Tales from a Young Vet Read online

  I could hear his howls and whimpers from the other end of the corridor. I arrived to find a young yellow Labrador lying on the floor yelping. His owner, wrapped in a huge parka, looked exhausted. He introduced himself as Doug.

  ‘Barney’s nine months old, he’s normally the life and soul, but he’s not been himself today,’ Doug said, raising his voice to make himself heard over Barney’s cries. ‘Tonight I got home from a night out to find him like this. I can’t think what’s happened.’

  I had a pretty good idea, but I needed to be sure. I knelt beside him in the waiting room to give him a quick check. His abdomen was bloated and tight, and he yelped when I touched it.

  ‘He’s very bloated. I’m afraid this could be quite serious. Would you mind waiting? I’ll take him straight through to the senior vets, then come back to get a fuller history from you while they start working on him.’

  I ran to get a trolley to wheel Barney through to the ER. Doug helped me to lift him gently onto it and then patted him on the head. I wheeled him through the double doors and Stacy rushed over. ‘He’s really bloated. I think it’s a twisted stomach,’ I said. She checked him over, put the ultrasound probe on him to confirm the diagnosis and nodded.

  ‘OK, he’ll need surgery, but first we need to deflate his stomach; the build-up of gas is what’s hurting him. Jo, you can do this.’

  We clipped a small patch of fur from Barney’s abdomen and applied antiseptic, then Stacy handed me a two-inch-long needle. Clenching my teeth, I plunged it straight through the clipped area and into Barney’s stomach.

  The whoosh of gas escaping sounded a bit like a balloon when you blow it up and then let go. Almost immediately Barney calmed down and stopped howling. I knelt and stroked his head. ‘You’ve had a tough time, haven’t you, young chap?’ Barney raised his head, licked my hand and managed two thumps of his tail.

  A few minutes later he was taken to a kennel in the Intensive Care Unit to be prepped for surgery while I went back, with Stacy, to talk to Doug and to take Barney’s history.

  ‘What is a twisted stomach?’ he asked. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘It’s not uncommon in deep-chested breeds of dog,’ I told him. ‘It’s a condition called gastric dilation volvulus or GDV, in which the stomach twists and dilates when it can’t expel food or gas. The blood supply can also be cut off. GDV sometimes happens after a big meal followed by exercise, but frequently there isn’t an obvious reason.’

  ‘Barney always seems to be hungry,’ Doug said. ‘He steals anything he can get hold of; we have to keep all our food out of reach. The only things he doesn’t seem to like are carrots. Yesterday he ate my son’s headphones, a plate of biscuits and the insole of a boot.’

  I laughed. ‘That’s a Lab for you. Happy dogs, but big eaters. What happened to Barney wasn’t necessarily anything he ate; we still don’t know all the reasons why dogs get twisted stomachs.’

  I explained that we’d relieved the pressure of the build-up of gas, which could eventually have ruptured the stomach wall, and that Barney would need immediate surgery to return his stomach to the right position and to check for any other internal damage. ‘He’s sleeping now, we’ve given him pain relief and we’ll give you a call as soon as he’s out of surgery.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Doug smiled. ‘I’ll be off then. Got to get up for work at six.’

  I looked at my watch. It was ten past two. Ten hours into my shift and there were still new patients coming through every few minutes.

  By three things were quieter and at half-past Stacy told me I could go.

  ‘Have you had fun?’ she grinned. ‘ECC can be a bit of a baptism of fire.’

  ‘I’ve loved it,’ I said. ‘I felt like a real vet tonight.’

  As I headed out to the car park the hospital’s hushed corridors felt peaceful. For a brief hour or two, until the day staff began to arrive, everything was calm.

  I climbed into my little Volvo C30 and drove back to the house I shared with four other vet students in the village of Welham Green, five minutes from the campus. It just so happened (honest) that the other four were boys, despite the fact that eighty per cent of students in my year were girls. But despite the teasing I’d had from some of my friends, there was strictly no romance with any of them – we all just got on really well.

