Kitted up in lead gowns and gloves to protect us from the X-rays, we spent a lot of time learning the right angles to use, and then running out of the room while the image was taken (all bar the lucky two holding the horse and the plate) and back in again.
But our first job that grey February morning was to assist with bone-scanning, or to give it its technical name, scintigraphy, on a large grey Arab stallion. The clinician in charge that day was Jackie. In her mid-thirties and very friendly, she was aware of how nervous we all were and went out of her way to help us and make sure we were enjoying ourselves as well as learning.
The Arab stallion was lame, but there was no obvious reason why. Hence the bone scan, which is a good way of locating where the problem is when it’s not immediately obvious. Before the scan the horse is given an intravenous injection of a radioactive substance that spreads around its body, binding to areas where the bone is trying to heal itself and emitting radioactive rays that show up on the scans.
As one of the others stood holding the heavily sedated horse and stroking its nose, the scanner was moved around it, section by section. And, as we discovered, it takes absolutely ages. It’s not unusual to spend four hours scanning a horse, so we were taking it in shifts, holding the horse, observing the scans with the clinician or doing the other vital job – catching the horse’s radioactive pee in a bucket.
I was the lucky candidate first up for this job so, bucket in hand, I hovered around the horse’s rear end. I felt pretty silly and, to make matters worse, Lucy, who was holding the horse, kept catching my eye and making me laugh. As I lunged forward, just a moment too late to stop another waterfall of radioactive pee hitting the floor, Lucy snorted with laughter. ‘Just wait till it’s your turn,’ I mouthed at her.
It seemed like an age until we finished, but the end result showed that the horse had an inflammation in the pelvis. The only treatment, as Jackie the clinician explained, was rest and pain relief.
Over a brief lunch we chatted to the other three in our group. Now that we were underway, Grace had begun to get a little of her bounce back. Katy was quiet, but prone to cracking wicked jokes. And Jade was funny and very upfront – she said what she thought. They were all lovely, but I did wonder if, as we were going to be together so much, personality clashes would emerge.
Lucy and Jade were both trying out online dating, which led to a lot of laughter and discussion along the lines of, ‘Oh, look at him, what do you think? No, he’s definitely not my type, what about this one? That one looks like one of the horses, but here, take a look, this one’s quite hot.’
Grace, Katy and I weren’t in the market for dates, so we provided second opinions and back-up. Grace was living with her boyfriend, Miles, Katy wasn’t looking for a relationship and I had Jacques, the lovely South African I’d met during my gap year. By then we’d been dating long-distance for almost four years. We used Skype and our phones to stay in touch, but I missed him.
Apart from the horse pee/bucket challenge, things appeared to be pretty straightforward so far, but that afternoon we faced a much bigger test. An X-ray on the hock (the joint in the middle of the back leg) of a lame horse showed that a lot of things were wrong. This horse was elderly and the hock showed little bone protrusions, erosion, swelling and ankylosis, or bone fusion.
We had to stand round the X-ray and point out to Jackie what we saw, taking it in turns to come up with new things. This was a scene we would be repeating many times throughout rotations, in which students sweated and panicked, and clinicians looked patiently (or impatiently in a lot of cases) at them waiting for answers. If the person before you said the thing you had planned to say, you just had to come up with something else. The clinicians were never satisfied until they had squeezed multiple answers out of each of us.
Once we’d exhausted the list of visible irregularities, Jackie asked whether we thought the ankylosis was hurting the horse. My horse Elli had been through this, so I knew that once fused the bones in the two immobile hock joints no longer hurt because they had stopped moving. Feeling a touch smug, since everyone else had said yes, I said no, and was rewarded with a ‘Well done’ from Jackie, and ‘Just wait till we get to the cows’ and a wink from Lucy.
Next up was Honey, a lovely bay with a back problem. She had become unhappy with being ridden and an X-ray revealed that she had kissing spine; two of her vertebrae were touching each other, which must have been very painful for her. Luckily kissing spine is easy to treat; Honey would go for surgery, which could be done under local anaesthetic, and until then she’d be given pain relief via powder in her food.
By the end of the ten-hour day we were exhausted. Heady with relief that we’d made it through Black Monday, we raced each other around the imaging suite in the chairs on wheels, there for the infinitely more serious purpose of allowing clinicians to move around the horse while holding the scanner, but great for a little light relief before heading home.
Back at the house Andrew was cooking up a cauldron of pasta after his day in the QMH working on small animal imaging. Kevin, John and James were all away on their rotations.
‘How was your first day?’ I asked.
‘It was all right. Got pretty badly grilled over an X-ray image, though. They asked if it was an image from a dog or a cat. Surely I would know if I’ve just X-rayed a dog or a cat and I wouldn’t need to work it out from an image.’
‘So you couldn’t tell?’
‘Er, no.’
I laughed. Then it dawned on me I had no idea myself. ‘So when I get asked that question next week on small animal imaging, how exactly do I tell if it’s a dog or a cat?’
He looked at me and sighed, then went back to stirring the pasta. ‘You look at the vertebrae. Cats’ are long, dogs’ are short. Also the femur. Cats’ are straight, dogs’ are slightly curved.’
‘Thanks, appreciate it.’
I was grateful for the tip – at least that was one mistake I hoped to avoid. After four years of study there were still so many things to get wrong. Things we’d only realise we didn’t know when some gimlet-eyed senior vet put us on the spot. I could feel my cheeks burn just thinking about it. I hated messing up, but I was already beginning to realise that if the system of rotations was about anything, it was about making mistakes and then learning how to get it right, so that once we were let loose on the world as qualified vets we would know what we were doing.
I stuck a couple of pieces of cheese toast under the grill and went to Skype Jacques. At the end of March I would be heading to South Africa to see him and to do some work experience in the sun, and I couldn’t wait. Only six weeks to go. Six weeks of hard graft, endless grilling and a lot of wet noses.
CHAPTER THREE
The Vaccine Trick and Dermaholiday
Sometimes the simplest things give you the biggest headaches. Like administering kennel cough vaccine – something vets have to do all the time.
It should be so easy. You prepare the vaccine and then squirt it up the dog’s nose. And that would be fine, if it wasn’t for the snorting, sneezing, head-shaking canines determined to get it all out again.
I looked at the young retriever sniffing round the surgery, tail wagging enthusiastically.
‘Let’s put Jiffy up on the table, shall we?’ I said to the owner, who was dressed in a smart navy suit.
Once on the examining table, as his owner stood next to me, I held Jiffy’s head up, positioned the plunger and squirted – just as Jiffy jerked out of my grip, shook his head and snorted the vaccine all over his owner’s face and the front of her jacket.
‘What was that?’ she asked, startled.
‘I’m