As she mopped the vaccine off her face and clothes I could only hope that some of it had actually got into the dog it was intended for. And I made a mental note – always position the owner behind the dog.
I was on a fortnight’s work experience in a small, friendly veterinary practice close to my family home in Kent. It was a great opportunity for me to get some hands-on experience, with the added bonus of being able to see a bit of my family in the evenings.
This placement was one I’d arranged myself, as part of the sixteen weeks of EMS – Extra-Mural Studies – that we were expected to fit in between the compulsory rotations allocated by the college.
Puddlefoot is a country practice based in a building that looks a bit like a mobile home, but bigger. The staff I was working with included four friendly vets, a couple of them part-time, and a very helpful and chatty nurse, Chloe. The patients we saw were ninety-five per cent small animals, plus a few horses. The vets were encouraging and helpful, and with their supervision they allowed me to do consultations, give injections, scrub in to help during surgery and administer vaccines – hence the embarrassing scene with Jiffy and his owner.
That wasn’t my only vaccine disaster, either. My next patient was a tiny eight-week-old Chihuahua, a fluffy little ball with the minutest nose I’d ever seen. I took one look at it and my heart sank. No way was I going to get the whole vial of kennel cough vaccine into that nose. I drew up the vaccine into the syringe, and the dog started shaking its head before I’d even approached. All I could do, as I placed the syringe in front of one minuscule nostril, was hope that a bit would go in and that the owner, a charming elderly woman whom I positioned carefully behind her dog, wouldn’t notice how much of it dripped down the dog’s face and was snorted onto both me and the table.
As a final-year student I was being taught about the latest developments in the industry, and the practice vets were keen to know what I could pass on. When a cheerful collie came in with urinary incontinence, it was a chance to show off my knowledge because we’d done it as a topic just a few weeks earlier. The vets liked quizzing me on subjects, not only to help me reinforce what I had been learning but also to remind themselves. One of the vets, Cheryl, started asking me about the modes of action of different drugs that work on the bladder, so I drew a bladder on the whiteboard, with all the drug receptors. ‘It’s been years since I’ve gone into this much detail,’ Cheryl laughed. ‘It’s great to have a refresher.’
Most of the time I was the novice learning from everyone else, so it felt good to be able to redress the balance a bit.
The funniest case that week was a beautiful, glossy saluki crossbreed called Matilda, who had torn her ear on a barbed-wire fence. Ears bleed and bleed, and when their ears feel funny, dogs shake their heads. Matilda soon had the surgery looking like something out of a horror film, as her ear flapped from side to side, spattering blood up the walls and all over everyone in the room.
We treated the wound with cauterising powder and bandaged the ear to her head like a helmet. Then off she went, with her very charming owners, a young mum called Tina and her five-year-old daughter, Daisy, who giggled non-stop as we bandaged Matilda’s head.
‘You know, Daisy,’ I said, ‘at university they teach us to bandage on cuddly toys, so I’ve fixed the ear of many squishy doggies with poorly ears.’ Daisy giggled even more.
A couple of days later they were back for a change of bandage, along with Daisy’s cuddly-toy puppy, who now had a heavily bandaged head, which I duly admired.
The moment the bandage was removed, Matilda shook her head, opened up the wound again and redecorated the surgery with what seemed to be another litre or two of blood. We all sighed, cauterised the wound again and re-bandaged the ear, before wiping down the consulting room before the next client came in.
After the third time this happened, Tina was getting worried. ‘Is it ever going to heal?’ she said. ‘We seem to be going round in circles.’
We did, and although the ear wasn’t hurting Matilda too much, we needed it to stop bleeding. Once again, under Cheryl’s watchful eye, I bandaged it up, making Matilda look like a one-eared alien. ‘This time we’ll take our chances and leave it for an extra day or two,’ Cheryl said firmly. ‘The issue’s not that it isn’t healing. It’s healing pretty well, but every time we take off the bandage Matilda opens it up again. Next time she comes in, after the extra couple of days, it will hopefully have had time to heal a bit more and won’t reopen. But since there are risks to leaving a bandage on, if it starts to smell or you see anything soaking through, bring her back in straight away and we’ll have to come up with a plan B.’ We all gave a sigh of relief.
At the end of each day I drove back to my family home near Tunbridge Wells. We had lived in the same house since I was one, and I always loved going back to a proper meal and my own bed. Ross was away at university, so it was just me, my mum Clare, my dad Giles and the dogs, Paddy and Tosca. I’m close to my parents – we’ve always enjoyed each other’s company – so it was nice to catch up with them and fill them in on how the rotations were going. Each evening, Mum cooked my favourite beef stew or shepherd’s pie, and it was a rare treat to relax in front of the television with the dogs.
We’re all animal lovers and Mum was juggling her Open University degree in Humanities with Creative Writing with her other passion, working as a volunteer transporting rescue dogs to new homes. After we got Paddy, Mum realised that a dog being cared for by an animal charity is often miles away from the people willing to give it a home. A network of willing volunteers with transport is vital. Mum would get a call, often at short notice, asking her to collect a dog and deliver it to the new owners, or in cases where the dog needed to travel long distances, to be part of a team collecting the dog from the previous driver and taking it on to the next. The transport charity she helped out did much more than just delivering dogs from charities to new homes, though. It also picked up dogs from pounds when their time was up and they were about to be put to sleep, and took them to charities that would provide them with training, which would mean they could be put up for adoption. She was helping to save lives.
After my two weeks with the team at Puddlefoot, I packed my bags and headed back to the Queen Mother Hospital for dermatology, known by the students as ‘dermaholiday’ because it involved cushy hours, no emergencies and straightforward consultations, generally along the lines of ‘How long has your dog/cat been scratching?’
Dermatology is mostly about allergies, and a big part of the job is persuading the owners that they need to take the allergies seriously. A lot end up at the QMH with their dogs and cats because they’ve ignored the advice of their first-opinion vet and continued to feed Tibbles or Rover food that is making them itch and break out in rashes. Eventually either they demand a second opinion or their exasperated vet suggests they see a specialist.
The only real way to find out what’s causing the allergy, once you’ve ruled out parasites like fleas and mites, is by a process of elimination. The animal has to change to a hypo-allergenic food for six weeks to see if the problem clears up. If it does, after that you can gently re-introduce other foods, watching to see if there’s any reaction. If the food elimination doesn’t work, you can assume it’s an environmental allergy and start the process of trying to desensitise the animal, although in many cases it’s down to food and eliminating the allergen should be all that’s needed.
But for some owners it isn’t quite so straightforward. Take the very earnest lady, Mrs Hooper, who came in with her little pug dog, Muffin. A blood test had indicated that Muffin, who was scratching and rubbing his head on the floor, was definitely allergic but, as is often the case, the test hadn’t indicated what he was specifically allergic to. It only indicated he was allergic to a great number of things.
‘Start with his food,’ I explained to Mrs Hooper, under the watchful eye of the dermatology clinician, Annie. ‘Give him hypo-allergenic food and nothing else for six weeks, and see whether his condition improves.’
‘Oh, I’ve done that,’ Mrs H said. ‘It didn’t help.’
‘Are you certain that