Diary of a Dick Vet

PASS!

(And holy smokes, with a 77%!)

Today is National Poetry Day in the UK. There is, admittedly, limited crossover between poetry and veterinary medicine; however, being a lover of poetry I wanted to share an example of such an intersection.

As a veterinarian, my understanding of science must be influenced by and compounded with my understanding of humanity. That fundamental principle of primum non nocere - “first, do no harm” - accounts for the lives and emotions tied into any patient observed. I hope I never forget that the animal in front of me is someone’s pet and companion.

So, printed without any permission at all - but also to no profit to me besides the satisfaction of a good poem:

The Family Cat

This cat was bought upon the day
That marked the Japanese defeat;
He was anonymous and gay,
But timorous and not discreet.

Although three years have gone, he shows
Fresh sides of his uneven mind:
To us - fond, lenient - he grows
Still more eccentric and defined.

He is a grey, white-chested cat,
And barred with black along the grey;
Not large, and the reverse of fat,
His profle good from either way.

The poet buys especial fish,
Which is made ready by his wife;
The poet’s son holds out the dish:
They thus maintan the creature’s life.

It’s not his anniversary
Alone that’s his significance:
In any case mortality
May not be thought of in his presence.

For brief as are out lives, more brief
Exist. Our stroking hides the bones,
Which none the less cry out in grief,
Beneath the mocking, loving tones.

— Roy Fuller

It’s time to share a bit of information with the people reading this blog, that I hadn’t anticipated ever having to write.

In December 2010, I took, and failed, my farm animal written exam. I missed the pass mark by 2 points, and while I was not happy about the prospect of resitting the exam in July, I recognized that reviewing the material a second time would only serve to benefit me. If I pass, I prefer to pass with a healthy 60+% (remember, in the UK, 60% is akin to a B-), just so I know that I hadn’t “scraped past.”

On my way to Cramond

I spent a lot of my summer studying for this resit exam, grabbing minutes to review flashcards between appointments at my EMS placement and re-reading notes in a nearby cafe. I came back to the UK for about two weeks of intensive studying, spending long hours in the library with my study-partner, answering practice questions and constantly quizing myself. I never feel fully prepared for an exam, but I was more knowledgeable this time around, and felt some comfort in knowing I was only 2 points away from passing in my first attempt.

Fast-forward two weeks later, to when I found out I had failed the exam for a second time. I wasn’t surprised - quickly after leaving the exam, and when chatting with my friends, I realized that I had misunderstood one of the essay questions and wrote about the wrong topic, which I knew would probably cost me the exam - but I was still very upset. Very suddenly, I went from moving steadily along the stream with the rest of the school, to realizing I had made a mistake that would hold me back, and cost me a lot of time and money.

The breakwater at Cramond Beach

The consequence of failing this exam for the second time is that I must take it a third time: in December of 2011, with the class of students I had once called “the year below me” and must now call my own. The class that used to be mine - now “the year above me” started final year yesterday. They’ll spend this year mostly in the hospital, acting as vets-to-be; I will be back in the lecture theatre, re-learning about farm animals, come the end of September.

After I take the exam for the third time, I am free for awhile: as I have already passed all of the course work in the Spring Semester of 4th year, I don’t need to retake any of it. Being (mostly) free until August, and without a work visa, and no longer a student, I have to move back to the United States for awhile. I am not upset about moving home, but I hadn’t planned to come back to California under these circumstances.

Near Ocean Terminal

All of this news has been very upsetting for me, especially to my confidence, and I was hesitant to share any of this publicly. But, ultimately I decided it was important to open up about this, because I think the next generation of US/Canadian students looking to apply to vet college abroad, should be aware of the consequences of doing poorly. No one thinks they’ll struggle to the point of failure - I certainly didn’t - and I should emphasize that I am part of a small fraction of students who failed their exams for a second time this year, so I am not wishing to scare people away. The clear majority of students make it to the end without having to re-organize their plans for resitting a semester. But shit happens. And while students fail in US/Canadian vet schools as well, failing and re-taking a course in a foreign University brings even more complications. I think it’s only fair that future applicants are able to prepare for a ‘worst-case’ scenario.

NB Worth noting is that the UK system of re-sitting years, while increasingly less common, is still more frequently encountered than in US universities. UK students traditionally leave vet school with substantially less debt than their American and Canadian counterparts, and at a younger age; thus spending extra time in University is perhaps less dramatic a consequence. Believe it or not, over here, re-sitting a year is not seen as a mark of a poor student, but rather that the student needed a bit more time - although I dread trying to explain that to a future US employer!

"Remember, you passed the Cat and Dog part of the course alright!"

I’m at the tail end of a week of Small Animal ICU at the vet school. It’s been a fairly calm week - with less than 24 hours to go, we haven’t had anything terribly dramatic happen to our little group of ICU students. I was afraid the week would be full of sick animals becoming even sicker, and lone vet students on constant monitoring at 3am having to phone the resident and intern and assist with a ‘crash.’ Though I shouldn’t say anything, since I have the last 12am-4am shift tonight….

The cases have been interesting, and I understand a lot during the evening rounds without having to run off to a textbook. Tonight, most of the animals have bad abdomens: two kitties recovering from peritonitis, and a dog recuperating from a splenectomy.  The dog was apparently quite a tricky surgery, as he already has heart problems, and there was a lot of internal bleeding to complicate the procedure even further.

The first cat with peritonitis looked dreadful for the past two days, but now he finds the energy to destroy every box of litter and paper that comes his way. As the nurse recounted changing his litter three times already this morning, I added the the three times I cleaned up after him last night (between midnight and 3am), and even the resident had changed the cat’s litter twice this morning! Cheeky wee thing.

