I explained that we’d relieved the pressure of the build-up of gas, which could eventually have ruptured the stomach wall, and that Barney would need immediate surgery to return his stomach to the right position and to check for any other internal damage. ‘He’s sleeping now, we’ve given him pain relief and we’ll give you a call as soon as he’s out of surgery.’
‘Thanks.’ Doug smiled. ‘I’ll be off then. Got to get up for work at six.’
I looked at my watch. It was ten past two. Ten hours into my shift and there were still new patients coming through every few minutes.
By three things were quieter and at half-past Stacy told me I could go.
‘Have you had fun?’ she grinned. ‘ECC can be a bit of a baptism of fire.’
‘I’ve loved it,’ I said. ‘I felt like a real vet tonight.’
As I headed out to the car park the hospital’s hushed corridors felt peaceful. For a brief hour or two, until the day staff began to arrive, everything was calm.
I climbed into my little Volvo C30 and drove back to the house I shared with four other vet students in the village of Welham Green, five minutes from the campus. It just so happened (honest) that the other four were boys, despite the fact that eighty per cent of students in my year were girls. But despite the teasing I’d had from some of my friends, there was strictly no romance with any of them – we all just got on really well.
The house was in darkness as I crept in through the front door and made my way into the kitchen. Even Buddy, the sixth member of our household, a funny little mutt that one of my housemates had inherited from his grandparents, barely stirred in his basket.
Despite the late – or was it early? – hour, I was still buzzing with all that I’d learned and done over the past twelve hours. I made myself a cup of tea and a piece of toast – standard post-night-out fare – and sat at the kitchen table.
Fifteen minutes later the exhaustion hit me. I crawled upstairs and was asleep within seconds.
CHAPTER TWO
Most people decide they want to be vets when they’re four years old and fall in love with their hamster, or kitten, or puppy. But for me the lightbulb moment didn’t come until I was sixteen. Until then I was pretty sure I wanted to be a forensic scientist – I loved the idea of solving mysteries – but when I was offered the chance to do a couple of weeks’ work experience with a local veterinary practice I realised how much people love and depend on their animals, and that if we help the animal, we help the owner, whether that’s an elderly person whose cat means the world to them or a farmer who depends on his cows for his income. Being a vet wasn’t just about animals; it was about people, too. There was also a forensic side to it. A vet has to examine all the available information to determine what’s wrong with an animal and while that’s sometimes obvious, it can also be a bit of a mystery.
I was sold.
I come from a family of animal-lovers, which helps. We’ve always had dogs, mostly springer spaniels; affectionate, loyal and energetic dogs. By the time I went to college we’d had Tosca for about eight years and Paddy, a little Yorkshire terrier, for four. Paddy came to us after his elderly owner died and the RSPCA discovered about 200 Yorkies in a squalid, windowless shed, all of them in a dreadful condition. Some of them died and the rest were farmed out to different rescue organisations. Paddy was only eight months old when we got him, a little brown ball of hair. He seemed to have survived the ordeal pretty well and he and Tosca soon bonded, she took him under her wing and they’d snuggle on the sofa together.
We also had my two horses, Elli and Tammy. I’d been mad about horses since I was five years old, when my friend started riding lessons and I begged my parents to let me learn, too. It was a huge financial commitment for my parents, but for Mum, being around horses was an unfulfilled childhood dream, and Dad just wanted to get as far away from his city job as possible at weekends. Only my younger brother Ross didn’t share the passion, having received a hoof in the groin during his first riding lesson when he was five. There was no way he was going near a horse again.
We bought Elli when I was twelve. She was a six-year-old bay, dark brown with a black mane and tail, chestnut dapples and huge dark eyes. She was my fun horse, so safe I could even ride her without a saddle. We won lots of rosettes together at local gymkhanas, but three years later she went badly lame. The vet told us she would never be a competition horse again and that she should be put down. The alternatives were to box-rest her in stables for a year or so, or to put her in a field, let her roam free and see what happened.
It was a huge blow to me. Elli was my world and there was no way I was going to let her be put to sleep. She’d always hated stables, so we chose to put her in the field and let her run loose. Two years later she was no longer lame but very unfit, so I began riding her to get her fit enough to enter competitions again.
While Elli was recovering I got Tammy, a four-year-old bay whose broad brown flanks have an orange glow in the sun. Tammy was much more highly strung than Elli. Nervous around other horses, she would bare her teeth if she got scared, but she was willing and bold and she learned new tricks really fast.
Tammy was so unpredictable that at competitions she would either come first or be disqualified after terrifying the audience by rearing or trashing the jumps. I was never scared with her because I’d been around horses for ten years when I got her, and I had a Saturday job in which I trained difficult and young horses. I also had a bum like glue, so I seldom fell off her, even when she was misbehaving. Elli became the one horse Tammy trusted, and by the time I left for college Tammy and Elli were sharing a field at the stables up the road from us and were happy in one another’s company. I knew I’d miss them dreadfully, but I planned to get home as often as possible, and I arranged to loan them out to other riders so that they’d be exercised.
Once I decided that I wanted to be a vet there was no stopping me. I worked incredibly hard to make the A-level grades I needed, and Dad and I went to look around potential vet schools.
There were seven veterinary colleges I could apply to (there are eight now), but the moment I saw it my heart was set on the Royal Veterinary College. With two campuses, in Camden and Hertfordshire, it has fantastic teaching facilities, including the Queen Mother Hospital for Animals, its own Equine Centre and its own first-opinion practice. So I was heartbroken when they turned me down. I decided to call them and find out why, and when I was told it was because I didn’t have physics GCSE I told them that there had been a mistake, because I did have it. I begged for an interview, but they said the interviews were almost over. Eventually they relented and said I could come on the last day of interviews, for the final appointment of the day.
I did and I was accepted. But as I was right at the end of the interviews, all the places had already been allocated for that September and so I was offered one for the following year. That was fine with me; I was prepared to wait and I decided to spend my gap year working and travelling.
A year later, when I walked through the doors of the RVC’s Camden campus to start my course, I felt ready to take on whatever the college was going to throw at me over the next five years. I knew that by the end I would need to know how to do everything – diagnosis, treatment and surgery – on any animal at any time, anywhere, from a well-equipped surgery to a grubby barn, and I couldn’t wait to get going.
For the first two years we were based in Camden before transferring to the Hawkshead campus in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, for the final three years. And until the spring term of our fourth year everything went smoothly. My days were filled with lectures, essays and studying dry bones, specimens in bottles, X-rays, plastic models and charts. Everything, in fact, but live animal cases.
We knew that was coming, of course, but it didn’t seem real until, one bleak January day in 2013, all 250 of us in the year