Clinic Night Owls Put Animal Health First

With sick and wounded animals crying for attention and affection during the frantic night shift at Ventura’s Pet Emergency Clinic, veterinary technician Karen Abeloe doesn’t have the time or the inclination to watch the clock.

The other night, Abeloe’s 7 1/2-hour shift flew by so quickly she didn’t check the time until about 1:30 in the morning, after she was supposed to be off work. Looking at the clock, Abeloe felt her stomach churn: Her replacement was supposed to be there already.

After soothing a shivering Pomeranian named Cuddles, Abeloe called Keith Flanagan, who was on the schedule to work the graveyard shift. Reaching only his answering machine, she resigned herself to filling in for him, meaning she would have to stay up the rest of the night and then work a day job at 8 a.m.

But instead of feeding Flanagan’s surgical gown to the pit bull in cage No. 8, Abeloe felt nothing but empathy for her missing colleague. “It’s really hard to get up in the middle of the night,” she said.

The veterinarian on duty, Dr. Irene Mary Cote, avoids that problem. She doesn’t go to sleep.

With Abeloe as her assistant, Cote was halfway through a double shift and planned to continue her sleepless marathon the next day to check up on the animals.

“It wipes you out,” said Cote, 28 and not yet a year out of veterinary school, “but you have to do it. This is not a 9-to-5 job.”

Cote normally works the day shift but was doing a favor for the regular all-night vet. It is a favor Cote relishes. Cote enjoys the emergency-room action of the night shift. Dogs get hit by cars at night. Owners come home from work at night and discover a sick pet who has eaten snail bait. People who wait all day to see if their ailing pet improves head to the clinic at night.

“I see lots of flea problems during the day,” Cote said. “It’s routine stuff. But at night, you’re doing life-or-death surgery and your adrenaline is really going.”

Earlier in the evening, the clinic’s 800-square-foot treatment area looked like a M*A*S*H unit as Cote and Abeloe administered to half a dozen seriously ill or injured pets.

Cote stared into a gaping lesion on the side of a small dog’s neck. “It could be an infection from an abscessed tooth or maybe we’re dealing with a ruptured salivary gland,” she said to Abeloe.

Anesthetized by an injection of Valium, the dog was lying on its side on the wet table--a long lattice bench on top of a tub--as Abeloe trimmed its neck with an electric shaver, exposing more of the infection.

“Could it be a lymph node?” Abeloe wondered.

In the stacked rows of steel cages behind them, cats screamed and dogs impersonated the hounds of the Baskervilles. Ignoring the racket, Cote delicately probed the open sore with her scalpel.

“I’m going to have to dig deeper,” she said as Abeloe held the dog, stroking it and picking ticks out of its hide.

*

After a drain was stitched into the wound, Cote and Abeloe carried the dog to its cage and then attended to their other post-operative patients: a pit bull tottering on bandaged feet, lucky to be alive after falling out of his owner’s pickup truck on a Ventura street; a gray cat whose owner had accidentally stepped on its broken leg, a black cat with a tube in its lungs to drain an infection.

Cote was worried most about Cuddles, an 11-week-old fur ball with life-threatening hypoglycemia. Unable to eat on its own, the tiny dog--weighing in at just under two pounds--had to have saline solution injected into its jugular every three hours. The injections were painful, but Abeloe calmed the dog afterward, gently brushing its hair.

“Oh, honey, you’re just a little ball of fluff,” she said, rocking Cuddles in her arms and looking into its baleful brown eyes.

Night or day, Abeloe would work on animals for nothing. “I’m here because I love it,” she said. “I’ve already told my boss I’d work even if I wasn’t paid for it.”

The night shift enables the 35-year-old Abeloe to take care of her four children during the day but gives her precious little time at home in Ojai with her husband, who works normal hours. “We never see each other,” she said.

The telephone rang at the clinic about midnight, its jarring sound echoing off the tiled walls in the treatment area. Abeloe answered on the third ring. The caller was a panicked woman whose cat was in the process of delivering kittens.

“Leave them alone and they’ll probably be OK,” Abeloe advised her.

The clinic gets a lot of calls at night--”People wanting to get a diagnosis over the phone,” Cote said disapprovingly.

