Dr. Burns with her German shorthaired pointer, Woodrow.

Dr. Burns' writing has appeared in newspapers and literary anthologies as well as award-winning veterinary-industry and outdoors magazines and on the Internet.  She has written three book-length manuscripts including a novel, an outdoorsy memoir and a book about Southern food customs specific to the Upstate of South Carolina. 

She writes newspaper and magazine pieces as well as fiction, but her favorite medium is the personal essay, also known as creative nonfiction.

For three years in a row, Dr. Burns' essays have appeared in Catfish Stew, the annual literary anthology published by the South Carolina Writer's Workshop.

She currently writes a weekly column for a local free newspaper, Tidbits: The Best Little Paper Ever Read.

The following essay,

"Something of Arnie" was first published in

the South Carolina Writer's Workshop yearly Anthology

Catfish Stew III.

It won Third Place in the Creative Nonfiction Division.

Something of Arnie

By Jacquelyn Holmes Burns, DVM

My life intersected with Arnie’s for only a few hours.  I can’t even tell you what color he was.  Perhaps a gray and white domestic medium hair with enormous green eyes that bored directly into my soul. 

Arnie’s owner dropped him off on her way to work.  He hadn’t eaten and had used the bathroom very little for about three days.  And so the staff was expecting a possible urinary tract blockage, a common malady in male cats.

I walked into the exam room and saw the cat huddled in the sink. 

“This cat’s struggling to breathe!” I exclaimed.  “He needs a chest x-ray.”

I waved my hand at the technicians, a matter-of-fact gesture that they needed to hop to it and I went on into surgery.  I hoped Arnie would be asthmatic, an easy enough problem to address.

When I came out and viewed his radiograph, the problem was evident.  Arnie had pleural effusion.  His chest cavity was filled with fluid that obscured the silhouette of his heart and floated his lungs, forcing them into a tiny little space in the top and back of his chest cavity. 

I worked my way through the diagnostic rule-outs with Alice, his human.

“I’m going to be blunt,” I said.  “None of these things carries a very good prognosis.”

Explaining that I would tap his chest, both to draw off the fluid, ease his breathing and to obtain a specimen of the fluid for diagnostic purposes, I obtained her permission to proceed. 

Arnie had other ideas, or perhaps no ideas except how he would manage to draw his next breath.  Smothering in his own fluids, he struggled to breathe—and just struggled.  Cats with difficulty breathing often arrive in a state of panic or are easily pushed into one.  With gentleness and caring, my staff helped Arnie into a position where he was comfortable enough and I proceeded to draw 200 milliliters of blood-tinged fluid from his left hemi-thorax as well as to draw a blood sample to check him for feline leukemia virus and feline “AIDs”.

 By the time I was finished with the procedure, called thoracocentesis, Arnie’s breathing had eased considerably.  He slumped into his towel to get some much-deserved rest while my staff set up the tests.

I knew there was still plenty of fluid inside Arnie, and feared the relief the procedure offered would only be temporary.  Conducting the fluid analysis, I discovered that the fluid did not contain pus, was of moderate protein content and had large numbers of round cells with large nuclei.  Sometimes the cells lining the chest and abdomen can be reactive and appear similar to this.  But there were so many cells! Though I am not a pathologist, I became suspicious of neoplasia—the big C.  Cancer.

This is an easy enough academic exercise.  Make a preliminary list of diagnostic rule-outs.  Perform thoracocentesis.  Draw blood samples.  Analyze the fluid.  Take the test results and come up with a plan.  And it is sure nice when that plan includes recovery.

Arnie’s didn’t.  He tested positive for the feline leukemia virus, or FeLV.  A retrovirus, FeLV can cause several forms of disease including cancers, none particularly treatable.  And so I called Alice and explained our options.

“I don’t want you to think there are no treatment options,” I began, “but there is no cure for feline leukemia.  We can try immune system stimulants, but the most pressing problem is the fluid in Arnie’s chest and the fact that it will likely build back up--quickly.”

I went on to offer treatment options that included referral to a specialist for an ultrasound of the mediastinal lymph nodes, a pathologist’s assessment of the fluid and more definitive care that might include a chest tube to keep the effusion from building back up.  But I warned Alice that the prognosis was still extremely guarded. 

With great care Alice made a decision to spare Arnie further suffering.

Euthanasias in veterinary medicine are so routine that they frighten me.  It also surprised me when I went to the cage and Arnie looked at me with huge, knowing eyes.  It was so evident that he felt better that I found it difficult to proceed. 

To avoid having him panic, I gave him an injection of a tranquilizer that would take about ten minutes to ease his anxiety and make the euthanasia procedure easier. 

And then I did something totally out of character for me.  I gathered Arnie into my arms, held him and just broke down and sobbed.

This confused me.  Why was I crying?  I was a professional who had done this countless times over the nearly twenty years I’d been in practice.  Was I crying because I just needed a good cry?  Was I crying because having the power to perform euthanasia is a fearsome responsibility?  Or was I just crying for Arnie, a cat I didn’t really know?

It soon became apparent.  Arnie melded into me, a stranger to him, and began to purr, softly at first and then louder as I stroked his silky coat.  Somehow in those few minutes, a bond formed between us that I will carry to my grave and I know he did to his.

Arnie has been gone from this corporeal world for a week.  Something of him, I think, lives on in me.

This column appears in Tidbits:  The Best Little Paper Ever Read

the week of June 4, 2006:

Learning to Wear Dangly Earrings

By Jacquelyn Holmes Burns, DVM

            There must come a time in every woman’s life when she learns to let go of some baggage.  It’s a funky time of life, and for me, I guess that time is now. 