  The house was in darkness as I crept in through the front door and made my way into the kitchen. Even Buddy, the sixth member of our household, a funny little mutt that one of my housemates had inherited from his grandparents, barely stirred in his basket.

  Despite the late – or was it early? – hour, I was still buzzing with all that I’d learned and done over the past twelve hours. I made myself a cup of tea and a piece of toast – standard post-night-out fare – and sat at the kitchen table.

  Fifteen minutes later the exhaustion hit me. I crawled upstairs and was asleep within seconds.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Black Monday

  Most people decide they want to be vets when they’re four years old and fall in love with their hamster, or kitten, or puppy. But for me the lightbulb moment didn’t come until I was sixteen. Until then I was pretty sure I wanted to be a forensic scientist – I loved the idea of solving mysteries – but when I was offered the chance to do a couple of weeks’ work experience with a local veterinary practice I realised how much people love and depend on their animals, and that if we help the animal, we help the owner, whether that’s an elderly person whose cat means the world to them or a farmer who depends on his cows for his income. Being a vet wasn’t just about animals; it was about people, too. There was also a forensic side to it. A vet has to examine all the available information to determine what’s wrong with an animal and while that’s sometimes obvious, it can also be a bit of a mystery.

  I was sold.

  I come from a family of animal-lovers, which helps. We’ve always had dogs, mostly springer spaniels; affectionate, loyal and energetic dogs. By the time I went to college we’d had Tosca for about eight years and Paddy, a little Yorkshire terrier, for four. Paddy came to us after his elderly owner died and the RSPCA discovered about 200 Yorkies in a squalid, windowless shed, all of them in a dreadful condition. Some of them died and the rest were farmed out to different rescue organisations. Paddy was only eight months old when we got him, a little brown ball of hair. He seemed to have survived the ordeal pretty well and he and Tosca soon bonded, she took him under her wing and they’d snuggle on the sofa together.

  We also had my two horses, Elli and Tammy. I’d been mad about horses since I was five years old, when my friend started riding lessons and I begged my parents to let me learn, too. It was a huge financial commitment for my parents, but for Mum, being around horses was an unfulfilled childhood dream, and Dad just wanted to get as far away from his city job as possible at weekends. Only my younger brother Ross didn’t share the passion, having received a hoof in the groin during his first riding lesson when he was five. There was no way he was going near a horse again.

  We bought Elli when I was twelve. She was a six-year-old bay, dark brown with a black mane and tail, chestnut dapples and huge dark eyes. She was my fun horse, so safe I could even ride her without a saddle. We won lots of rosettes together at local gymkhanas, but three years later she went badly lame. The vet told us she would never be a competition horse again and that she should be put down. The alternatives were to box-rest her in stables for a year or so, or to put her in a field, let her roam free and see what happened.

  It was a huge blow to me. Elli was my world and there was no way I was going to let her be put to sleep. She’d always hated stables, so we chose to put her in the field and let her run loose. Two years later she was no longer lame but very unfit, so I began riding her to get her fit enough to enter competitions again.

  While Elli was recovering I got Tammy, a four-year-old bay whose broad brown flanks have an orange glow in the sun. Tammy was much more highly strung than Elli. Nervous around other horses, she would
bare her teeth if she got scared, but she was willing and bold and she learned new tricks really fast.

  Tammy was so unpredictable that at competitions she would either come first or be disqualified after terrifying the audience by rearing or trashing the jumps. I was never scared with her because I’d been around horses for ten years when I got her, and I had a Saturday job in which I trained difficult and young horses. I also had a bum like glue, so I seldom fell off her, even when she was misbehaving. Elli became the one horse Tammy trusted, and by the time I left for college Tammy and Elli were sharing a field at the stables up the road from us and were happy in one another’s company. I knew I’d miss them dreadfully, but I planned to get home as often as possible, and I arranged to loan them out to other riders so that they’d be exercised.

