With pre-exam stress in full swing for most of us, we welcomed a break in the form of the Glasgow Vet School Rodeo last weekend. The annual charity event took place for the 53rd time this year.
Poster for the 53rd Glasgow Vet School Rodeo
Traditionally (from what I can gather), it used to be somewhat like a country show, with stock showing, sheep herding and the like. Now, it’s more of a family day out with many displays and stalls of different natures, though all loosely animal-related.
Entertainment throughout the day included displays such as falconry, duck herding and dog sledding. There was have-a-go dog agility and dog showing for the public to enter their pets into. For the children, there were pony rides, bouncy castles, laser quest and a climbing wall. Of course, there was a marquee full of craft stalls and all sorts of different tombola and raffle stands supporting various animal related charities.
The proceeds from the entry tickets and the main raffle went towards four key charities: The Riding for the Disabled Association, Canine Partners, The Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Scottish SPCA) and The Vet Fund (James Herriot Scholarship Fund). In addition to these, many other animal and breed-specific charities had their own stalls.
It is a vet school tradition that first years “volunteer” on the day. My friend and I spent the morning helping out on the “small animal” stand – there were a selection of small furries including rabbits, hamsters, mice and guinea pigs available for the public (mainly children) to handle. Our role was to help get the animals out of their cages and make sure there were no escapees. Other than my small disagreement with a rat (it sank its teeth into my finger in response to being picked up), we enjoyed our time chatting to people and brushing up on our handling skills.
In true Glasgow style, the day ended with a ceilidh – a great day and evening was had by all of us at the vet school!
You know you’re going somewhere remote when your first exchange with a local Norwegian at the airport is: “People don’t go to Alta, people get sent to Alta.”
Alaskan Huskies in Norway. Credit: Pater McFly
Joking aside, Alta is a fairly small community well into the Arctic Circle, and we were leaving civilisation behind altogether by venturing into the wilderness with seven sleds and 32 huskies. The cabins we stayed at varied in facilities – some had running water and electricity but, at some, we had to keep a fire going for warmth and drill into a frozen lake for drinking water. It really did feel like we’d left the real world far behind.
On the first day, we were introduced to our dogs and shown how to harness them correctly to the sled. Before long, we were tearing across the snow, astounded at the dogs’ enthusiasm, strength and speed. They were as friendly as pet dogs and yet much hardier with a relentless attitude towards their work. They slept outside in the snow and pulled the sleds for hours on end without tiring. And each had an individual character.
Whenever we hit an incline and they started to slow, we had to jump off and run with them or scoot to help them out. Leaving them to it was not an option; if we were slacking, the dogs would just stop and turn round to look at us. They don’t need the power of speech – it was easy to see what they were thinking!
But it wasn’t just a case of jumping on the sled in the morning, traveling for five or six hours, and then collapsing. We looked after the dogs’ every need before we settled down each night. Having no TV or internet meant that our group of seven (including the expedition leader and trip doctor) really bonded over the course of the week.
I think the second day was the most physically demanding. Not because there were many hills (that day was actually quite flat), but because muscles I didn’t even know I had were aching. Despite all the training, everyone seemed to be feeling the strain. I don’t think I could have trained more, but think this was simply down to the fact that it’s a completely different type of exercise to running or cycling or swimming. That day, I really did have to make myself get off and run when the dogs needed a bit of extra help. But I kept reminding myself why I was doing it and kept going.
Lying in hospital with 12 broken ribs, I would never have thought that, two years on, I would be mushing my own team of huskies across Norway. I can’t thank the Warwickshire and Northamptonshire Air Ambulance (WNAA) enough – I genuinely believe that they saved my life the day that I fell from that horse. I think it’s important to keep raising awareness and funds for the charity so that they can continue to save lives.
So that’s how I came to be stood on a sled in the North of Norway. It was tough at times but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and am grateful that I had so much support with raising money for the charity.
I had heard of the Pet Blood Bank before, but only when it was mentioned in one of our blood lectures did I start wondering. I don’t know how often veterinary professionals make use of the service in general practice, but I do think it’s fantastic that a resource like this is available to help save the lives of sick dogs.
A Parson Jack Russell terrier receiving a blood transfusion for treatment of severe anaemia as a consequence of rat bait toxicity. Credit: Pet Blood Bank UK.
Set up in 2007 after a change in legislation allowing collection, processing and storage of pet blood, it is a fairly new charity.
