During the year I worked with David at Thirsk, he taught me an awful lot. Not necessarily factually, but more about the importance of being thorough and meticulous.
Just before my first Christmas at Skeldale, David had been presented with an injured owl. It had been found nearby the surgery and brought in by a member of the public. He had spent a full morning meticulously repairing its broken wing, ingeniously using hypodermic needles as makeshift bone pins. As hypodermic needles are hollow and therefore lightweight, they were perfect for repairing the fractured bones of a bird.
The owl had been with us for over a week, recuperating from its operation. I had been helping David during this time and we had both become attached to our feathery patient. On Christmas Eve, after the rest of the practice staff had gone home, we decided the time was right to release the bird back to its natural habitat. Its wing looked strong and although the owl did not know it was Christmas, it seemed appropriate to let him go home on this day. We carefully carried him outside, towards the neighbouring fields, and held him aloft. He stretched his wings and we felt confident that he would fly unhindered. He looked all around and I gently flicked him into the air. To our delight, he flew off, into the washed out, wintery sunshine and headed straight to a large oak tree just between the practice and the fields. He had flown effortlessly and it was a joy to see him going so well, justifying of all our efforts.
Sadly, our joy was only momentary. Our owl landed on a large, high branch of the oak tree, but misjudged his landing and tumbled, bouncing off lower branches until he fell, splat onto the road. As we rushed towards the road to retrieve him and take him back into the clinic, a lorry thundered past, and to our horror, went straight over him, leaving a flurry of feathers where the owl once was. We were devastated. It was not a good start to Christmas for any of us, especially not the owl.
After about a year, David moved on, into academia. His replacement was another equine enthusiast called Ben. Jon, Ben and I had a lot in common and we worked superbly as a team. It was simply a joy to wake up in the morning and go into work. We were having so much fun, it didn’t really seem like work at all. Ben had a brilliant manner with clients and was an eloquent orator. It soon became clear that client communication was one of his great talents. He would explain conditions and treatments in minute detail, and capture the imagination of the enthralled owners with his florid descriptions. Mostly they were based on fact, but sometimes I was not so sure. His main recommendation for almost any abdominal condition in dogs was the feeding of ‘moist green vegetables’.
The art of client communication, be it face to face in a consultation or over the telephone, is a great skill to master and is a crucial part of veterinary practice. Ben was very adept, but it was a skill that I was slower to perfect.
One of my worst errors in this department is forever etched on my mind. In my penultimate year at Cambridge, I was offered a four-week externship at the illustrious Veterinary Hospital, University of Pennsylvania (or VHUP for short) in the USA. It was one of the leading centres of veterinary excellence and it was an amazing opportunity. I spent two weeks in the emergency department and two weeks in the medicine department.
We worked a fourteen-hour shift, either days or nights, and each shift would comprise twelve hours in the clinic followed by two hours of tutorials and case discussions. Afterwards we would eat a massive pizza and then sleep, wake up, drink an enormous vat of coffee and do the same again. I did this non-stop for a month and learnt a huge amount. It was very exciting in the emergency department, and we were faced with conditions that would rarely be seen in a rural practice in England. ‘High-Rise Cats’, for instance, were cats that had accidentally fallen from windows in high-rise apartment blocks, and we saw GSWs (gunshot wounds) to dogs that had been caught up in drive-by shootings.
On the medical wards we had responsibility for complicated cases that would be hospitalized for long periods. The Americans did not do things by halves, and we were required to take blood samples four times daily to monitor for subtle changes in our patients. I was never completely sure that this was strictly necessary or indeed helpful – there were stories of dogs who had developed anaemia from having had too many blood samples taken – but it was certainly thorough, and a fantastic learning experience.
I had one particularly memorable patient. She was a large and lovely Doberman called Sabrina. Her blood count was peculiar and it was postulated that this had been caused by an obscure reaction to some medication that had been prescribed by a different vet. I was not fully convinced by this explanation of her illness, but the supportive treatment seemed to be working and she was progressing well, despite my six-hourly blood sampling.
I was in the habit of telephoning the owners of all my patients every evening, to give an update on their progress before I left to get my obligatory pizza for tea. Sabrina’s owners were very worried about their beloved dog, so I would always phone them last, so I had plenty of time to discuss things in detail. On this occasion, towards the end of Sabrina’s stay in the hospital, I called her owners to give a final update before they came to collect her the following day.
‘Oh hello, is that … ’ I said, and then completely forgot the chap’s surname. I panicked and quickly changed tack. ‘Hello,’ I said in my obviously obscure Not-Just-English-But-Yorkshire accent, ‘Is that Sabrina’s dad?’
I thought this had got me out of the hole. But no! My unfamiliar accent had been misunderstood.
