Tales from a Young Vet: Part 2 of 3: Mad cows, crazy kittens, and all creatures big and small. Jo Hardy
and I’d been dropping by every summer since, so Tom and I had become good friends and he’d agreed that the crew could do some filming on the farm.
Tom is a country man through and through. All he ever wanted was to take over the family farm and to keep things just as they had always been. He loved the quiet life, running the farm and then going to the pub for a pint in the evenings. With my thirst for adventure we were very different, but he was a joker who made me laugh and I liked lending a hand when I was down there.
This summer Tom proudly showed me the trailer he had bought to fit behind the tractor. The idea was that it would pick up the cut grass and save him doing it by hand. Except that what Tom showed me was, as far as I could see, a pile of rusty junk.
‘What do you think?’ he said, eyes gleaming with triumph.
‘Um, it looks as though it might need a bit of work doing on it.’
‘Yes, I know, but never mind that, I’ll soon sort it out. And it was a bargain at £800.’
I peered at the trailer, with its rusting sides, dodgy wooden flooring and rotting chains.
‘I’m sure it will be great when you get it going, Tom.’
‘Course it will. Real beauty this, it’s going to save me hours of work.’
To be fair, he did get it going. He worked on it for a week and eventually it cranked into action and rattled along behind the tractor, flicking at least some of the grass into the back before grinding to a halt. A thump and a kick and it would reluctantly be off again, until the next stop, but despite its lacklustre performance and dubious charms, Tom remained delighted with it and was convinced that it was a bargain.
When Amy and Sam arrived on the farm they decided to shoot a dreamy (and I thought cheesy, but I kept quiet) segment of me walking through a herd of cows and then sitting down on the grass to admire the view. Unfortunately, however, I hadn’t slept much the night before, and each time the camera panned around for a close-up shot of my face, my eye twitched convulsively, making me look more Hunchback of Notre-Dame than dewy-eyed young vet.
Giving up on that footage, they waited until the next day and joined us in the farmyard, where I was helping Tom ‘dry off’ some cows in the dairy parlour, which meant putting teat sealants in those cows that needed a few milk-free months before giving birth to another calf and starting the cycle again. As the camera panned in I concentrated hard on the teats of the cow I was under, trying to do a perfect job, but unfortunately I didn’t think about where my head was and I head-butted the cow on the hock so hard that my head was left throbbing. Despite the pain I tried to ignore what had just happened and carry on but, unbeknown to me, I had cow dung smeared across my forehead, which didn’t exactly make for a flattering bit of footage.
Third time lucky, we all hoped. The following day Amy decided they would film me with Tosca on the beach. What could be simpler than a little sequence of me playing with the family dog? Tosca, despite being blind, still had a springer spaniel attitude. In other words, she was a big ball of non-stop energy. I really hoped she would be reasonably calm and play her part, but with the scent of the sea in her nostrils she became wildly excited, tugging and jerking on her lead so that it twisted round my hand and I yelped in pain. ‘Try squatting down beside her and giving her a cuddle,’ suggested Amy.
I tried, pleading with Tosca to behave and just sit patiently for two minutes while we both stared out to sea. But Tosca wasn’t having it; she bounded off into the waves, blissfully happy and oblivious to her missed opportunity to be a canine star.
Amy decided to cut straight to the family film. Mum wasn’t keen on being filmed, so they went for a shot of me with Dad and Ross on either side. So far so good, and they asked Dad and Ross each to say something about me. Dad was very complimentary, but in true little brother style Ross wasn’t. He and I just couldn’t stop laughing, so yet another unusable piece of film bit the dust. All in all not a good start to my TV career!
I spent a final evening with Tom, enjoying a bottle of wine beside a fire in his backyard, talking about life and laughing about the filming. Despite our different takes on life I really liked Tom and I was sad to say goodbye for another year.
After we drove back from Cornwall I had one more relaxed Sunday before starting two weeks in anaesthesia, a rotation I was absolutely dreading. I did a bit of last-minute cramming, the names of all the different anaesthetic drugs blurring before my eyes and my panic levels rising, before giving up and nipping over to Grandma and Grandpa next door for a calming cup of tea.
Mum’s parents have always been a mainstay in my life. They’ve lived next door to us all our lives, and when Ross and I were little and our parents were working they picked us up from school and fed us wickedly delicious food like chicken nuggets and Grandpa’s amazing creamy mash or, our favourite of all, custard with chocolate drops sprinkled over it. We had some lovely times; Grandpa used to take me to the park to find a goose feather, bring it home and cut it into shape and then use it as a quill to teach me calligraphy. And Grandma taught me how to make melt-in-your-mouth scones and crunchy gingerbread men.
As I hugged them goodbye and piled my bags back into the car I thanked my lucky stars for my generous, supportive family.
CHAPTER EIGHT
We’d been told that the anaesthesia rotation would make even the toughest vet student cry. Rumour had it that the clinicians were merciless, the drugs impossible to figure out and the operations interminable. So I arrived at the Queen Mother Hospital at eight o’clock on a morning in late August feeling extremely nervous. I felt sure that I knew absolutely nothing and was going to fall flat on my face.
To make matters worse, the TV crew were coming to film me at work for the first time. After the slapstick carry-on of our holiday shoots, I could only hope that this wouldn’t be a disaster, too.
Thankfully, two of the other students were also being filmed. Grace was by now a bit of an old hand in front of the cameras, and so was Charlie. He was in our sister rotation group, the one that was doing more or less the same order of rotations and had been with us in Wales. They joined us again for anaesthesia and it was good to see them – especially Charlie, who was one of those guys that everyone got on with. Quite a posh country chap, he wore his checked shirts, chinos and gilet as standard wear rather than just as vet ‘uniform’. With blond, floppy hair and a huge grin on his face, Charlie was always in a good mood, always jokey and easygoing, no matter how stressful the moment. And he was brave; he would give anything a go, even if he knew he was probably going to get it wrong.
I enjoyed bumping into Charlie in the student tea room, where we’d regularly congregate to have a moan. He’d be the one who would come and put his arms around you and say, ‘How’s it going? What’s going on?’
That first week the crew concentrated on Charlie and Grace, and I was grateful for the chance to find my feet with anaesthesia without cameras there to highlight my every mistake. I like to get things right, which I was quickly coming to realise was unrealistic in rotations. This was the time to get things wrong and learn from those mistakes so that they wouldn’t be made once we were out in the world on our own.
My first case was a sleek black cat called Archie, who had a mass in one of his lungs. He needed to have a third of the lung removed, which required a sternotomy, for which the whole sternum would need to be opened. When you do this the animal can’t breathe alone, so it has to be attached to a ventilator that will effectively breathe for it. But ventilating has a major impact on blood pressure; if you over-ventilate it affects the blood flowing around the thorax and around the heart, and because of this you must take the blood pressure every five minutes. This is in addition to the information on the anaesthetic machine that must be closely monitored throughout the operation; the heart rate, oxygen saturation level (the amount of oxygen in the blood), the breathing rate, the end tidal CO2 (which is the amount of carbon dioxide being breathed out), and finally the isoflurane concentration (which indicates the concentration of