It was two o’clock in the morning and Dr. Constance Breese of Edgartown was driving through Katama in fog so thick she couldn’t see the pavement in front of her. The truck headlights illuminated a halo of mist and occasionally, if she strained her eyes, the lane markings – the only way she knew she was actually still on the road. The fog slowed her pace to a crawl on a trip in which every minute counted. “I had to get to a patient in the midst of a difficult labor and I was stuck going twenty miles per hour,” she says. “It was an emergency and I had to respond quickly, but I couldn’t see a thing.” Not what the doctor ordered.
But Breese is neither an obstetrician nor a midwife, although she is certainly no stranger to delivering babies. She is an Island veterinarian, and on this night her patient was a miniature horse trying to deliver a breeching foal. She knew she had to act fast, but upon arrival couldn’t find the foal’s heartbeat and feared the worst. She struggled to get hold of it, but after several attempts, her fears were confirmed. The baby was delivered stillborn. “You never enjoy calls like that,” she says quietly. “But it is all part of the job.”
It’s a job Breese has been doing on the Vineyard for twenty years now, traveling to home and farm to treat the illnesses and ailments of all kinds of animals. By making house calls across the Island, sometimes in an emergency and during all hours of the night, she is a sort of EMT for animals. She is also one of the few Vineyard vets who specializes in large farm animals and will treat almost any pet except birds, which, she says, are too anatomically different from quadrupeds. On any given day she might tend to a golden retriever with a broken leg in Chilmark, a newborn Mawari foal on Chappaquiddick, and an ox with a runny nose in West Tisbury, sometimes all before lunch. “I have a wide range of patients with all sorts of ailments,” she says.
Tending to animals, especially the large and unpredictable ones, is a tricky proposition. “With horses and cattle, you really have to be careful,” she says. She remembers a horse that had tried to jump a fence but instead got its leg woven in between the rails, and after it panicked, pulled the fence down on top of it. “That is when anything can happen, and keeping the animal calm is the hardest yet most important thing, because all it wants to do is get up and run. There is a good reason we use tranquilizers.” She laughs now about a visit during her second year on the Vineyard when a Clydesdale kicked her while she was behind it. She wasn’t hurt, but it left an imprint. “It definitely taught me to never forget about safety.”
Whether drawing blood samples or administering medication, Breese knows that for her patients it’s a bitter pill to swallow, whatever the procedure. Getting an ox to ingest a four-inch tablet involves more than just skill or luck; it requires some serious tools. She uses implements with names such as “balling gun,” and most of her equipment resembles something you might find in the plumbing section of a hardware store. “Just giving a cow a pill is not as easy as it sounds,” she says.
Many parts of the job are harder than that. She is frequently called to a family’s home to euthanize a pet, or help to make that decision. “The emotional times are tough,” she says, “and talking to a family about their dog or horse’s imminent death involves decisions that are not formed quickly or easily. It is especially hard when children have to be a part of that decision. Watching a little girl snip off a part of her horse’s mane right before it is put to sleep really gets to you.”
Most of the time, things end happily. But there is one thing Breese encounters on her calls that she wishes she could change. “Oftentimes my patients’ owners will share their own health problems with me, sometimes asking me to treat them,” she says, shaking her head. “There was one time I had to remove some stitches from a dog and the dog’s owner asked me if I could remove her brother’s stitches while I was there. I guess I could have done it, but there was no way I would have. I don’t do humans.”
