It’s not exactly a dog’s life but it can be tough being a vet, having to deal with both the animals and their owners. THEO PANAYIDES battles his way through thank-you notes and yapping dogs to meet one
Dr Andreas Artemiou interrupts our interview to deal with a patient. “Yianni,” he instructs his assistant, “this gentleman’s dog will be staying in for a bronchoscopy.” I can’t see the dog from where I’m sitting, but the owner looks a bit concerned. “He’ll just go to sleep for a bit, then I’ll go down with the camera and have a look at his bronchi,” adds Andreas reassuringly. The owner nods dubiously, casting a fond look at his pet.
People get emotional when it comes to their animals. Almost an entire wall of Andreas’ waiting-room, in an old house near the US Embassy in Nicosia, is covered with thank-you notes from grateful pet-owners – from little kids (you can tell by the scrawly handwriting) to elderly-sounding ladies, animals ranging from ‘Ginger the Devil Cat’ to the Button cats, 18 of them, signing ‘their’ letter with names like ‘Belly Button’ and ‘Jenson Button’. “Thanks for saving my life (I know, I am not a cat),” reads one missive, leaving it ambiguous whether the first half of the sentence refers to the cat or the owner. Others aren’t so ambiguous, unabashedly taking on their pet’s persona: “My barks are not enough to thank you for making me well again,” writes one (surprisingly literate) dog. Other letters are more poignant: “Thank you for trying to save my beloved Maximilian,” reads one heart-rending note, “and for burying him at the farm.”
It’s a vital point, and easy to forget unless (like Andreas) you’ve been an animal doctor for the past 13 years: unlike all other branches of medicine (except perhaps paediatrics), the doctor-patient relationship isn’t one-on-one, it’s triangular. You deal with animals, but also with their owners. “A vet has a double burden,” he explains. “He’s responsible both for his patient and for those behind his patient, especially when those behind his patient are young children, who are emotionally very attached. So you feel twice the stress”.
Not only does a vet do everything – “he’s a pathologist, a dermatologist, an eye doctor, a surgeon” – he sometimes has to be a grief counsellor too, especially today when pets have become so important in people’s lives. Andreas’ father was also a vet (it’s a medical family; his brother is a heart surgeon in Vienna), but things were different 50 years ago, at least in Cyprus: “when your dog got sick you didn’t take him to a doctor,” you just waited till he died, buried him and got another one. Such blasé attitudes are no longer common, which of course is wonderful – animal cruelty is far less than it used to be – but also has another side, a larger burden placed on the animal which almost amounts to a kind of exploitation.
“Social norms are changing,” notes Andreas, “people are becoming alienated from each other, and you see sometimes that the pet becomes a substitute for someone you would like to have in your life, but don’t.” Elderly people living alone, for instance, “under normal circumstances should have a better relationship with their children or grandchildren. Solitary people who, in the old days, lived in a neighbourhood and had the rest of the neighbourhood as their friends, now you see that neighbours confine themselves to their own houses. Because we no longer have in Cyprus what we used to have” – that sense of community – pets have assumed a new, symbolic importance, standing in for friends, lovers, children. The risks are, firstly, that the pet will be forgotten when its owner actually finds what (s)he’s missing, and secondly that owners may become too attached, losing sight of the animal’s needs.
You see it sometimes in very bad cases, says Andreas sadly, terminal cancers or elderly animals with heart conditions. “You have to be the advocate of the animal,” he explains. “And you have to fight, sometimes, for the rights of the pet. What I mean is, to keep a suffering animal alive with medicines, just to give its owner the happiness of feeling that the animal is still there – well, that’s just wrong”. Often, the triangular relationship gets in the way. “Often you have to be the bad guy,” he admits, “which gets misunderstood by the owner.”
It’s the vet’s job, for instance, to chide misguided owners for feeding their dogs to the point of obesity. It’s the vet’s job to ask them not to cry in front of their sick pets – because, of course, “the owner knows why he’s crying but the animal, which has its own pain and stress, gets even more stressed out when it hears its owner crying and doesn’t know why”. It’s also the vet’s job to get shirty when owners neglect to keep the neck collar on a pet that’s just had surgery; “Many owners feel sorry for the dog, [saying] ‘oh why does he have to wear it?’, or they say ‘it makes him knock things over in the house’, so they take off the collar then bring you the dog with open wounds”. That’s when he gets a bit “intense,” admits Andreas, though not out of spite. “I have to support and defend my patient”.
Easy to see how Andreas Artemiou might get intense occasionally; he’s a powerful presence, an ebullient 40-year-old with a booming voice and larger-than-life air. He used to be overweight, having piled on the pounds when he quit smoking, but has now slimmed down – though he’s also started smoking again. Maybe it’s inevitable, given the stress of the job and the hours he works. Emergency calls outside office hours are par for the course; sometimes he’ll get woken up every night for a week, or else he might trudge home after an emergency only to be called out again before he’s even settled down to bed. What can you do, he asks rhetorically, when people call you up to say their pet is dying? “You can’t say ‘I’m sleeping now, come by tomorrow for a post-mortem’.”
