Tales from a Young Vet: Mad cows, crazy kittens, and all creatures big and small
The funny, touching and entertaining story of how Jo Hardy, the star of BBC2’s Young Vets, gets to grips with animals big and small, friendly and not-at-all-happy, on the road to becoming a fully qualified vet.‘Stand well clear. Keep your eyes on them. Oh, and make sure you have insurance.’Not the most comforting words of wisdom, but probably the most useful for a trainee vet, Jo would say. From well-equipped surgeries to windswept hills and ramshackle barns, Jo has to be able to diagnose and treat any animal, at any time of the day or night. It’s not quite as easy as James Herriot made it seem.Jo’s final year of training saw her race from rectal examinations of cows to spine surgery on a Great Dane, and from treating an eventing horse with a heart problem to inserting a contraceptive implant into a monkey.And then there were the owners – the tough guy who sobbed when his cat was diagnosed with cancer, the woman who was convinced her dog was embarrassed by its stomach upset, and the farmer who loved his cows as much as anyone loves their pets.Gruelling days of animal treatments and visits combined with long nights of study and revision made Jo’s final year of training the most demanding and rewarding year of her life. Her book tells of the highs and lows, the pets that stole her heart, and the lifelong friends that she made – with two legs and four.
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Certain details in this book, including names, places and dates, have been changed.
HarperElement
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London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperElement 2015
FIRST EDITION
© Jo Hardy and Caro Handley 2015
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
Cover images © Sarah Tanat-Jones (animal illustrations); Johnny Ring (photograph)
Cover layout © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Jo Hardy asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008142483
Ebook Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 9780008142490
Version: 2015-09-24
Contents
Chapter One: Critical Care and the Night Shift
Chapter Three: The Vaccine Trick and Dermaholiday
Chapter Four: ‘Don’t Cry, Englishman’
Chapter Five: ‘What Seems to Be the Problem?’
Chapter Six: For the Love of Horses
Chapter Seven: Fly on the Wall
Chapter Eight: We Saved a Life
Chapter Ten: Between Two Worlds
Chapter Eleven: The Kitten who Thought She Was a Parrot
Chapter Twelve: Mad Cows and Doris the Goat
Chapter Thirteen: ‘Happy Christmas, Clunky’
Chapter Fourteen: Grumpy Lizards and Misty-eyed Gorillas
Chapter Fifteen: Stella the Heifer
Chapter Sixteen: Man’s Best Friend
Chapter Seventeen: Horse Sense
Chapter Eighteen: Luca the Great Dane
CHAPTER ONE
‘Can you help her? Please? She means the world to me. I don’t know what I’d do without Misty.’
Tears filled the eyes of the elderly woman on the other side of the consultation table as she looked down at the small white ball of fur in her arms.
I took a deep breath.
‘Pop her on the table and let’s have a quick look.’
Misty was a little terrier, and she was clearly feeling pretty ill. She lay on her side on the table in front of me, whimpering and panting frantically. Terriers can be real rascals, full of energy, always keeping their owners on their toes, but poor Misty was obviously in a bad way.
I was doing my best to sound confident, but inside I was quaking. It was my first twelve-hour shift in Emergency Critical Care – the equivalent of accident and emergency for pets – at the world-famous Queen Mother Hospital for Animals, and it was my job to assess each new case as it came in and to judge whether the animal could wait for attention or needed to be rushed straight to the Emergency Room – or ER – for treatment.
This was crunch time. As a fourth-year vet student I’d done all the theory, attended endless lectures, written papers and taken exams; in fact, just about everything except take charge of real live animals. Now, I, together with the other 250 students in my year at the Royal Veterinary College, was starting the final year of training – a whirlwind of back-to-back work placements known as rotations in which we’d be taking all that we’d learned in the classroom and putting it to the test in practices, farms, zoos and animal hospitals. We’d be covering everything from surgery to radiology to anaesthesia and tackling a whole range of life-saving procedures for the first time. Each of our three dozen or so placements would be assessed – we couldn’t afford to fail a single one.
I’d started out feeling a mixture of excitement and terror, anticipation and blind panic. What if I blew it, made a wrong diagnosis, failed to spot something vital or just froze? Was I really cut out to be a vet, or had I been fooling myself? It was time to find out. So here I was, in Emergency Critical Care, just three weeks into rotations, in at the deep end, dealing with a non-stop queue of very sick animals with very worried owners and having to make the vital first-stage triage assessments on my own.
That morning I’d got my kit ready – the unwritten vet ‘uniform’ of chinos, flat pumps and checked shirt. Over that went the student’s purple scrub top with my name stitched onto the top left side, plus a stethoscope round my neck, thermometer, scissors, notepad and pens (lots) shoved in my pockets. And a fob watch, because as vets we had to keep our arms below the elbow bare of clothing or jewellery.
Knowing that I’d be on the front line of emergency animal care had kept me awake for a good part of the night. So far we’d had a couple of easy weeks, learning how to take diagnostic images and spending time in dermatology. But now, along with the four other trainee vets in my rotation group, I would be facing a continuous stream of animals, all needing a split-second diagnosis. Animals can’t tell you what they’re feeling, so all a vet can do is look at the presenting symptoms, the animal’s condition and its history and put everything together to try to work out what’s going on.