The loudly slamming doors of the student ICU flat disrupted my nap this afternoon, but hopefully I’ll have enough sleep on board for another graveyard shift. I actually like the late night shifts, as there is often something interesting going on, but most of the craziness has passed by 1 or 2 am. I’m sure the duty intern, who doesn’t appear to have had any sleep in the past 36 hours, would beg to differ with me. I wouldn’t be surprised to find her curled up in a kennel, attached to drip when I come down at midnight.

I’m nearly done with my first week of EMS at a small animal practice in Edinburgh. It’s been really great so far: lovely, helpful staff (who even remembered me from last time! And presumably not for the wrong reasons!), a small surgery (not too many cases to keep track of in my head) and they’ve been letting me do quite a bit. After I’ve been in practice for a few years, I’m sure I’ll be bored with drawing up medications, inducing animals for anesthesia, intubating them, stitching up incisions, etc etc. Right now it’s exciting and challenging, and the sort of things I should be practicing at this point.

Wednesday morning, I came in, and one of the vets gave me this:

“Do you recognize that?” he asked.

I honestly couldn’t tell what it was.

“Maybe if I get the scanner out?” the other vet in the room hinted….

The day before, I had put a microchip in a cat that was anesthetized for a spay. The vet came over to check and decided I had been successful, as he couldn’t find the chip outside of the cat. Later that day, after the cat had gone home, while being combed, the owner had found a funny little white thing on its coat, and brought it to the practice. It was my (failed) microchip, which had fallen out. And now I have it to keep, in a little plastic pot.

(I was amused and a bit embarrassed by this all, but two of the vets told me about their own failed microchip attempts, and the third vet insisted it was because the cat was so skinny that the chip had fallen out. Regardless, no one seemed to suggest I had been blindly incompetent, and rather told me it was just bad luck. Sadly, as the cat needs a new microchip, it’s a rather expensive accident!)

I recently finished a week of EMS at the Large Animal hospital at the vet school. Students in their 4th year are required to participate in a week of either large or small animal ICU duty, during which they live on site, and are on-call 24 hours a day.

Initially, I was quite nervous about the whole thing, but I ended up really enjoying myself, and found the week very rewarding. By the end, after several nights of less than 5 hours of sleep, and daily 9pm emergencies that needed attending to, I was physically and mentally knackered, but somehow I still feel keen on the idea of doing it again in final year! We students divided up the cases in the hospital and provided their nursing care for the week. Unlike my other EMS experiences, where I tend to become a fly-on-the-wall, and mostly observe a practice that functions quite happily without me during every other week of the year, the vet school’s hospitals rely on students to perform a lot of daily duties for the cases, so I was very busy doing vet-y things.

We didn’t diagnose cases, nor did we decide on treatment plans, but honestly I’m not at the point yet anyway. Instead, I got a chance to practice very basic aspects of medicine that I haven’t had a chance to learn - really simple things like opening a syringe packet without looking like a dunce, drawing up meds with a degree of confidence and accuracy, choosing needle sizes for different injections, mixing feeds, listening to normal AND abnormal gut sounds and heart rhythms and lung fields, writing down useful case details, giving morning rounds and sounding like you know what you’re talking about in front of a group of experts - so that the little details don’t overwhelm me, and thus won’t distract me from the more complicated stuff.

Also, there were horses! I forgot how much I like horses. I looked after an Arabian gelding who was frightened by just about everything in his path, but was still very charming about his phobias. Later on, I looked after a Thoroughbred mare following a really cool surgery that involved ligating her left internal carotid artery, and she was very sweet. Plus, there were a few 2am shifts spent with an obese, farting gelding who needed eye medication….

At the end of the week, during 9am rounds, the weekend on-call clinician thanked us all for working so hard. And we had worked hard - 7 emergencies, including three surgical colics and two foals that needed 2-hourly intensive care - so it was nice to be appreciated. I came home and slept for hours, but since Monday I’ve been wondering about the cases in the hospital, and how everything turned out - especially the outcomes of the critical cases. I will have to ask the students on duty this week how it all turned out.

I spent my holidays in Cornwall, visiting a mixed animal practice and appreciating the noticeably longer day length. One photo I took illustrates it all perfectly:

This was taken Christmas morning. It captures the happy mix of small farms, tiny villages, blue sky, and crisp December weather that filled my days, as the year turned from old to new.

Sadly, it wasn’t lovely weather everyday. But at least there were plenty of cows to keep me in high spirits.

Today I learned that the expression ‘to luck out’ means completely opposite things in British English versus American English.

When hearing of differences like these, I wonder how much unrealized confusion I may have been caused in previous conversations with my British and Irish friends.

The weather has been pretty lousy in Edinburgh lately. I feel bit funny even writing that, since I seem to always be gripping about the weather. What I dislike about Scottish weather is how horribly unpredictable it is; lately, however, the weather has been predictably bad. Instead of a rain shower popping in at 3pm for a short 45 minute drizzle on hundreds of thousands of Edinburgers who dressed for the clear, blue skies they saw that morning, there has been rain rain rain all day for three days. The days are definitely feeling short as well.

However, when the sun does manage to return, it will highlight how lovely the city has become as summer fades, and autumn takes center stage. Hallowe’en isn’t especially popular here - it’s seen as a bit too American for this country - but I’m going to take advantage of my American roots to knit some pumpkins to cheer up the place as the rain continues to come down, and to remind me of clear California Hallowe’en nights. Last Sunday was the sort of crisp, clear day that makes fall my favorite season. I just hope a few more join us, before winter arrives!