The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (25 page)

It wasn’t until years later, in college, that I read another rendition of this myth. In this version, Zeus is enraged that Leda has rejected him as a lover. In retaliation, he turns into a swan, swims down the river on whose banks Leda is sunning, and clucks so sweetly to her that she awakens and wades into the water, drawn by the beauty of this beast. And once she is in the water, the placid river turns wild, the currents swift and strong, trapping her while Zeus sheds his swanness and rapes her as a male.

We, as humans, have so many, many stories in which animals play parts, but it is only when you actually come to care for animals that you see how these stories, powerful though they may be, bear basically zero relationship to the actual animal kingdom. In our animal stories the only animal we learn about is man, but when you come close to animals you see the true strangeness of the beasts who share our planet. Swans are extraordinary but not at all in the way our literature suggests. They are extraordinary because of their unique biology, which has created for them a way to manufacture, in a gland, a special oil they then, when preening, spread across their feathers, this substance more waterproof than anything a human could ever devise.

They are extraordinary because their brains are about the size of a kiwi, grey paste stuffed in their slender heads, and yet within that small scoop of grey matter they are able to memorize migratory routes thousands of miles long, and they never need a map. They are capable of mating for life, something we, as humans, have tried but largely failed to accomplish.

Dr. Proctor gave Dr. Brumberg and me a deadline. We could keep the swan at our facility for three more weeks, but at the end of that time, when the clock chimed, the bird was to go back to the lake, ready or not.

Dr. Brumberg and I had to think now, think hard and fast. Perhaps I or he could find a facility that would take the swan. Surely if we set Ivory back upon the lake from which she came we would be consigning her to death, either a fast merciful death in the jaws of some snapping prey or a slow miserable death due to starvation and fear. At work the next day I called a few habitats, asking them if they would be interested in housing a swan with no beak on a permanent basis, but this is like asking a barn to accept the care and maintenance of a lame mare—what’s in it for them? We thought about zoos, but zoos in this country are largely built for the pleasure of the people who pass through them—what fun to see the tiger snoozing in the sun or to see the spider-tailed monkeys swinging from their branches. Who wants to pay twelve bucks to see a badly mangled soundless swan, an ugly duckling with no chance at transformation? Where were our wands when we needed them?

Transformation. I had seen that word somewhere not long ago. Where? On a billboard?
Transformation.
Oh yes, that’s right. I had seen it on the cover of a magazine in our waiting room, a fashion magazine, the sort of thing that holds no interest for me.

Now, however, I had an interest. I went to the office waiting room and found the publication—
Vogue
, the slick cover showing a breezy model in a diamond dress with her hand on her hip and her eyes in provocative slits. The headline: “Transformation: Plastic Surgery in Ten Minutes or Less.”

I flipped to the article. It was about facelifts, chemical peels, and supposedly other low cost fix-its for aging. According to the article, one in four women in the United States now have some sort of cosmetic procedure, as do one in eight men. The number of people having cosmetic procedures has risen by 68 percent in the past decade. It’s de rigueur.

Veterinary care has become expensive in part because it uses much of the same technology as human medicine. CAT scans, MRI machines, complicated blood tests, delicate eye surgeries, replacement hips, even replacement hearts; slowly all of these options have become available for animal patients as well as human patients, although few pet owners have pockets deep enough to actually pay. Even dentistry has entered veterinary care, and it wouldn’t surprise me if in a few years one can get veneers for Fido. There is one area of care, however, that has not really caught on in animal land—plastic surgery.

What about a case where an animal loses a limb, or is badly torn apart; is there not a role for plastic surgery in veterinary care in these cases? Dr. Brumberg and I discussed this. He was not afraid of seeming stupid. On speaker phone, so I could listen in, he called a plastic surgeon at Yale Medical Center.

“This is Dr. Brumberg,” he said. “I have a patient I need to refer to you.”

“Okay,” said Dr. Feldman. He waited for Brumberg to tell him more. He did not know, had no way of knowing, that Dr. Brumberg was a vet and the patient in question was nonhuman.

“There has been a traumatic injury to the … the face area,” Dr. Brumberg said, “and portions will need to be rebuilt.”

This was a surgeon known for his work on faces.

“Age?” asked the doctor.

“Oh,” Dr. Brumberg said, “very young. Very, very young.” He paused, glanced over at me; I shrugged. “Just about,” Dr. Brumberg said (he later explained to me that swans live fifteen years roughly and he based his calculations on that), “just about four years.”

