9. Brendan
Brendan
My clinic day started with a perfectly healthy ball python named Congresswoman, whose owner was a man named Dale who had strong opinions about the political implications of his snake’s name and explained them at length while I examined her.
The Honorable Lady, as he insisted I refer to her, submitted to my exam without complaint.
“Her mouth looks good,” I said. “Shedding on schedule?”
“Like clockwork,” Dale said. “She’s very reliable, unlike actual congresspeople, in my experience, but that’s a whole other—”
“Diet’s been consistent?”
“Frozen mice every ten days. I always feed her the same brand.” He watched me work. “You know, she’s really more of an independent thinker—”
“She’s in excellent health,” I said, and handed him his discharge summary before the ball python could acquire a party affiliation.
Diane appeared the moment the door closed.
“Room two is a chinchilla. His name is either Fluffington the Third or Fluffington the Turd, depending on which family member you ask. There are four of them, family members, not chinchillas. I’ve already had to mediate once, and I want that noted.
I may apply for battle pay or grief counseling later. ”
“Noted,” I said, careful not to roll my eyes or snicker. Give that woman an inch—
“I suggested they focus on the animal’s health rather than his name.”
“Good call.”
“They did not agree.” She handed me the chart. “Also, he’s been eating his bedding.”
Fluffington—I was careful to take no position on the suffix—was a healthy three-year-old chinchilla with a mild blockage from stress-eating his bedding.
His family watched me deliver this news with the concern of people who loved their animal more than they disagreed about his name, which was the thing that truly mattered.
“More hay?” asked the youngest, who was eight.
“Different hay,” I said. “But good instinct.”
She looked at her parents with the pride of a child who was right about something in front of adults. I recognized that look. My brother had been making it at me since he was her age and had never fully stopped.
The afternoon moved through its usual configurations: two dog wellness checks, a cat whose owner was convinced her feline’s skin condition was emotional in origin, and one bird whose owner had not mentioned his pet was a bird until I opened the exam room door and found a large cockatoo standing on the exam table like he owned it.
His name was Malcolm. The bird, not the owner.
Malcolm stomped on the exam table, expressing his displeasure at the shiny metal, while I documented everything in the most professionally neutral language available to me.
I had returned to the tranquility of my office and was finishing Malcolm’s chart when Marcus appeared in my doorway with a piece of paper and the expression he wore when delivering news he considered important.
“Message came in while you were with Malcolm,” he said.
“The Lowry Park Zoo called, a Dr. Reyes. She said it wasn’t urgent, but she’d appreciate a call back when you have time.
She had that tone of a vet who didn’t want to alarm anyone but really needed help.
” He set the paper on my desk at the correct angle.
“They’re affiliated with USF’s wildlife program. I assume that’s how they found you.”
“I know who they are, Marcus. Every vet in a hundred miles does,” I said. “Did she say what animal or give any indication what might be going on?”
“She was vague. She said she’d explain when you called.” He paused, his eyes going a bit distant before refocusing. “She sounded like someone who’s been sitting with something for a while and is finally ready to talk about it.”
Zoo consults weren’t unusual. I’d done a few over the years, mostly exotics that needed a primary care perspective rather than a specialist, but Lowry Park had their own veterinary staff.
They had a med bay that rivaled most pet hospitals, complete with imaging equipment and very skilled vets.
If they were reaching out, it meant the situation was specific enough to want a different set of eyes.
“She said it wasn’t urgent, right?”
Marcus nodded. “That’s what she said.”
“Fine,” I said, moving the paper with her number to the side. “I’ll call her in the morning. Thanks, Marcus.”
Thursday’s call with Dr. Reyes took twenty minutes. She was precise and prepared, the kind of colleague who had done her homework before picking up the phone. She laid out the case without editorializing:
The patient was a Malayan tapir, eleven years old, female, named Marisol. There was an unusual presentation of intermittent symptoms, with nothing resolving the way it should. Their team had ruled out the obvious.
Dr. Reyes wanted a fresh perspective before committing to a diagnostic direction.
“Who referred you?” I asked.
“Dr. Peter Loupier,” she said. “He said you were good with complicated cases. He also said you’d want the full imaging before you’d agree to anything. I’ll send it over today.”
“I’m usually called in for marsupials or anything in the rodent family. Tapirs are—”
“More closely related to rhinos, I know, but Dr. Loupier was confident you’d be well paired with this situation. There isn’t a vet in a five-state radius with direct tapir experience.”
I stared at the wall of my office and thought about Peter telling a zoo veterinarian I was good with complicated cases, which was the kind of thing Peter would never say directly to me and had apparently said without hesitation to someone else, which was entirely consistent with how Peter operated.
A part of me smiled at the unspoken compliment.
“Send the imaging,” I said. “I’ll take a look.”
“Thank you, Dr. Davis. She’s—she’s a good animal. The staff is very attached to her. We’d like to figure this out.”
“I understand,” I said. “Give me some time with the imaging, and I’ll circle back.”
I hung up and pulled up what I knew about Malayan tapirs, which was very little but not nothing. Complicated cases had always held my attention longer than straightforward ones. That was either a professional asset or a personality trait. The line between those two had always been blurry for me.
Diane knocked on the open door. “Room one. Schnauzer, annual wellness. Owner brought cookies.”
“For us or the dog?”