*

By now, Cote and Abeloe had been working several hours without a break and without food. “If it’s really busy, we won’t leave or go to the bathroom,” said Abeloe, who eats only one meal a day--a salad at lunch. They get through the night on nervous energy and chocolate bars, “which is how we sustain life around here,” Abeloe said.

Cote straightened out her wrinkled lab coat, which was smeared with blood and grime. “We get pretty scruffy at the end of these night shifts,” she said.

It is always nighttime in the windowless treatment area, but the wall clock reminds the two-person staff that most everybody they know is asleep. They can’t call friends or order a pizza over the phone. Working nights gives them a sense of isolation and disorientation.

“Sometimes you’re in a haze or a dream from lack of sleep and food,” Cote said. “Sometimes your body doesn’t react the way you want and you can’t think.”

Cote, who lives in Oxnard with two roommates, got used to long hours and sleepless nights as a graduate student at Colorado State University.

“I love sleep,” she said, “but I’m also a night person.” Becoming a vet partly because it was her late father’s wish, she likes science and animals and isn’t in the profession to make money, “since there isn’t any.”

*

Although most owners usually return after 7 a.m. to pick up their animals, Cote had made special arrangements with the owner of the gray cat with the broken leg. After midnight, Abeloe transferred the cat from the cage to a carrying case.

It was not a simple maneuver. Evidently feeling betrayed after being injured by its owner, the cat was in a foul mood, shrieking and hissing at Abeloe. Sliding a blanket into the cage to corner the cat, she slipped a noose over its head, pulled tight and deftly grabbed the animal behind the neck.

“This is not a nice cat,” Abeloe said, stuffing the furious feline into the carrying case.

Abeloe displayed bite and scratch marks from previous encounters with angry pets. “You can’t be afraid of the animals,” she said. “You get bit, but you still can’t let go.” Suddenly, the front-door buzzer rang. Ding dong. “Avon calling,” Abeloe quipped. As Cote helped Cuddles, who was having a mild seizure, Abeloe went to the door and found an Oxnard woman carrying a Chihuahua wrapped in a blanket. The dog had been vomiting earlier in the day.

“I have to spend lots of money on this stupid dog,” the woman said to Abeloe in an examination room. “But my son loves her.”

Cote checked out the Chihuahua, which had a death grip on the blanket. Finding nothing wrong, she suggested putting the dog on a bland diet. The advice cost the owner $55, which was not as expensive as the $98 someone once paid to treat a pet rat, Abeloe said.

After 2 a.m., the hectic pace slowed considerably, allowing Cote to fill out reports and Abeloe to clean the treatment area. With her relief a no-show, Abeloe could look forward to six hours of mopping floors and doing laundry.

But Flanagan saved the day, or the night, by arriving about 2:30. His excuse for being late: He didn’t know he was working until he walked into his Oxnard home a few minutes earlier and heard Abeloe’s phone message.

“I’ve been up all day,” he told Abeloe and Cote. “Either me or someone else screwed up.”

*

Flanagan went into the office to check the schedule and came back embarrassed. “It was me,” he said sheepishly.

Flanagan, 26, explained that the night shift throws off more than his biorhythms and social life.

“I’m always a day ahead of everyone else,” he said. “My day is finished when everybody else is starting theirs. I have to sleep all day my first day off.”

After a couple of days off, resuming the night schedule is even more difficult, he said. “I hate this shift, but I like the job more than I dislike the graveyard.”

At the clinic, the graveyard isn’t as exciting as earlier night shifts. Although the animals need to be checked constantly, they are generally sleeping in their cages, waiting for their owners.

The vet catnaps on a bed in a small room. During this lull, with country music cranked up on the radio, the technician scrubs instruments and cleans cages.

“Once a week or so we get an (early morning) emergency and it’s me and the doctor,” Flanagan said. “I have to do everything (to assist) and I like the responsibility. You have to think fast.”

But mostly the emergency clinic grows dull after 2 a.m., with the boredom only disrupted by the occasional water fight. “We get goofy on a slow night,” Abeloe said. “But you have to do something to keep up the energy.”

Before she left, Abeloe looked in on Cuddles, who was improving. Abeloe smiled. “If you’re able to save an animal,” she said, “it gives you a feeling of accomplishment.”

Abeloe finally left about 3:30 a.m., nearly 10 hours after she’d started.

“It’s kind of a shock,” she said, “when you come in during the day and go out at night.”