“Four years,” the surgeon said. “What happened?”

“She was swimming,” Dr. Brumberg said. I could see he was smiling slightly. “Bitten by a turtle.”

“Do four-year-olds swim?” asked the doctor.

“Look,” Dr. Brumberg said then, and sighed. I swear I could see the air go out of his sail. “I’m a vet over at New Haven Animal Hospital. The patient in question is a swan. I have a baby swan whose beak was bitten off, and I need a plastic surgeon to make her a new beak so she can survive.”

“A swan,” Dr. Feldman repeated. Even over speakerphone I could feel his shock. “A swan …,” he repeated.

“Yes,” Dr. Brumberg said. “Very sweet animal with no chance of making it unless she gets a b—”

“You are,” Feldman interrupted, “you are a vet and you are asking me, a plastic surgeon, to do a procedure on a swan. You are,” he cleared his throat, “you are essentially asking me to do a nose job on a bird.”

“Well,” Dr. Brumberg said. “Well, yes. That’s exactly what I’m asking. And as free care, of course,” he said. “Because the swan does not have Medicaid.”

“I see,” said the surgeon. I could almost hear him smile, and somehow, at some point, a little bit more levity entered the conversation. “And may I ask?” the surgeon said, “may I ask whether or not the patient in question has a preference for what sort of prosthetic beak we might build? In nose jobs,” he said, “patients have very clear preferences. Upturned, downturned, narrow, tilted, et cetera. Oftentimes,” he said, “patients have a certain celebrity in mind, upon whom they wish their nose to be modeled. Is there, in this case—”

“We have no celebrity in mind,” Dr. Brumberg said, and he seemed on the verge of being elated and then—

“Donald Duck, I suppose,” said the surgeon.

Dr. Brumberg’s face fell.

“No, not Donald Duck,” Dr. Brumberg said in a soft voice. “The patient, after all, is not a duck.”

“Right,” said Dr. Feldman. “Precisely.” And suddenly then the surgeon’s tone changed, veered swiftly and sharply into iciness. “Dr. Brumberg,” he said. “The patient is not a duck. Nor is the patient a person. Are you out of your goddamn mind thinking I’m going to do a plastic surgery procedure on a … on a …” He seemed at a loss for words.

“A swan,” Dr. Brumberg said gently. “It’s a swan. We call her Ivory.”

But he didn’t ever hear her name. He had hung up.

Dr. Brumberg called, then, a dentist. Yes, by the way, he was out of his goddamn mind, which is sometimes exactly what you need to step out of, if you are to find a solution.

Dr. Brumberg called a friend of his, a Dr. Eric Soth, who was a dentist. Dr. Soth, also, was out of his goddamn mind. Dr. Brumberg told me how they had been good friends at Berkeley. Brumberg had come to college with a snake, and Soth had come to college with a kilt and a pair of bagpipes. At night, in their dorm room, so the story goes, Soth would get dressed in his kilt and play the bagpipes while the snake danced on Brumberg’s desk.

Dr. Brumberg explained the situation to Eric Soth. The very next day Soth drove from his office to ours, saw the baby bird, and said to both of us, “Guys, this is possible.”

Eric Soth showed us how he planned to do it. Retainers and other orthodontic materials are made out of a pinkish, inner-lip-colored resin that the doctor pours in a bowl as powder and then liquefies with water, making a kind of clayish substance that he then molds to the patient’s teeth. You may have had this done to you before, the cold metal clamp filled with the waxy pink stuff, jammed up against the roof of your mouth while you wait for it to harden just enough to hold an impression of your bite. This impression is then left to dry under a heat lamp and the dentist uses it to fashion whatever mouth gear you need.

Eric Soth’s idea was to do something similar for our swan. Because she had lost her beak, there was no impression of the original beak that he could make. But there was a ragged beak stump left, and, very gently, the dentist made a mold of it—the beak’s base—and then, using measurements derived from pictures, fashioned a full beak out of the same stuff your retainer is made of.

In fact, it took a long time. The process of fashioning a prosthetic beak took days and days. Soth was a meticulous craftsman. He created the acrylic beak to resemble a real swan beak as closely as possible, using tiny hinges to allow it to open and shut.

Now, the core questions—how would we attach it and would it actually work?