This is a classic example of just how recent and non-routine a procedure is in veterinary compared to how commonplace it is in human medicine. It is understandable why blood transfusions are less often thought of in the veterinary world. While animal blood-typing is less well understood and more complicated than human blood-typing, we also have to take ethical decisions, considering the healthy donor dog cannot choose whether to surrender some of his/her blood.
However, I think that the benefits of having a pet blood bank outweighs the ethical conundrum, as long as the donor is healthy and any risks are minimised. Blood transfusions can be life-saving, and we should embrace the opportunity to provide dogs with the same medical advancements as are available in human medicine.
We should not only support the work of the Pet Blood Bank, but also promote it and try to increase awareness throughout not only the veterinary world but in the general public as well. By raising the profile of the charity, more donors will come forward and more funding can become available to extend the service in order to provide other pets, such as cats and horses, with an equally life-saving resource.
Because the liver may be contained entirely within the rib cage in normal cats and dogs, microhepatica is more difficult to recognise than hepatomegaly.
Changes in the angle of the gastric fundus in the right lateral projection could indicate a small hepatic shadow if the angle is more upright or perpendicular to the spine – especially if the stomach seems close to the diaphragm.
The liver may also seem small in animals with traumatic diaphragmatic hernia and herniation of liver lobes into the thorax or in those with congenital peritoneopericardial hernia.
This is fine so long as they’re not going to the extent of babying them (a common trait among young women with teacup Chihuahuas, dare I say?) and so long as, like children, the owners remember:
Everyone knows that there’s an ancient feud between vet and medical students. Glasgow is no exception – only the other day, I had a heated debate on the topic with another student (who, annoyingly, wasn’t even a medic).
While, for the most part, it’s just friendly banter, there is some truth in both arguments.
A doctor will usually have one area of focus and will spend his whole career becoming more and more specialised in that particular field, whereas a vet will be the GP, surgeon, physio, neurologist and much more for several different species, not just one. As a first year student, it’s sometimes a little scary and overwhelming to think about the broad spectrum of knowledge we need to gain in just five years.
When the medics graduate, they’ll become junior doctors and from then on will begin narrowing down their fields of interest until eventually finding themselves as “left toe specialists”, or something. In 4.5 years, we’ll be let loose into the world of veterinary and, at the end of day one, will have probably already spayed a cat, pregnancy tested a few cows and euthanised a dog, with a rabbit or bird thrown in somewhere too.
Not only are the medics likely to be more specialised than us, they also “go further” than we do in terms of treatment. In my interview for Glasgow vet school two years ago, after expressing an interest in orthopaedics, I was asked the ethical question: “How far is too far?”
The Bionic Vet
I didn’t really have an answer but tried to reason my way through it, discussing things like kidney transplants in cats in America and The Bionic Vet, and came to the conclusion that every case must be treated individually, having weighed up the pros and cons of “heroic treatments” in each situation.
Now I realise that these heroic treatments are fairly uncommon in the veterinary world. Kidney transplants, for example, which are routine in medicine, are non-existent in veterinary in the UK. Is this a consequence of lack of funding and resources or lack of experience and knowledge in the field? Probably a little of both.
The GP vet will play the role of all these specialised fields to some extent (some being more qualified to do so than others). While we can specialise and work in referral practices, the average mixed or small animal vet will find themselves becoming a “Jack of all trades and master of none”.
Does that make us more intelligent than the medics, or just more well-rounded? Is it better to have a broad spectrum of knowledge and practical skills or to be very skilled at a few specific procedures?
“If a nerve is squashed, it’s not too serious, it goes back to normal. If the nerve is severed or torn, the cow will be lame for a long time – the prognosis is bad.”
That made me sit up a little straighter than normal for a Monday morning lecture.
During my riding accident, I squashed part of my sciatic nerve (it was “stuck” on something, my doctors told me). Of all the injuries I sustained, that was by far the most painful and most long-term. Within a couple of months, I regained most of the movement in my foot, but the pain didn’t stop then.
Nerve pain is unlike other pain; it’s a stinging, hot pins-and-needles, burning, tingling, throbbing and above all persistent pain. There’s no escaping it… except for the appropriate nerve painkillers. It’s difficult to describe, and incomparable.
Now, a year-and-a-half later, I’m still on the painkillers, which is not unusual – I’ve lost count of the number of times doctors have told me nerves take the longest to heal.
So, how can we possibly hope to understand what an animal is going through? Or even, for that matter, whether they are in pain at all? Perhaps slight nerve damage doesn’t seem so serious because the cow can still move almost normally. But how are we to know that the cow is not experiencing that excruciating, burning pins-and-needles sensation?
