Vet Student Days
My vet school days are rich with so many memories. One memory shall remain.
In our 5th year at vet school, we finally had the chance to put into practise all those years of theory and work on live animals. One of our rotations involved large animal medicine. I grew up in the city with very little contact with large animals, especially bulls.
A prize Charolais bull happened to be one of my patients during our production animal rotation. This meant that our very knowledgeable and strict lecturer dealt out treatment and we had to willingly oblige or fail the course. The ill Charolais bull was enormous and confined to a stable. I cannot remember exactly what illness he had, but I do remember that the treatment was very experimental as our vet school tried to pioneer new techniques. The bull was due to be slaughtered anyway as it was very serious.
I was in charge of giving him an enormous injection of antibiotic in his equally enormous muscled hindquarters. I knew little about bulls, but remember a lecturer telling us that horses kick backwards and cows kick to the side. I had no intention of finding out if this was true or not as I stood at the entrance to the stable and felt very small compared to the huge bulk of bull before me.
As I am not very brave and as I knew he was due to be slaughtered anyway, I took the huge syringe of thick pink antibiotic and bent down to squirt it down one of the drains outside his stable. Almost at the end of squeezing the thick paste through a small hole, and feeling terribly guilty for doing it; I felt my heart rate soar as a male booming voice echoed through the stable shouting, "What is going on in here?"
I noticed someone dressed in our standard green overalls and white wellies marching towards me. All flustered, I jumped up, imagining having to explain myself to our scary lecturer, only to see that it was my friend on the same rotation with a huge grin on his face at having caught me out. We still laugh at this incident together as he is now my husband of 14 years.
The Baker Family
This incident happened during my first few months as a qualified vet. This is a frightening time for any client as they trustingly bring in their pet and we basically 'practise' our new skills. It was even worse for clients in our first practice as my husband and I chose to practise our new skills in Zimbabwe in an area where we were the only vets for miles and had no one else to turn to but each other. The clients were thrilled to have us as there had been no vets there for quite a while, but one incident still makes me cringe.
The Baker family brought in their adult Rottweiler with a large salivary gland swelling under his chin. I remember them so well as a family as they were all rather, well....large. I cannot remember the Rottweiler's name, but having little success with anti-inflammatories and wanting to put our newly acquired skills to the test, we boldly decided to operate and remove the offending lump.
We dived in to remove the salivary gland, only to find that it is possibly one of the most difficult of procedures and requires specialised knowledge as a salivary gland has so many tiny ducts and the side of the head is full of valuable nerves and arteries. Too late though, we had to finish what we had started and we naively stitched him up and sent him home.
He returned 2 days later for a check up and as I stepped through to the waiting room to call the Baker family through, I shall never forget the sight before me. The family of 2 children and 2 parents would always sit in a row with their generous frames taking up all the space. As the main function of saliva is to digest food, it is a highly irritable substance. By cutting into the gland, we had unknowingly made his condition far far worse and he sat with his family with the most enormously swollen neck I have ever seen. We had turned him onto a clone of his owners! (He did recover many weeks later and we have never attempted anything like that ever again). |