  Once I decided that I wanted to be a vet there was no stopping me. I worked incredibly hard to make the A-level grades I needed, and Dad and I went to look around potential vet schools.

  There were seven veterinary colleges I could apply to (there are eight now), but the moment I saw it my heart was set on the Royal Veterinary College. With two campuses, in Camden and Hertfordshire, it has fantastic teaching facilities, including the Queen Mother Hospital for Animals, its own Equine Centre and its own first-opinion practice. So I was heartbroken when they turned me down. I decided to call them and find out why, and when I was told it was because I didn’t have physics GCSE I told them that there had been a mistake, because I did have it. I begged for an interview, but they said the interviews were almost over. Eventually they relented and said I could come on the last day of interviews, for the final appointment of the day.

  I did and I was accepted. But as I was right at the end of the interviews, all the places had already been allocated for that September and so I was offered one for the following year. That was fine with me; I was prepared to wait and I decided to spend my gap year working and travelling.

  A year later, when I walked through the doors of the RVC’s Camden campus to start my course, I felt ready to take on whatever the college was going to throw at me over the next five years. I knew that by the end I would need to know how to do everything – diagnosis, treatment and surgery – on any animal at any time, anywhere, from a well-equipped surgery to a grubby barn, and I couldn’t wait to get going.

  For the first two years we were based in Camden before transferring to the Hawkshead campus in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, for the final three years. And until the spring term of our fourth year everything went smoothly. My days were filled with lectures, essays and studying dry bones, specimens in bottles, X-rays, plastic models and charts. Everything, in fact, but live animal cases.

  We knew that was coming, of course, but it didn’t seem real until, one bleak January day in 2013, all 250 of us in the year group were gathered together in the lecture theatre by our Vice Principal, David Church, a charismatic Australian who was passionate about getting the best out of his students. He was a genius, and incredibly intimidating for that reason, but we’d come to realise that ultimately he was on our side and always put the health and welfare of the students above everything else.

  That January morning he looked around the auditorium at a sea of expectant faces. ‘This is the start of the rest of your lives. It’s time to put everything you’ve learned into practice,’ he announced. ‘You’re going to go out there and be vets, and you’ll be expected to know your stuff and get it right. You’re not students now, you’re colleagues of the vets you’ll be working with, part of the team, and you’ll be expected to know what to do.’

  I was sitting to one side of the lecture theatre with my housemates, Andrew, James, Kevin and John, plus James’s girlfriend Hannah, who was a semi-permanent fixture in our house. Lucy was in the row behind. We always chose a spot well out of David Church’s direct eye line because he tended to pick on students and ask them alarming questions.

  I turned to Lucy. ‘Are you feeling as nervous as I am?’ I whispered.

  ‘More,’ she replied. ‘I’m actually about to be sick.’

  I looked over at the boys. Andrew looked cool and calm. He never seemed to get excited or nervous about anything, and was incredibly steady. Kevin looked worried and James even more so, but John looked excited. He couldn’t wait to get stuck in.

  The five of us couldn’t have been more different. Goodness knows how we ended up sharing a house together, but after a year in student accommodation we’d opted to move into a small house in Camden in our second year, and we’d decided to stay together when we moved to Hertfordshire in our third. We’d been lucky with the house we found as the owners were going abroad and, amazingly, didn’t mind letting to students.

  Being the only girl I’d bagged the best room. But for the boys the room that mattered was the kitchen, and this one had two ovens and six hobs. Food wasn’t a priority for me. I tried to keep my food budget to £10 a week and ate whatever was on offer at the supermarket so that I could save for other things, but the four boys were all big eaters.

  James loved to cook and had an entire rack of spices. At weekends you’d find him creating gourmet dishes like pulled pork and fennel or Thai green curry to share with Hannah. He had a slow cooker and would put a casserole on in the morning to be ready for when he came back in the evening.

  Andrew was stick thin but could pile away more food than anyone I’d ever seen; he liked substantial dishes like spaghetti with meatballs or big roasts. He’d eat a huge plateful and be back for more two hours later.

