Chapter 7: Christmas Day

Larissa started work on Christmas day at seven AM. Her first order of business was a phone call with her peers in other zones; she didn’t know all of them but recognised their names. At least she had someone else to call on if she needed help; today she felt really exposed. All her fears had come crashing back. Not even qualified ... and she knew that they steered her away from the medically complicated cases – well, not today. Today she was it, and mostly on her own. Sure, she could call on the others for help, but like her, they were the juniors too, even if they were qualified. She shook her head and did her best to bury her fears. Whatever came, she had to deal with it, and Mark and Bob had both told her they were confident she had what it took. And Ruth, which really mattered to her. If only she was as confident as they were.

Julian sat in the passenger’s seat and started working on his morning project: a Merry Christmas text message he was going to send to all of their friends from either of their phones, while Larissa worked. The message was supposedly pretty simple: a high level summary of their year in two sentences, thanks for being part of their journey, large or small, and best wishes for a happy day, and a good year to come. It kind of doubled as new year for them, since Thomas said they’d be off the grid when they went camping by the beach. But cramming all that in a concise message took time, and it was nearly ninety minutes later before he actually started sending it. Also, it took that long because Larissa was busy, as one of the few workers out there.

Her work list looked surprisingly long; her dispatcher was one of two working alone in the headquarters – more juniors – and they did their best to prioritise the jobs, working through the semi-urgent jobs and letting the really urgent ones – car accidents – interrupt her work. Initially she was seeing dogs and cats unexpectedly sick on Christmas morning, typically vomiting. She went into them with an assumption that they’d found some Christmas cheer somewhere, and eaten something they shouldn’t have. Or got hold of some egg-nog; dogs loved that stuff, but it was a great way to kill them – just a matter of alcohol dosage and body weight. One dog, a surly teenager had given her egg-nog to the dog on the sly. It might live, or not; on any other day, she would have taken it to an animal hospital, but they had skeleton staff too. Another was a confused old lady who wanted her dog to be happy too, but she hadn’t given her dog nearly as much as she thought.

In between jobs, Julian read her out lovely responses from their friends and family, thanking them for the message, passing on their own news, and thanking her for working, for those that knew. Julian invited a smaller group of friends and family to the beach right outside their house for Boxing Day, since the weather looked great.

After the confused old lady, she had her first challenge for the day: a woman home alone, isolated on Christmas day because she had a positive covid diagnosis, and her dog had been burnt – scalded by boiling water. Julian stayed in the car, watching carefully while Larissa nervously armoured up with PPE. Larissa wasn’t really worried about herself – young, extremely fit, triple vaccinated ... she had a very low chance of any actual illness, but catching the virus would mean she’d have to isolate at home for a week or two – she really didn’t want to do that. And unlike a couple of her nurse friends, who did this all day every day, she wasn’t experienced with the full PPE protocol. But both Julian and Larissa double checked her list, and she seemed ready; mainly she had to hope that the dog didn’t shred her PPE – the PPE gear seemed pretty fragile by her way of judging things.

Inside the house, she found a lonely and overwhelmed woman; a messy divorce during the year, and she couldn’t be with her kids and their families on Christmas day, and now her only companion was gravely injured, and she wasn’t even allowed to take it to emergency, since she was a positive case. All that meant that she was deeply appreciative that Larissa would come to visit. The scald was serious and painful for the dog but not life threatening at all, so Larissa followed the textbook, and talked to the woman while she was doing that – that seemed more important, actually. The woman was doing okay ... but just okay. Fever, difficulty breathing ... but not bad enough to call for help, though her kids were checking on her regularly. But one thing Larissa could do for her, and did, was figure out how to get Zoom working on her tablet so she could join her grandkids virtually – better than nothing, and the woman was very thankful indeed for the visit.

Out in the car, she carefully removed all the PPE as she’d practiced, and binned it. Both her and Julian double checked her process and integrity as she did it, and its integrity hadn’t been compromised by the dog, though it had struggled in her arms a little, so it seemed that she should be okay. It was certainly a relief to get the PPE off, she was already dripping with sweat underneath it.

