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      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 so sorry, it’s some of the vaccine, but don’t worry, it’s not toxic and it shouldn’t stain. Let me get you a tissue.’ My cheeks were scarlet.

      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.

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