Going to Italy for all the wrong reasons
The saga of the spluttering hound who deserves the world
Between £6000 and £9000. This is what I was quoted by an Edinburgh vet to remove the airgun pellet which is lodged in my dog’s neck. Of course, there’s all kinds of angry that this makes me.
Firstly, there’s the issue of how the hell it got there in the first place. It only came to light after Alfie’s slight cough became progressively worse, warranting numerous visits to my local vet in Scotland. They checked him for infections, sent a camera down his windpipe and eventually agreed to X-ray him. The result: no doubt about it, there’s something solid and pellet-shaped in his neck, alarmingly close to the base of his windpipe. It must have been in there for years, and it’s in a really nasty spot.
Alfie was discovered as a stray in the south of Italy, very weak and malnourished until the gook folk at Rifugio Fata took him in and nursed him back to health. A few months later he came to me via Settusfree, a UK charity that finds homes for continental Setters in need and arranges their international transport. For his first few months in the UK, Alfie was only friendly towards women, and thankfully – despite my toweringly masculine physique and booming bass voice (ahem) – he found it in him to like me too. But on the whole, blokes would stir dark memories, and kids would really send the wind up him. One excited chirrup of the word “doggie!” from a tottering infant was enough to send Alfie scurrying out of the room.
Thankfully that’s long behind him. He’s now an irrepressibly playful monster, eternally eager to meet as many people, go on as many long walks and play as many raucous games as possible, devoting his downtime to melting soppily into duvets and chair cushions and seeking cuddles from anyone who’ll give them to him – which tends to be everyone who claps eyes on him. But particularly me. Getting him healthy has been a long battle, thanks mainly to his plethora of food allergies and an incurable-but-treatable condition called Leishmaniasis that dogs pick up near the Mediterranean, but he is now, thank God, a mostly fit and happy dog, plagued only by fits of coughing and spluttering that come a few times a day and night. How he remains chipper despite this I’ll never know.
Alfie has an instinct to pursue with total clarity only those things that make life worth living, and that makes me want to cherish and preserve his life as best I can, for as long as I can.
So we’re going back to Italy to empty my meagre savings. Not to Rifugio Fata, but to a vet who has been recommended to me in Abruzzo. Abruzzo seems a gloriously picturesque region about half-way down the east coast of Italy, opposite Rome, protected by a greater proportion of national parks and reserves than any other area of Europe. The towns are ancient, the population sparse, the fortresses ubiquitous, and if The Internet is anything to go by, every table is permanently laden with a smorgasbord of curious cheeses. If I had a tail, Alfie and I would be wagging in unison.
But we’re going there for the vet. Instead of quoting £6000-£9000, this chap says the bill is more likely to be closer to €10001. Obviously I wouldn’t entrust Alfie to any old back-alley quack, even if said alley turns out to be a quaint little cobble-stoned slice of medieval bella vita. He comes recommended to me by a friend who lives in Abruzzo and has been taking her dogs to him for years. She knows dogs, and she’s full of praise for him, so from what I can tell he’s legit, and my spidey senses reckon the vibe is good. (Vibe, gut feeling, instinct… it’s a rough science, but it can lead in good directions if we’re attentive enough to the unspoken motivations that can cloud our thinking.)
Signor Vetinarissimo (which may or may not be his real name) has recommended some sort of ultrasound technique. It might work, but I won’t know until he’s seen Alfie. What’s remarkable is the huge difference in his approach to the job. The Edinburgh vet clinic flatly refused to discuss what they intended to do, or how they arrived at their estimated cost. Any details would only be discussed with the referring vet at my local practice; they were happy leaving me in the dark about such fundamentals as what the surgery options were likely to be, why £3000 was needed for an initial inspection when Alfie had already received both an endoscope examination and X-rays (costing a fraction of that), and how many nights I would need to spend away from home in Edinburgh. It was appalling.
How did we get like this in the UK? Why won’t people talk? How did we end up with such little trust in the world at large, or our customers, that we dismiss the essential value of human-to-human communication? Did politics do it? Did technology do it? Did Zuckerberg or Twitter or TikTok do it? Did our education system do it? Did our parents do it? Who corrupted our stories about who we are?
I’m hoping for good things. We’ll recuperate in Italy, probably for a few days, before boarding a ferry that will chuff from the Adriatic into the Ionian sea and drop us off in Greece. I’ll have work with me and a new project in the Peloponnese which will keep me occupied (another ‘follow your gut’ style of potential lunacy) until the EU tells me I have to go home. Since Brexit, UK citizens like me are now limited to 90 days at a time in the EU. Just as well really. I dread to think of the harm I could be causing if I stayed any longer than that. Thank goodness.
Anyway. It’ll be fun. Lots could go badly wrong, but it could go well too. And I’ll write about it.
For now, I’m in list-making and car-packing mode while finishing off some last bits of work and staring into the teeth of the third (or is it fourth?) Met Office weather warning in as many weeks. Meanwhile, Alfie has snoozes to snooze.
Yes, he is insured, but there’s a get-out clause so I won’t see any money back. Because Alfie’s medical record shows that I mentioned his cough to a vet years ago, before it was serious and only a week after taking out my first policy, his cough now counts as a ‘pre-existing condition’ – i.e. outside the terms of the policy.