The Elephant Doctor

Kate Connell - Univeristy of Pennsylvania

Volume 51, Issue 1

This piece received the 2nd Best Overall Aubmission Award for Volume 51, Issue 1, as well as 1st place for Foot in Mouth Disease. 

Two years ago, I hopped on a plane to Thailand to scratch a major item off of my bucket list: I wanted to work with elephants. The timing was right. I had eight months until I started vet school and enough money to buy the round-trip ticket.  

Some thirty hours after my departure, I waited outside the bus station in Kanchanaburi, sleep-deprived but excited for my upcoming adventure. A battered pickup truck beeped and slowed to a stop in front of me. The hefty Dutch woman inside told me to hurry up and get in. This was Agnes, the volunteer coordinator for ElephantsWorld. As soon as I had both feet inside of the cab, she was rolling. Agnes spoke quickly and with a thick accent, and I had trouble focusing on what she was saying as she wove in and out of the lane and nearly ran a pedestrian down.

“What do you do for a living?” Agnes asked in a tone that suggested that she was repeating the question.

I told her that I would be starting vet school the following fall. This seemed to satisfy her, and she changed topics again as we drove further from the city.  

When we arrived at ElephantsWorld, Agnes introduced me as “Kate the vet student.” I thought about qualifying that with “future vet student,” but it seemed like a harmless mistake.

It wasn’t until the next day that I realized Agnes was rapidly advancing my career—whether she was doing this on purpose or not, I could never be sure. “Kate is almost finished with veterinary school,” she told a few of the staff members. I did my best to correct her, but the workers seemed to find this funny and started calling me Soon-Doc.

At the end of the first week, Agnes introduced me to the veterinarian who sporadically stopped by to check on the elephants. “This is Kate, a vet from America,” she said. He smiled and gave me a nod. He had a slightly puzzled look as I tried to explain that I was not, in fact, a vet. Turns out he only knew very basic English, and Agnes wasn’t interested in translating for me with her poor knowledge of Thai.

The veterinarian seemed to remember something, and looked to me. He spoke in Thai and pointed to one of the elephants standing in the shade.

I caught penicillin and iodine, but whatever his request was, I had to wait for Agnes’ translation.

“What did he say?” I asked. He was already walking away.

“Oh, he just wants you to keep an eye on Aum Pan while he’s gone. She has an abscess under her chin.”

“What am I supposed to do about it?” I asked in a slight panic. “And how long will he be gone?”

“He’s just going for two weeks. He said that you need to give her a hundred milliliters of penicillin every two days. And if it bursts, just clean it up a little. No problem, right?”

No problem? Aum Pan was my favorite elephant, the old girl of the group with a gentle disposition and hint of mischief in her eyes. But that didn’t take away from the fact that she was an 8,000-pound animal, that I had never done medical work unsupervised, and that the facility was not equipped with a restraining area for vet work. This request sounded like it could very well be a death sentence.

The next day I met with her mahout (handler) and loaded an elephant-sized syringe with Penicillin. 

“Okay, Soon-Doc?” he asked. “I tell her to hold still, you inject here.” He pointed to her trapezius, which was well above the level of my head.

“How does she do with shots?” I asked. “Will she get upset?”

“No, she is good elephant. Just be fast!”

 

I held my breath, hoping that it wouldn’t be my last, and punched the needle through her skin with an overhand swing. Aum Pan didn’t even flinch as she fed herself pineapple halves from the pile at her feet. A wave of relief washed over me, followed by exhilaration. I had done it! And I hadn’t been swept off the earth with an enormous foot to the chest!

That night, I went out drinking with the other volunteers. Despite the fact that I have been well aware of my limits since my freshman year of college—ahem, I mean, since my 21^st birthday—I found myself mercilessly hung over the next day. Turns out when you’re eating a rice-based diet and drinking in a country that doesn’t limit alcohol percentages in its liquor, that tends to happen.

At least I wasn’t alone in my misery. The group of volunteers sat around the breakfast table the next morning, nursing glasses of water and coffee, stomachs turning at the smell of the eggs growing cold in the middle of the table. And then another smell hit us.

“Oh, God, what is that?” someone exclaimed. A stench engulfed our already-nauseous group, and we frantically covered our faces with t-shirts and napkins. The smell was indescribable, but if I gave it a shot, I would call it week-old road kill mixed with raw sewage and puke. It was that bad.

We looked around for the source. There was no wind carrying it in, and all I could see in the distance was the herd of elephants. Wordlessly, one of my compatriots pointed toward the elephants. At first I shook my head. The elephants smelled nice and earthy, nothing like this. But he pointed again, and I looked closer.

Aum Pan was in the lead, always eager for the morning feeding. Even at a hundred yards away, I could see something globbing from her neck.

“Oh no,” I groaned.

Yep, the abscess had burst. On the morning of hangovers to end all hangovers.

My friend Elliot (and this is the truest moment of friendship I think I have ever experienced) gloved up with me and grabbed a basket of bananas. We met Aum Pan on the feeding platform, our eyes tearing up from the smell.

 

The feeding platform was elevated so that tourists could feed the elephants at face-level, and Elliot was able to lure Aum Pan close enough to work on. I lowered myself to the concrete and wiggled under her face to get a clear view of what I was working with. I didn’t have to look very hard. The abscess was roughly the size of a soccer ball (something that I hadn’t appreciated until this moment), and a thick wad of puss dangled from it.

I repressed my urge to vomit and grabbed the puss-vine and tugged. Fluid flowed forth like something biblical. It took some coaxing and massaging to drain the skin completely, and a few liters of iodine to clean it afterwards.    

                 

The whole exercise probably took us twenty minutes, and Aum Pan seemed to be enjoying herself. Her bright eyes gave the impression that she was laughing.

As one of earth’s smartest creatures, was she aware that her stench had driven all of the other volunteers indoors? Did she know that I wanted to be a vet, and that—despite my need to vomit—this was one of the highlights of my pre-vet career? And that one of my dream jobs would actually be a zoo veterinarian?

Maybe this would be the ticket on my resume to getting elephant work in the US, I told myself. I could write “substitute elephant doctor; experience in giving injections and draining facial abscesses.” 

It later occurred to me that anyone reading between the lines could get a good chuckle. This fabulous experience of being an elephant doctor was nothing short of popping a really, really big zit. Might not be as good on a resume as I would have hoped.

But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I would do it all again.