Tales from a Young Vet by Jo Hardy

Author:Jo Hardy
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Kitten who Thought She Was a Parrot

By late November I had reached a real low. We were in the middle of our two weeks in small animal medicine and it was, to put it mildly, challenging.

To be honest I had dreaded this placement, and it was turning out to be even worse than I had feared.

The problem with this rotation wasn’t the patients, which were mostly cuddly and uncomplaining, it was the non-stop pressure of hectic twelve- to fifteen-hour days on which I arrived at and left the almost windowless confines of the Queen Mother Hospital without ever seeing daylight.

I’m a very outdoorsy person. I need to ride, jog, walk or just get outside, or I start to get cabin fever. But on the treadmill that was small animal medicine there was no time even to stick your head out of the door and check that daylight still existed. Breaks were snatched and barely lasted long enough to grab a cup of tea or a biscuit. And inevitably tiredness set in, tempers frayed and grumbling became the order of the day.

Lucy, Grace, Jade, Katy and I were on this rotation with our sister group. So there were ten of us students, each being assigned multiple cases for which we were expected to take charge, and the strain set in pretty much straight away. Even cheerful Charlie looked a bit white-faced by the end of each long, long day.

Each morning I woke at 5.30am to a freezing cold house, threw on my clothes, gulped down half a bowl of cereal and huddled into my coat before venturing out into the cold and dark to de-ice my car.

I had to get to the hospital by 6.30am to start animal checks. On day one we were each assigned multiple cases and from then on we took charge of them. As new animals were admitted to the QMH we were allocated their cases, which happened as frequently or sometimes more frequently than our current cases being discharged or transferred to other departments. So we continually had at least three or four cases on the go, and that meant morning SOAP checks on all of them. In addition to checking their medical state, we also had to clean out kennels and cat cages and take any dogs that were in our care outside so that they could go to the toilet on the square of grass reserved for this purpose. Everyone was supposed to pick up after the dogs, but a lot of them had diarrhoea, so we’d be out there in our dolly shoes tip-toeing through a minefield of dog mess and mud in the dark, thinking ‘Please go quickly so we can go back inside’ while the dog whose lead you were holding would be sniffing around, taking its time and enjoying the aroma. At least the cats had litter trays.

At around 8am we’d go to the tea room for a welcome cup of tea and to be allocated the new cases that were to come in that day.

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