After that, her vehicle driven work picked up sharply, now that the traffic was picking up. The car accidents were sad; people on the way to family lunches with their favourite pets, minor car accidents but dogs were mostly not restrained so things escalated quickly – lots of broken ribs and face injuries.

When she arrived at her third accident, things suddenly got intense. Jumping out of her van, she was welcomed by a small group gathered around a young man, about the same age as Larissa herself, who was sitting on the kerb beside a damaged car, sobbing his heart out. Larissa hadn’t ever seen a man so deeply upset – this guy was gutted, and his keening cries were hard to listen to. A woman was waiting for her and explained. He was a passenger in the car, and it had been t-boned by another car. The driver – his sister – was unhurt though severely shaken, but he was bruised and battered, and at least had a broken arm. An ambulance woman was attending to him. But his agony was because he was blind, and his guide dog had been sitting at his feet in the car and had taken the brunt of the impact. It was alive, but things didn’t look good.

Larissa went straight into the zone for this one, she’d give it everything she had; she knew how close these relationships were, she also knew how valuable these dogs were, and something about this case, it just tugged at her heart: she really cared about this one. But it didn’t look good – the dog had significant trauma to its upper abdomen and rib cage, at least two broken legs, and massive pain and bleeding. As quickly as she could, she stemmed the bleeding and got the dog on a drip to maintain his circulation, adding some sedative to dull his senses and stop him from moving around. She had to be careful there – she couldn’t deal with an overdose out here on the roadside. Once she’d done this, she got on her phone, and called the nearest open vet hospital – this one was grounds to get a vet surgeon in even on Christmas day, and she let them know what was coming, and that she’d be there as soon as she could.

Now, the trickiest part, dealing with the young man. She sat down beside him, and put her hand on his shoulder, and introduced herself as the rescue vet. He stopped his wretched crying, and asked how was Bud, was there any chance? Larissa was honest with him. “It’s hard to say. He’s alive, stable, and pretty sedated, but I don’t know how much internal damage there is, and how much blood he lost, though it’s a lot. The animal hospital has called a surgeon in, and I’m taking Bud there now.” Can I come with him? he asked. For anyone else, the answer would be flat no in these circumstances; he needed to get to hospital himself, and she’d heard him refusing to go already. Larissa looked at the ambulance officer – what did she think? She shrugged, he did need to go to hospital, to get his arm x-rayed, but whatever was happening with his arm if there was more work required wasn’t going to be today, so an hour or two to see his dog go into surgery, might be more important this time, but if she did, the ambulance couldn’t take him, of course.

Larissa nodded, and turned to his sister, sitting next to him crying. “If you two come to the animal hospital with me, can you get someone to take you to hospital after?” Sure, she said, family will help, they’re coming, but what about her car? – couldn’t lock that up now. “Well, Julian, my fiancé here, he won’t fit in the van with you in it, so he’s going to sit here with your car until I can figure out how to pick him up again. He’ll watch it for a while.”

So she left Julian behind, and took the two of them to the animal hospital, the sister sitting where Julian had sat, and the blind guy in the compassion seat in the back of the van sitting next to his dog, crying quietly. She had time to talk to the sister – as she expected, she was quite traumatised by what had happened, and she burst into tears again as soon as Larissa started moving. A few minutes later, she started to talk, and she was full of appreciation for what Larissa had done – a life saver, she said. Harry is so close to Bud, he can’t go anywhere without him. And he had to wait years for Bud ... it’ll be a disaster if he doesn’t live. Thank you so much for what you’ve done, and I knew as soon as I saw you, it was all going to be right – you just looked like you know what you’re doing.

They were waiting for her at the entrance to the hospital, and handover was quick and clean, since nothing else was going on. Harry’s sister helped him into the hospital, and told her that their family was twenty minutes away. Thanks, and good luck getting re-united with Julian.