In farm practice, I suppose the general consensus would be that if the cow’s value decreases and it’s cheaper to euthanise it, then so be it. But what if it were a horse or dog with sciatic nerve damage? Would we go as far as to operate on the damaged nerve (as mine was) or are there nerve-painkillers currently available for animals?
How do we know how long the animal is in pain or discomfort for? My foot doesn’t hurt anymore, but it’s still hypersensitive, so I don’t like people touching it, etc. I would assume nerve tissue in animals takes as long to heal as it does in us. Does that mean these injured animals are suffering, though perhaps on a slightly lower key basis than initially, for longer than we realise?
We can’t possibly experience every type of pain or ailment that an animal might have, so we may not always understand why something hurts or indeed where that pain is coming from (although the pain is in my foot – the damage is at the knee). But all we can do is try to use the resources available to us to do the best for the animals under our care.
As with any condition in veterinary medicine, it comes down to the fact animals can’t speak to us, and we must not forget that.
I think it’s fair to say I have a less than conventional pre-veterinary school story. In early 2011, after years of working hard at school, gathering experience at different animal establishments and doing regular work experience at a nearby practice, I finally received an offer for veterinary school.
Student blogger Jordan Sinclair.
All I had to do was get the right grades in my final A-Level exams that summer. Or so I thought. In March, a horse I’d been exercising had other ideas.
One moment I was mounting in a car park at a showjumping competition; the next thing I knew, I was waking up in hospital 10 days later.
Involuntary gap year
Despite 12 broken ribs, a punctured lung, a collapsed lung, a broken clavicle and nerve damage, I was still determined to go to the University of Glasgow that year. After a month, I came out of hospital and soon realised I couldn’t fight the sleepy side effects of the morphine long enough to pick up a book, let alone try to catch up with the schoolwork I’d missed.
Glasgow were fantastic – I remember mum being on the phone trying to explain the situation, while I tried to gauge the response from half the conversation. They would not only allow me to defer, but told her I needed to, in order to guarantee full physical fitness for the start of the course.
So what did I do with my involuntary gap year? I spent quite a lot of it recovering. The Air Ambulance Service saved my life by operating at the scene of the accident, and since it is a charity, I started volunteering and fund-raising for it.
When I was well enough, I rode again. Over Christmas, I visited family in Australia and, while I wasn’t allowed to scuba dive due to the previously collapsed lung, nothing was stopping me snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef. I then returned to school to finish my A-Levels.
The long journey begins
Finally, after seeing my friends go through it the previous year, results day came. And so began the mad rush to kit up for veterinary school; books, wellies, overalls and goodness knows what else were gathered up and rammed into the car. Unfortunately, my horse wouldn’t fit in the boot, and I heard cats weren’t permitted in halls. So, petless and not knowing what to expect, I started the long journey north.
I thought A-levels were hard; veterinary school is a whole new ball game. You know it’s not going to be easy when even working out your timetable is almost impossible. It was equally daunting to see the proportions of internationals and postgraduates who all seemed to know everything compared to us Brits, who were fresh(ish) out of school.
One moment I was at a showjumping competition, the next I was waking up in hospital.
Anatomy was like learning a new language, with hundreds of obscure words being thrown at you in one lecture; in a whole sentence, the only recognisable words could be “the” or “and”.
Dissections took some getting used to, when you’ve only ever observed surgery and never actually made contact with a cadaver before. However, after a couple of weeks you can actually visualise where everything is and things start to slot into place.
A whole new world
For those not from farming backgrounds (I’m not sure what I consider myself – my horses were kept on a pig farm), husbandry was a whole new world. We all have varying degrees of experience in some area of farming or animal care, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, but trying to learn a lifetimes worth of experience in keeping sheep from someone in six hours seemed crazy. Now, it’s easy to see the importance of preclinical EMS – you can’t learn everything from a book. Though it is good to take a break from bookwork and head out to the uni farm for handling sessions every so often.
After my riding accident, I was given a CD with all of my radiographs and CT scan pictures on. Although the idea of having my own x-rays was novel, aside from seeing the obvious snap in the collar bone, they meant very little. After being shown an example of a radiograph showing the collapsed lung in a dog in the first couple of weeks at Glasgow, I went back to my stashed away x-rays. To my delight, I could see things more clearly, although did find it odd being able to understand how smashed up my insides had been. So far, the CT pictures still remain a mystery though.
I’m not sure if the beginning of vet school is what I expected or not. In some respects, it seems very real now, with professionalism being drummed into us from the outset. And in others, it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel from here.
