Certain details in this book, including names, places and dates, have been changed.
HarperElement
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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 Nineteen: The End in Sight
CHAPTER ONE
Critical Care and the Night Shift
‘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