There are other occupational hazards. He shows me his hands, with deep scars on the knuckles and arms from patients who refused to be diagnosed without a struggle. (Yiannis the assistant shows his own scars, and I note that his are fresher; “That’s because he’s the new guy!” laughs Andreas; “The new guy always gets the worst scratches!”) Cats are a menace, of course, their bites becoming infected “to the point where you can’t move your hand because of the inflammation, and you have to take strong antibiotics”; they also tend to lash out, whereas “dogs do warn you before they attack”. Nor is the job exactly glamorous. As I enter the waiting-room, waiting for the interview, I can hear loud yapping from inside the office, a frantic owner scolding his dog angrily and Andreas’ voice saying “The poo’s all stuck together!” – his hand, presumably, halfway up some panic-stricken animal’s rectum.
Our interview also gets sidetracked a few times, an uninterrupted half-hour clearly something of a luxury in Andreas’ world. Someone calls up seeking information about rabies tests in Britain. Someone else asks about administering medicine to a sick pet (“Wrap him in a towel,” warns Andreas, “so he won’t scratch you”). A man brings in a Pointer who’s going abroad and needs his shots. The doctor’s own dog, a German Shepherd named Faust, loiters in the background (he also has cats, birds and a gang of swans in a pond in the backyard). He’s always been a pet-owner, says Andreas – as children, he and his brother even had their own horses – and always wanted to be an animal doctor, even in the bad old days before dog shelters and animal-welfare laws.
Things are better now, though of course far from perfect. He still gets frequent cases of animal poisoning, not just during hunting season when dogs go out in the fields but even on the streets of Nicosia. “Some neighbour doesn
’t like the fact that people walk their dogs outside his house, so he puts down poison,” sighs Andreas. “Or he’s bought a new car, and doesn’t want cats scratching it. Or near restaurants and kebab shops sometimes, especially in summer when they put the tables outside and cats come for a bite of souvlaki.” The basic problem is that it’s entirely legal to keep unlimited quantities of pesticides at home – and though the infamous Lanate is now banned, it’s widely smuggled in from the occupied north; besides, even Lanate is preferable to the new poison cocktails, where you don’t even know what antidote to give because “you don’t know what those sick minds have mixed together”. People who do that are “perverts,” he says, not mincing words. “When you see an animal twitching for minutes on end, in that agony of dying – you’ve got to be sick in the head for doing something like that.”
Animal abuse comes in many forms, he adds. You don’t have to beat a dog, or pour boiling water over it, to abuse it; keeping it chained 12 months a year, or “in a small cage in the field opposite your house”, or out on your balcony in the middle of summer, is abuse too. Then there are owners who buy a pet because it’s fashionable – because a certain breed starred in a movie, or has been endorsed by some celebrity – or else they buy a puppy because it’s cute, not thinking (or caring) that the puppy will grow up, and require responsibility. Even sadder than abuse is perhaps neglect, the pet that’s outgrown its cuteness and now “lives in our home as an object, meaning we just provide it with the basics – food, water, and the very occasional walk”. Not attention, in other words. Not love.
There’s a lot of love in Andreas Artemiou’s office. There’s a lot of fear and loathing too, pets and owners on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Dogs smell day-old blood from yesterday’s surgery, or the pheromones – the sheer animal fear – of the previous patient, and go crazy. Simple love of animals won’t cut it; sometimes you have to be ruthless. “There are animals that try to show their strength,” he explains, “so you have to show them that you have strength also”. Sometimes, especially with dogs, Andreas has to send the owner outside, leaving the animal feeling abandoned and vulnerable so it’ll co-operate. Some come in with symptoms of depression, or false pregnancy or paranoid jealousy. Being a vet is a hotbed of mind-games, violent emotions and the constant threat of pandemonium. Someone even brought in a crocodile once, Andreas and his team taping the beast’s mouth shut so it wouldn’t kill them while being X-rayed.
Yet it’s mostly the love that shines through – the almost obsessive love lavished by people on their (not so) dumb animals. I stop by the wall of thank-you notes on my way out, touchingly earnest messages brimming with the writers’ joy at having their pets back again – and sometimes a numb, inexpressible sadness when they know they’ll never hear the familiar barking sound welcoming them home again, or feel the familiar snout nuzzling them awake in the morning. One note is an elegy from an owner to her dog Fernando, thanking Andreas for all he’s done for the family over the years. We’ll miss coming by the office, says the note. “We’ll miss you grumbling that ‘he’s grown fat again’.
“But more than that, I’ll miss my Nando.”