  Kevin and John were both from the States, but that was all they had in common. Kevin was from South Carolina and was an outdoor, baseball and hiking kind of guy who loved his steak, burger and fries. Top of his list was grits, or ground corn; it was his staple diet and he’d bring back bags of the stuff every time he went to the States. We all thought it was just like Italian polenta that you can get in a lot of supermarkets, but Kevin insisted that they weren’t the same at all and he had to have the authentic Yankee version from home.

  Every Halloween his parents would send over a bulk order of candy corn, which tastes like fudge, comes in the shape of sweetcorn and is orange and white. We loved it and dug into the huge jar every time we passed.

  While Kevin missed the wide open spaces of America, John was a city guy from New York. Neat, clean and organised, he kept his room pristine and tidied up after all of us. John loved English culture, he thought the English were terribly polite and he loved traditions like afternoon tea. He shipped his Mini Cooper over from the States because he didn’t want to drive any other car, and he liked to make himself fancy dishes like chicken salad with pomegranate seeds and feta. He also made bread, enough for all of us, and on the days when I had no time or money for anything else his fresh bread kept me going.

  All the boys were in different groups and on a different rotation schedule to mine, so I was grateful for Lucy. An hour after David Church’s talk we sat in the canteen, going through our rotations timetables. Altogether we would be going through sixteen different core rotations, some a week long, some two weeks. The essential ones would include farm animal medicine, first-opinion practice (which means being part of a local veterinary practice), equine medicine, and specialist areas such as neurology, surgery, anaesthesia and orthopaedics. In addition we would have three fortnights in which we could choose our own rotation electives, and sixteen weeks in which we were expected to carry out work experience, which we had to set up ourselves. We’d started writing to practices months earlier, asking if they would accept us for work experience, which had to fit into the gaps between the required college rotations. It was enough to make the most confident student’s head spin.

  ‘Horses first,’ I said. ‘That’s good for me.’

  ‘Not me,’ Lucy said gloomily. ‘I’m not keen on horses. I prefer cows, so give me a cowshed over a stable anytime.’

  ‘I’ll watch your back with the horses if you watch mine with the cows.’

  She grinned. ‘Deal.’
r />   Lucy and I were close, and there wasn’t much we didn’t tell each other. We had a lot of interests in common; we were both musical and also sporty, outdoor people. We played a lot of tennis together, but when it came to running our paths diverged; Lucy ran marathons while I was happy to settle for a mile or two with the dog.

  Thank goodness we’d got into the same rotation group. I didn’t know the other three girls on our rotation – Grace, Jade and Katy – but soon after we’d been given our groups at the end of the autumn term, Lucy and I met Grace at the Christmas Ball. She bounced up, put an arm round each of us and said merrily, ‘Hello, girls, I think we’re going to be working together.’

  Lucy and I laughed. ‘Nice to meet you, too. See you on Black Monday.’

  ‘Yup,’ Grace called, as her boyfriend Miles led her away, ‘it’s going to be a laugh.’

  Black Monday was the first day of rotations. So-called, no doubt, because it was the day on which every single student was filled with unmitigated terror.

  For us it fell on a bitterly cold day in early February, when the five of us gathered at 8am by the whiteboard in the RVC’s Equine Hospital, ready to begin large animal imaging, all of us pale with lack of sleep and visibly nervous. Grace, in total contrast to her appearance at the ball, was jittery and anxious. ‘Not good with horses,’ she muttered.

  Jade had a bit of experience with horses but none of the others did, so I felt lucky. But liking horses and knowing how to treat them were two different things, and I’d spent the previous weekend cramming over my textbooks, trying to memorise every possible horse complaint.

  For equine work we all had to wear green overalls with our name tags pinned to the front. Rumour had it that if you forgot your name tag you failed the rotation. I wasn’t absolutely sure that this was true, but just to be safe I’d had mine within sight all weekend. Underneath the overalls I had a thick fleece and, like the others, I was wearing sturdy boots padded out with warm socks.