Read Online The Hippo with Toothache by Lucy H Spelman - Free Book Online Page B

his shower for an hour, for example, he would lie down in the middle of his enclosure. His eyelids and ears drooped. He would rarely come over to the bars. At that point, we’d schedule him for a complete trim under anesthesia.
    I knelt back down next to the rhino’s huge head, and watched again as Paul worked on the feet. He used a rope to fashion a tourniquet just below the rhino’s tarsal-metatarsal (ankle) joint. Using a short piece of tubing with a needle on the end, a butterfly catheter, he quickly found a vein and injected the medicine. It would flood the tissue of the foot and stay there until he removed the rope. He followed that with some lidocaine, a local anesthetic, to ensure that Mo wouldn’t feel anything.
    For the bandage, Paul started with a combination of cotton and gauze wrap, covered by stretchy material calledVetwrap. We’d been through a fair amount of trial and error with this last step. Our first set of bandages stayed on for only a few hours. Mo got his feet wet and kicked them off. We wanted the bandages to last a day or two, long enough to keep his feet clean immediately after the trim. The answer? Duct tape, of course: the wide gray sticky tape used to patch holes in just about anything. The brand in our kit that day had a clever brand name, Duck Tape, with a picture of a yellow duck standing in a puddle of water.
    The team waited for me to give the rhino a bit more anesthetic and then pushed him up onto his sternum and over onto the other side, folding his legs under his body. Mo’s heavy head rested in my lap during the shift, temporarily pinning me to the floor. Adjusting the blindfold, I checked his eyes again: no change. The extra dose had worked perfectly. I couldn’t resist giving his neck a light pat. His rough skin felt like concrete with a little flex, reminding me of Rudyard Kipling’s description: bumpy plates of armor.
    Thirty minutes later, just as Paul finished bandaging the second rear foot, the rhino blinked and opened his eyelids extremely wide. The initial narcotic anesthetic had begun to wear off at just the right time. Minutes later, with most of the staff and equipment cleared away, I gave Mo a drug that would reverse the remaining effects of the anesthetic, took a last set of vital signs, and removed his catheter. Erin stayed with me at his head. Her shoes spattered with blood, she looked tired, having spent most of the time bent over, helping to hold Mo’s feet.
    â€œHe’ll feel so much better in a few days,” I said quietly as we waited for the effects of the reversal drug to kick in.
    â€œI know,” Erin responded. “I just wish we didn’t have to put him through this much, at his age.”
    As the anesthetic reversal took effect, the rhino took a huge breath and lifted his nose. We pulled out the ear gauze, removed the blindfold, and backed out of the stall. Mo heaved himself to his feet, wobbling. Watery blood dripped from his elbows. He took a few steps, shaking his bandaged feet. The duct tape held. Once again, he’d sailed through the anesthesia. When I stopped by to check him two hours later, he appeared remarkably normal.
    From past experience, we knew the rhino’s feet would improve after the trim. We also knew we hadn’t solved anything. The infection would return within several months. In fact, Mo had been suffering from this problem for much of his life. It started long before he came to Washington, DC, while he lived at a zoo in Florida. Maybe the antibiotic perfusion would knock down the bacteria and keep them away for a bit longer this time. Like Erin, I wondered how many more times we could anesthetize him safely.
    Some months later, at a veterinary conference, I attended a presentation about foot problems in rhinos, expecting to hear the familiar advice: trim and trim again; try antibiotic footbaths. Instead, the speaker, Dr. Mark Atkinson, focused on what he had learned about greater