Ivory is the first and only swan to have a prosthetic beak, but that is really the least of it. She is the first, and perhaps the only swan to have benefited from plastic surgery and, by doing so, to demonstrate that the “luxury” medical procedures human use can in fact have critical relevance to animals who truly need the procedures. More than that, she is the first and only swan to have illuminated so starkly, so clearly, the truth about her species—the vulnerability, the sociability, the capacity to connect with humans—and by doing so to bust through the myths that have kept swans caged in misconceptions. They are elegant animals, yes, but they are also sweet, love to play, understand language (Ivory knew the words
tub
and
water
)
.
Still more important, Ivory helped me to find and articulate a certain ethical stance: all questions of logic, of risks and benefits, cannot stand up to this simple mandate that drives my life today, as a psychologist treating humans in a clinic not so different from that twenty-four-hour crisis veterinary hospital where I worked so long ago. The humans I treat have no money to pay; they are all Ivories, badly bungled, empty of purse. Care should not cost; air should not cost; they are both basic animal rights and thus the economic burden should be placed on all of us, collectively.

I am happy to be able to say that Ivory had her new beak within the three-week deadline set by Dr. Proctor, and because the beak worked, because it opened and shut and allowed Ivory to take food on her own, she grew fat to the point of independence. However, independence would never mean life as a regular swan for Ivory; she would never return to the lake from which she came. On the day of Ivory’s discharge I called the mother of the girl who brought her in and said, “Come now. Come see the swan.”

So they came. I wanted them to. Dr. Brumberg and I treated animals but all pain was our concern. If that day of the snapping turtle had made a memory for this girl—a memory of horror—then we wanted to help make its alternate. A memory of joy? No. A mangled swan with an acrylic beak is not a joyful sight. But it is a hopeful sight, a sight that suggests there are always possible solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

So the girl came down and was amazed to see the baby bird who was now, twenty days later, no longer a baby but a full-fledged teen with an enormous appetite and a sense of her own beauty. Ivory, it turns out, was a large bird, as white as snow, the pink of the prosthetic beak all the pinker when set against the blizzard of her body. The girl touched the beak, watched the tiny golden hinges work. “Wow,” she said.

At the end of that day, after the visit, we moved Ivory to a wildlife habitat in Maine where she could spend her long life in safety and in peace, in the midst of humans and also other birds. The director’s name was Ginny. Dr. Brumberg and I drove Ivory there and left her in the hands of Ginny and walked away, something sad in me, something I could not say. We walked away. We had had her for less than thirty days, but in that time so much had happened, so much growth, for one, and then so much fear, for another, those nighttime sounds, the creature I never found, and then the one that I did. From Ivory I had learned what I believe to be right about medical care—it should come at no cost to the consumer, and because of Ivory I frequently recall the necessity of faith in any healing endeavor. Poor Dr. Feldman, the eminent plastic surgeon. He could not see it. He lacked either the imagination or the sheer chutzpah that allows caring to happen. And why not, Dr. Feldman? I’d like to ask. Why not a nose job for a swan, a beak for a boy, if that is what is needed? You must, sometimes, be a little out of your mind.

Not long after Ivory had gone to her rehab center, Ginny called us to tell us that she was using her beak to eat, to kiss, and, yes, to sing. The girl had begun to sing, soft but real songs nonetheless, a gentle mournful music that you can hear only if you listen very quietly. Dr. Brumberg and I went back to visit Ivory several months later; we went to hear her songs, and we did, and the soft music was like a river running over rocks or a fast falling rain. It went on and on, her beak just slightly ajar and her lids at half mast, she swam and sang, and though we knew nothing of what she meant—the struggles against the turtle, or just smelt and scat, no matter— the melodies clearly had meaning, because the other birds listened, all cocking their tiny heads.

Anyway, this was all years and years ago, when I was younger, and perhaps more easily charmed. Maybe now, twenty years older, and that much harder, I have more of the Proctor and less of the Brumberg in me; I hope not. I hope I’d still support the quixotic risk taker over the bureaucratic conservative, but one does not know where one’s values lies until one is pushed up against a living ledge. For me, Ivory was that ledge. I have not seen her in years and years. But I do keep tabs on her, and last I heard she was still alive, an old lady now herself, but very elegant and still as playful as ever. According to Ginny she still likes to be scratched like a cat, and she uses her not-new-anymore beak to snack on smelt and bluefish, and she enjoys all her meals. She enjoys paddling in the small habitat pond. She enjoys mothering the foundling birds brought to the habitat; she has never had babies of her own, but she has come to know what it means to care. When the injured birds are brought in, Ivory, an old timer, takes them quite literally under her enormous white wing, sings softly, and then pecks them gently with her gold hinged beak, a kind of kissing.