Too hot to handle
Gavin’s attention drifted somewhat as a shard of Spring sunshine refracted through the tiny consulting room window, an architect’s lamentable nod to allowing a token shaft of natural light... | 3.5 min read
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Ted’s early morning reverie was rudely interrupted by a large black Range Rover bearing down on him as he swung into the practice car park. Ted stamped on his brakes, causing the usual vet car flotsam of syringe cases, sandwich wrappings and empty energy drink cans to hurtle unceremoniously into the footwell. Muttering a few choice expletives under his breath, he glanced in his rear-view mirror and recognised the car as belonging to Mr Bishop-Brennan, one of the practice’s more demanding sheep farmer clients. Farmers had moaned to him so often there was no money in sheep he had started to believe it was true, but as he watched the shiny new Range Rover roaring off into the distance, Ted had his doubts. The purpose of Mr Bishop-Brennan’s flying visit was to deposit his trailer containing five Suffolk cross rams for vasectomy, so he could use them as teasers on his pedigree Texel flock that autumn. However, as they careered down the ramp into a holding pen, Dougal, the practice’s new assistant, pointed out one which was a tad lame, a bigger beast with a chunk missing from its left ear. With a burgeoning list of visits as long as his arm, Ted took advantage of Dougal’s youthful enthusiasm and, hurrying off, tasked him with reminding Ted to examine the gnarly looking ram later, pointing out its new career would be rather short-lived if it couldn’t run fast enough to catch the ewes.Black sheep
It was a predictably hectic day and the sun was fast approaching the yardarm before Ted and Dougal got round to performing the surgery. Remembering his earlier conversation, Ted asked his junior colleague to examine the lame ram while he was wrestling wearily with one of its friends. Dougal cheerily reported to be a mild case of foot rot and released it back into the woolly melee. At that point, Ted’s phone rang and two minutes later he was back in his mobile skip, heading to what proved to be a rather epic calving while Dougal, ever the boy scout, finished the last of the rams by the light of his trusty head torch.
"Mr B-B blamed Ted for incompetent surgery and demanded what seemed rather fanciful compensation for the loss of the high-quality lambs he had been anticipating."
It was obvious to all the sire of these unwanted arrivals was one of the teaser rams. Mr B-B blamed Ted for incompetent surgery and demanded what seemed rather fanciful compensation for the loss of the high-quality lambs he had been anticipating. His heart sinking, Ted contacted the Society and was asked by the Claims Consultant to send all the records he could muster of the day in question, his record of the ear numbers of the teaser rams and a consent form for a start. To his increasing consternation, Ted could find none of these documents; then it dawned on him this was because they simply didn’t exist. The only paperwork was the invoice made up by Dougal which simply said, ‘To vasectomy, 4 rams’. An uncomfortable trip to the farm revealed all. When Ted turned the rams up for a closer look, he realised the odd-eared ram that had been lame had not been near a scalpel and when Ted got back to the surgery, it soon became clear how the mix up had occurred. Poor Dougal had misunderstood Ted’s comments to mean that if the ram was lame for any reason, Mr Bishop-Brennan didn’t want it doing under any circumstances and hadn’t thought to ask whether in view of the eminently rectifiable cause of the lameness, the ram should be operated on. This slipup, coupled with the complete absence of any records to identify the rams, let alone a consent form, meant the Society had no alternative but to accept liability and settle Mr B-B’s claim.
"It was obvious to all the sire of these unwanted arrivals was one of the teaser rams."
While a great relief to Ted and his partners when it was all over, the farmer’s loss was independently valued at well over twenty thousand pounds, a substantial sum for what seemed a minor miscommunication. Consoling a rather penitent Dougal, Ted resolved that in future he would make a written record of his clinical work, just as his colleagues on the small animal side of the practice had been doing as a matter of routine for years.
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