Larissa shrugged – that was the risk being her passenger for the day, because she couldn’t take any time to fetch him, particularly not this day. Next call, unless another motor accident interrupted, was a wildlife road accident diametrically opposite where Julian was. When she got there, the accident was something she’d seen too often; a big kangaroo had run into a car from the side, both of them going maybe eighty km/hr – there was a big dent on the side of the car, and then the driver had lost control and rammed into a tree, writing the car off. He’d done well, though, and braked enough that the humans in the car were only shaken, not injured. The roo: that was a write off too; hitting a car at full speed often totalled the car, not the roo, but this one, it’d done too much damage to its neck and chest and then the car behind had smacked into it. A female, no joey in evidence, and no chance it would live without surgery, which wasn’t going to be funded. Larissa sighed, and shot the kangaroo, to the despair of the children in the car that had been hit. On another day, she might have had more time for the children, but she did what she could to make it easier for them.

Then she got a message from Julian: Harry’s cousin had turned up, they had cleaned the car out, and it was fine to sit there unattended, waiting for a tow truck, and now he was at the animal hospital, and the cousin was bringing him to wherever Larissa was going to next. She looked at her next job, a new one: sudden loss of consciousness in a pet dog, and sent him the address, between where they were.

She was thankful Julian was with her on this one. As soon as she walked into the house, she could smell the anger, the tension. Yeah, Christmas day, happy families. Except for when it all fell apart, and it had here, she could tell. A frowning middled aged man showed her out the back to where their dog was lying. Larissa’s operating assumption was Christmas cheer, though she added domestic abuse to her list of things to consider. She glanced at Julian – yes, he’d smelt it in the air too. She’d just started looking at the dog when the guy’s wife was standing behind her demanding to know what had happened to her dog, and whether Larissa could tell her whose fault it was. Right, here was at least part of the problem, and this woman, she sure looked drunk. Larissa knew the sort, and ignored her, looking at the dog’s signs and symptoms, and running through differential diagnoses in her head. Weird, this almost looked like ... Larissa whipped some gloves on and looked carefully, and found what she was looking for – a snake bite mark on the dog’s neck. Showing the woman what she’d found led to world war three in the family; the woman claimed to have seen a snake in their yard a few days before but her husband hadn’t believed her, and now it was on between all of them. And the woman demanded that Larissa deal with the snake too - at least Larissa could shut that one down easily, since policy was that she didn’t have anything to do with snakes in any fashion. Not that anyone would see the snake again for weeks anyway, since they had a lovely concrete patio for it to hide under.

There was about ten of them there, watching this, and getting drawn in, except for two younger children, maybe about nine and seven years old. She indicated for them to follow her, and asked them to help her carry the things she’d need – anything to get them out of there. In the van, as she got the anti-venom out of the fridge, she asked the kids whether they were OK. Not much fun, the older one said, but Mum warned us this could happen. Larissa smiled at them sadly, and said they were her team, and to ignore all the adults. Inside, the war was heating up, so she asked Julian to shut them up, while the kids helped her with the dog.

She was in her zone, focused on the dog, so she didn’t listen to what Julian said, but the noise stopped, and then the kids helped her by holding the motionless dog still while she got the dog on a drip and a disposable oxygen line and got antivenom and histamine into it. She got on the phone but couldn’t find any hospitals willing to take the dog on Christmas afternoon – just not worth it, given the poor underlying outlook for dogs bitten by a snake. Now what? The dog needed to stay on the drip; her usual role was to get it anti-venom, then on a drip and get it to nursing care. Well, all she could do was leave it with them and hope for the best. Her only peer currently not busy didn’t have any better ideas, and one of the others had already had to do something similar himself, he said. She looked around and found the calmest adult, an older lady, and explained to her and the kids what they had to do – keep the dog motionless as much as possible, keep the drip running, clean up messes when they happened, as they must with the drip running, and watch continuously for evidence of internal bleeding; if there was evidence of that, then onto the phone with the animal hospital; that’s when they might change their mind about taking the dog. And don’t let it get the drip or the oxygen out. And otherwise, watch it all night, wait and if it was still alive in the morning, take it to a vet hospital for further care. Gently, she asked the kids – could this dog rely on them? They promised her with big serious eyes, they’d look after the dog.