That January morning he looked around the auditorium at a sea of expectant faces. ‘This is the start of the rest of your lives. It’s time to put everything you’ve learned into practice,’ he announced. ‘You’re going to go out there and be vets, and you’ll be expected to know your stuff and get it right. You’re not students now, you’re colleagues of the vets you’ll be working with, part of the team, and you’ll be expected to know what to do.’
I was sitting to one side of the lecture theatre with my housemates, Andrew, James, Kevin and John, plus James’s girlfriend Hannah, who was a semi-permanent fixture in our house. Lucy was in the row behind. We always chose a spot well out of David Church’s direct eye line because he tended to pick on students and ask them alarming questions.
I turned to Lucy. ‘Are you feeling as nervous as I am?’ I whispered.
‘More,’ she replied. ‘I’m actually about to be sick.’
I looked over at the boys. Andrew looked cool and calm. He never seemed to get excited or nervous about anything, and was incredibly steady. Kevin looked worried and James even more so, but John looked excited. He couldn’t wait to get stuck in.
The five of us couldn’t have been more different. Goodness knows how we ended up sharing a house together, but after a year in student accommodation we’d opted to move into a small house in Camden in our second year, and we’d decided to stay together when we moved to Hertfordshire in our third. We’d been lucky with the house we found as the owners were going abroad and, amazingly, didn’t mind letting to students.
Being the only girl I’d bagged the best room. But for the boys the room that mattered was the kitchen, and this one had two ovens and six hobs. Food wasn’t a priority for me. I tried to keep my food budget to £10 a week and ate whatever was on offer at the supermarket so that I could save for other things, but the four boys were all big eaters.
James loved to cook and had an entire rack of spices. At weekends you’d find him creating gourmet dishes like pulled pork and fennel or Thai green curry to share with Hannah. He had a slow cooker and would put a casserole on in the morning to be ready for when he came back in the evening.
Andrew was stick thin but could pile away more food than anyone I’d ever seen; he liked substantial dishes like spaghetti with meatballs or big roasts. He’d eat a huge plateful and be back for more two hours later.
Kevin and John were both from the States, but that was all they had in common. Kevin was from South Carolina and was an outdoor, baseball and hiking kind of guy who loved his steak, burger and fries. Top of his list was grits, or ground corn; it was his staple diet and he’d bring back bags of the stuff every time he went to the States. We all thought it was just like Italian polenta that you can get in a lot of supermarkets, but Kevin insisted that they weren’t the same at all and he had to have the authentic Yankee version from home.
Every Halloween his parents would send over a bulk order of candy corn, which tastes like fudge, comes in the shape of sweetcorn and is orange and white. We loved it and dug into the huge jar every time we passed.
While Kevin missed the wide open spaces of America, John was a city guy from New York. Neat, clean and organised, he kept his room pristine and tidied up after all of us. John loved English culture, he thought the English were terribly polite and he loved traditions like afternoon tea. He shipped his Mini Cooper over from the States because he didn’t want to drive any other car, and he liked to make himself fancy dishes like chicken salad with pomegranate seeds and feta. He also made bread, enough for all of us, and on the days when I had no time or money for anything else his fresh bread kept me going.
All the boys were in different groups and on a different rotation schedule to mine, so I was grateful for Lucy. An hour after David Church’s talk we sat in the canteen, going through our rotations timetables. Altogether we would be going through sixteen different core rotations, some a week long, some two weeks. The essential ones would include farm animal medicine, first-opinion practice (which means being part of a local veterinary practice), equine medicine, and specialist areas such as neurology, surgery, anaesthesia and orthopaedics. In addition we would have three fortnights in which we could choose our own rotation electives, and sixteen weeks in which we were expected to carry out work experience, which we had to set up ourselves. We’d started writing to practices months earlier, asking if they would accept us for work experience, which had to fit into the gaps between the required college rotations. It was enough to make the most confident student’s head spin.
‘Horses first,’ I said. ‘That’s good for me.’
‘Not me,’ Lucy said gloomily. ‘I’m not keen on horses. I prefer cows, so give me a cowshed over a stable anytime.’
‘I’ll watch your back with the horses if you watch mine with the cows.’
She grinned. ‘Deal.’
Lucy and I were close, and there wasn’t much we didn’t tell each other. We had a lot of interests in common; we were both musical and also sporty, outdoor people. We played a lot of tennis together, but when it came to running our paths diverged; Lucy ran marathons while I was happy to settle for a mile or two with the dog.
Thank goodness we’d got into the same rotation group. I didn’t know the other three girls on our rotation – Grace, Jade and Katy – but soon after we’d been given our groups at the end of the autumn term, Lucy and I met Grace at the Christmas Ball. She bounced up, put an arm round each of us and said merrily, ‘Hello, girls, I think we’re going to be working together.’
Lucy and I laughed. ‘Nice to meet you, too. See you on Black Monday.’
‘Yup,’ Grace called, as her boyfriend Miles led her away, ‘it’s going to be a laugh.’
Black Monday was the first day of rotations. So-called, no doubt, because it was the day on which every single student was filled with unmitigated terror.
For us it fell on a bitterly cold day in early February, when the five of us gathered at 8am by the whiteboard in the RVC’s Equine Hospital, ready to begin large animal imaging, all of us pale with lack of sleep and visibly nervous. Grace, in total contrast to her appearance at the ball, was jittery and anxious. ‘Not good with horses,’ she muttered.
Jade had a bit of experience with horses but none of the others did, so I felt lucky. But liking horses and knowing how to treat them were two different things, and I’d spent the previous weekend cramming over my textbooks, trying to memorise every possible horse complaint.
For equine work we all had to wear green overalls with our name tags pinned to the front. Rumour had it that if you forgot your name tag you failed the rotation. I wasn’t absolutely sure that this was true, but just to be safe I’d had mine within sight all weekend. Underneath the overalls I had a thick fleece and, like the others, I was wearing sturdy boots padded out with warm socks.
The Equine Hospital was part of the Large Animal Clinical Centre. We’d been into the barn around the back during training, but until now we’d never entered the hallowed portals of the main building, which was a working hospital open to the public. Before starting we were given a tour by one of the more junior vets. It was an impressive place, with consultation rooms, an imaging centre offering bone-scanning, MRI, CT and X-rays, two surgical theatres, and three stable blocks, one of them the Intensive Care Unit. We would be back here again later in the year for equine medicine, surgery and orthopaedics, but this time our focus was the imaging suite.
Everything in it was large scale. It had to be. And, as we quickly discovered, imaging a horse was no mean feat. To take a CT (computerised tomography) scan, a human would be asked to lie on a flat bed while an X-ray tube rotates around their body. With horses, only the head and neck fit in the tube, so if any other part of the body needs to be imaged a standard X-ray has to be taken. The machine is suspended from the ceiling, with handles either side, while the radiographer moves