow, and in her eating frenzy she would all but knock the dish out of my hand. To supplement her bowl foods, I gathered dandelion leaves from the yard.

“Look at these beauties,” I’d brag to Linda. “I found them near the mailbox, mixed in with some annoying grass.”

Liza relished dandelion leaves even more than mud, tootling her
appreciation with alto-saxophone slurs while yanking an entire handful from my fingers at a time. “Liza, you made me drop them all,” I’d complain, and she would honk gleefully between mouthfuls.

Despite her good spirits, Liza remained too weak to walk or even rise to her feet on her own. If the sun was shining, and we didn’t want her to have to spend all day on the shaded porch, we would carry her down to the duck pen and set her in an area on the girls’ side that I had fenced off. Sequestering her discouraged the others from their genetically-imprinted urge to pick on the weak, and it also kept them from getting close enough to catch her aspergillosis. Once or twice I carried Liza out to the front lawn and placed her in the middle of a virile cluster of dandelions, hoping that she would help herself. But even after twenty days on her antifungal medication, she remained gravely ill.

“Sweetie.” I looked up from the newspaper on a cool June evening as Linda came into the living room from the porch. She spoke softly, breaking bad news gently. “I don’t think Liza’s going to make it through the night. She’s having a lot of trouble breathing.”

I took a cushion onto the porch and sat on the floor next to our goose. She rallied briefly when she realized that I was there, even favoring me with a conversational honk, but a few seconds later she lowered her head to her chest and squeezed her eyes shut. I tried tempting her to eat with a fresh bowl of mud and a handful of tender dandelion leaves, but she wouldn’t take any food. Her entire body strained each time she took a breath, and her wheezing was unusually loud. “I’m sorry, hon,” I told her, petting her neck. Linda came out to spread a blanket over her and adjust the space heater. Finally both of us told her good night and went back into the house.