            It’s sort of a time when people stop looking at you—with a mixture of curiosity and appraisal—and start taking you for granted as somebody’s wife or somebody’s mother or somebody’s daughter.  It feels as though you’ve been dropped from the radar screen of life and have become, for all practical purposes, invisible. 

            I suppose if I were an XY, what I’m going through would be called a midlife crisis and I would have to go out and buy myself a Harley or a flashy new sports car or some kind of monstrous pickup truck. 

            But I am a woman, and looking back over the last year, I can see this has been coming in stages. 

            One year ago, on a spur of the moment whim, I bought a cheap mountain bike at Target.  This was remarkable in that I hadn’t been on a bicycle in over 25 years and was more or less scared (to death) to ride one. 

            Now I’m the proud owner of a moderately expensive road bike with most of the bells and whistles, the cyclist’s brightly colored clothes, more than one helmet, the special shoes that go with the clipless pedals, socks, gloves, maintenance gear and pepper spray.

 If you see me, you’d better watch out. 

            So, if XX’s have to purchase a flashy vehicle during their midlife crises, then I suppose my Trek bike is it.

            Today, as I’m decked out for Church, I’m sporting a bright new ensemble.  I shop at boutiques now, after many years of wearing surgical scrubs by day and things from old reliable department stores in my off time.  

I’ve noticed that people seem have difficulty recognizing me when I’m not wearing scrubs, a white lab coat and a stethoscope around my neck.  Many’s the time I’ve run into someone I know in the grocery store, smiled and spoken to them and gotten a blank stare.  Then they stammer something like, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t, uh, recognize you out here, uh, without your, uh, lab coat.”

You could say that after more than twenty years of wearing surgical scrubs—which are comfortable, sort of like going to work in your pajamas—I got bored wearing them.  But that is not the whole story.  When you get to the point that you feel invisible, it’s time to do something about your wardrobe! 

It’s also safe to mention that I am jewelry-challenged.  I was well into my thirties before I took the outrageous step to get my ears pierced.  Up until then, I seldom wore what my grandmothers called “earbobs” and when I did they hurt like the devil. 

So since going to the mall and having unnatural holes created in my earlobes with a sharp object by a teenaged “surgeon,” I’ve always worn rather low-key earrings, simple studs or very small hoops.

I always felt like a kid playing dress up whenever I wore dangly earrings.  They wiggled every time I moved my head and made me feel both conspicuous and pretentious, and as a Holmes, I was raised to quietly blend into the background.  That, too, is changing.  I’d like to say that the evil boutique slipped something into me that made me want to wear dangly earrings, but that would be untrue.  A simple pair of purple teardrops called to me from the rack, and I was drawn to them. 

It pains me to admit it, but, kicking and screaming, I am approaching middle age.  And falling off the radar screen of the entire world does something to a woman.  There is a hormonal roller coaster ride beginning that promises to rival adolescent angst, with more valleys than peaks awaiting my self-esteem. 

            I’m not ready for a red hat with purple trim, though I admire the women who celebrate and value themselves with pride by wearing them.  So for now, I’ll try to accept the fact that I’m getting to be on a first name basis with the guy at the bicycle shop and the ladies at the boutique, as I am… slowly…learning to wear dangly earrings.

(XY is the chromosomal designation for males

and XX is the chromosomal designation for females)

The following column appeared in

Tidbits:  The Best Little Paper Ever Read in March 2006

Beware the Diagnostic Weenie!

By Jacquelyn H. Burns, DVM

            My office has been a busy place of late.  Besides going to various elementary schools for career day, we’ve hosted an entire school’s kindergarten (a big round of applause for about sixty well-behaved 5 year olds!) and VIPs from the local humane organization.

            During one of these visits, I noticed a woman staring oddly at the side of the medications refrigerator. 

            Oh, goodness, I thought, there must be something naughty up there.

            Horrified that there might be an off-color cartoon posted on the ‘fridge, I leaned around the corner to see what she was looking at.

            Thank goodness it wasn’t naughty at all.  She was looking at my Beware the Diagnostic Weenie poster.  I made it myself.  It features a brindle and white English bulldog caught red-handed with a strand of old-fashioned frankfurters.  You know, the kind of wieners that are linked together. 

            The dog looks sheepish, and I freely admit that I cut the picture out of a magazine and wrote “Beware the Diagnostic Weenie” in block letters underneath the picture.

            This one requires an explanation. 

            Apparently, at least in this part of South Carolina, the weenie is both a diagnostic and therapeutic tool when it comes to veterinary medical issues.  First of all, note that my clientele who use the wiener diagnostically and therapeutically often have difficulty pronouncing the word.  More often than not, it comes out “winnie” instead of “weenie.”

            Dog owners who are unable to administer their pet’s capsules or tablets very often use a weenie therapeutically.  In fact, I wish I had a dollar for every pet owner who has told me, “We don’t have any trouble getting Bubbles to take her medicine.  I just hide it in a weenie and she gobbles it right up.” 

            I’d almost bet my next paycheck that for every hotdog, corn dog or pig-in-a-blanket consumed by a human being in the United States, there are at least three wieners used to medicate dogs! 

            Then there is the diagnostic weenie, a pet owner’s divining rod or crystal ball.  This is when the pet owner uses the wiener to determine exactly how sick their pet is, much as the veterinarian might use a stethoscope, an x-ray machine, blood tests or an EKG. 

            “Dr. Burns, I give Puddles a weenie and she didn’t eat it, so I knowed I needed to bring her to you.”

            Or, “After Rambo was run over by the truck, I give him a weenie and he et it, so I knowed he was a-gonna be okay.”

            My actual conclusion after twenty-one years in practice is that wieners might have a legitimate use in triaging pets.  The frankfurter industry might do well to do a marketing study on the use of their product in veterinary medicine.