“Apparently both. She bakes.” She frowned at me. “You’re doing the face.”
“What face?”
“The one where something interesting landed on your desk and you’re going to think about it until it makes sense.” She leaned on the doorframe. “What is it this time?”
“Zoo consult, a tapir.”
Her professional composure slipped approximately forty percent in under two seconds. “A tapir? The little hippo-looking thing with the long nose?”
“Rhino-looking thing, but yeah. This one’s a Malayan, eleven years old.”
“Brendan.” She straightened as a grin crawled across her lips. “I’m going to need photos.”
“It’s a medical consult.”
“I understand that. I’m going to need photos regardless. This sounds like adorable waiting to happen, and I want to see it.” She pushed off the doorframe. “The schnauzer is ready when you are.”
I shoved the tapir issue into the section of my brain where things waited their turn, put on my good doctor’s face for the schnauzer, and ate one of the owner’s cookies because they were excellent and a day with a chinchilla named Fluffington the Turd deserved its small rewards.
The tapir imaging arrived Friday afternoon. I spread it across the kitchen island that evening after dinner, which meant moving Puck twice, a pepper grinder once, and accepting that Puck was going to sit on the corner of the least convenient image for the duration of the review.
Despite my best, most professional efforts, I had no say in the matter.
“You’re not helping.”
He dook’d.
“I’m aware you think you are.”
He spread out and rested his head on a bent elbow like some saucy pinup from the 1930s. Had I not been annoyed at how he covered the image, I might’ve taken pictures and sent them to everyone I knew. It was an adorable pose and one I hadn’t even known a ferret could pull off.
The imaging told a story that was interesting.
It wasn’t straightforward or alarming, but it was layered and couldn’t be rushed.
I worked through it methodically, making notes, cross-referencing what Dr. Reyes had described on the phone with what I was seeing, and building a picture that was clearer in some areas than others.
Puck fell asleep on the corner of the imaging, his tiny head falling off his Marilyn Monroe paw and landing on the photos.
So I worked around him.
By nine o’clock, I had a direction, several questions about behavioral changes, and the beginning of a theory that I wanted to think about overnight before I put it in writing.
I stacked the imaging, carefully moved Puck to my shoulder, and stood at the kitchen island in the quiet of a Friday night.
Gerald was on the windowsill.
The imaging was on the island.
Puck was asleep on my shoulder making small sounds that suggested he was dreaming about something urgent.
My phone dinged.
Adrian: I survived the khakis.
I smiled before I’d finished reading it.
Me: Details. Now.
What followed was twenty minutes of texting about a man named Randall and the chaos of corporate events.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped thinking about the tapir imaging entirely, which had not happened once in the preceding two hours.
I sat at the kitchen island with my shoulder-ferret and my phone and laughed at my screen more than once.
Me: You ever had a ferret snoring on your shoulder while you stared at the insides of a tapir?
Adrian: Um, no, I can’t say that I have. Is that a challenge or an offer, Dr. Davis?
Me: I’m a DVM, remember?
Adrian: Is that a challenge Dr. Davis, DVM?
I snorted, then looked at Gerald, then craned my neck to look at Puck still asleep on my shoulder, entirely unbothered.
Me: I’ll find my booth Saturday and we’ll discuss it. It could be both. Depends on how you handle your Speedo.
Adrian: Wow. He went there. Straight to the Speedo.
Adrian: You’ve seen me handle it. The real question is can YOU handle it?
Me: I’ve treated much larger . . . snakes . . . with much bigger fangs.
Adrian: I have no words. There are no words.
I put the phone down and sat there for a moment. The imaging lay on one side of my brain, the chat with Adrian on the other, and the specific feeling of a Friday night that had turned out better than it started settling in my chest.
“She’s going to be okay,” I told Gerald. “I don’t have all of it yet, but I think she’s going to be okay.”
Gerald said nothing.
“We’re seeing each other Saturday.”
Gerald continued saying nothing, which I had come to find genuinely encouraging.
Puck made a sound in his sleep that might have been agreement.
“Thank you,” I said. “Both of you.”
On Saturday morning, I called Peter, though not about the tapir. I wasn’t ready to present my theory yet. I wanted one more day with it. I called about something else, something small, a question I’d been turning over since the previous Saturday.
He picked up on the third ring.
“Brendan.”
“Peter. Quick question.”
“All right.”
“The bar, Barbacks,“ I said. “When you recommended it, had you already told him about me?”
A pause, which meant something different with Peter than with other people. Pauses weren’t uncertainty or discomfort. They were Peter deciding exactly what to say.
“Who? Who would I have told about you?”
“Adrian, the dancer.”
Another pause.
“I mentioned you were a vet,” he said. “After you came the first time.”
“He remembered.”
“Adrian remembers most things,” Peter said. “He’s not just a pretty body, you know. That’s part of how he works. He actually has a brilliant mind, though I wonder sometimes if he knows it.”
I sat with that for a moment, trying not to fixate on caramel-colored skin and abs that stretched for miles. “Okay.”
“Brendan.”
“Yeah?”
“Go early,” Peter said. “Before his shift. He’s usually there early to stretch and warm up.”
He hung up before I could ask how he knew what I was planning, which was fine because Peter knowing things without being told was simply part of who Peter was. I had long since stopped being surprised by it.
So, of course, I drove to Ybor earlier than usual.