‘OH MY GOD!’ he screamed. It might have been Woody Allen by the frenzy and desperation in his voice.
‘I’LL GET MY WIFE … HONEY, SABRINA’S DEAD!’
I was mortified, and it took me a long time to convince them that she was not at all dead, but very much alive and ready to go home the following day.
The next day, when Sabrina was discharged, fit, well and alive, I was presented with a baseball cap from the guy’s favourite team, so I think I was forgiven. In my final ‘debrief’, the senior clinician at VHUP offered me an internship for my first job after graduating, so I guess I hadn’t messed up too badly. I seriously considered the offer, but in the end I couldn’t imagine not being in Yorkshire. I often wonder how different my life would have been had I taken up that offer.
Ben was not only much better at client communication than I was, but he was enormous fun to work with. We had a half-day each week, to make up for our long hours, and Ben and I both had ours on a Thursday afternoon. This suited me because my night on first-call was a Wednesday, so if I’d had a busy night, I knew I only had four hours of work before I could go home. We would often head to the hills on our mountain bikes. Our favourite route took us around the edge of the Hambleton Hills, Boltby Forest and the moors around Hawnby and Snilesworth. We would sometimes see farmers that we knew, as they went about their business on tractors, although as we were clad in bright helmets and colourful Lycra, they never seemed to recognize us! The route led us to a superb descent through a narrow gully of rhododendrons, which ended up in the pretty little village of Kepwick. It was fast, rocky and dangerous and could only rarely be achieved without putting a foot down. I did the same route three weeks ago with my oldest son, Jack. It is still fast, steep and dangerous, but now, nearly twenty years later, the rhododendron bushes have grown to completely enclose the gully. Rather than being open-topped, it is now a 400-metre-long leafy tunnel and in parts it is impossible to see the sky above.
Thursday afternoon rides would sometimes take us further afield. In winter, we had just enough time to drive into the middle of the North York Moors, and in summer I could drive to the Lake District, cycle up Helvellyn and return in time for a couple of quick pints in the Blacksmith’s Arms in the middle of town. This was our usual watering hole. Thirsk has a heritage as a coaching town. Before the railway arrived, travel up and down the country was by stagecoach, so the town was well supplied with pubs and inns. In the 1990s, we could choose one of about fifteen pubs within a stone’s throw of the market square. When
Jim and Pete were at a similar stage in their careers, there were over twenty. Half a pint in each was a standard Saturday night challenge.
On our first New Year here, we invited loads of vet friends from university up to Thirsk for a New Year’s Eve celebration. After a hastily prepared Mexican meal at home, we walked to the market square to sample the pubs, and Jon and I were proud to show off our home town.
Thirsk looks lovely at Christmas, with simple lights strung all around the large, cobbled square, with its clock tower at the centre, next to the massive iron bull ring set into cobbles, from the days when livestock were traded regularly here.
Now, I had enjoyed many New Year’s Eve parties in other North Yorkshire towns, notably in nearby Knaresborough, Ripon and Helmsley. In these places, just before midnight, everyone leaves the pubs to collect around the cross or the clock in the town square, and await the chimes that signify the old year passing and the New Year arriving. There is a huge communal celebration and it is all very festive. So, at about half past eleven, the group of about twenty of us wandered outside to get a good spot in the middle. We waited patiently with three policemen who were there in case of trouble later. As I chatted with the bobbies, and the time crept closer to midnight, I couldn’t help but notice that we were still standing by ourselves, with no throngs of revellers anywhere to be seen. This seemed odd and in complete contrast to what I was expecting. When the clock struck twelve, our group of young vets celebrated a rather muted New Year with three very sober policemen and nobody else. This had been something of a flop. We decided to go back to the pub, where clearly the people of Thirsk traditionally greeted the arrival of the New Year, but when we tried to get back into the Blacksmith’s Arms, the doors had been locked, as it was past closing time. Our evening’s celebrations had been brought to a premature end, and our friends who had travelled to see us and partake in Yorkshire hospitality had been sorely disappointed.
For me, the premature end to the night was something of a blessing, because I was on duty the following morning and, unlike some New Year’s mornings, I can remember what happened next very clearly. I was on call from 8 a.m. that morning and I was soon clambering over the slumbering bodies of my vet friends after receiving a request to visit another dairy herd, high up above the picturesque villages, on the edge of the Hambleton hills. The herd comprised about a hundred black and white Friesian cows and the place was renowned, within the practice, for its poor organization. Disasters were frequent.
The farm was cold and windswept when I arrived, but to my surprise, the sight that met me was not too dissimilar to the one I had seen the previous evening in the Blacksmith’s Arms. During the night, the cows had enjoyed their own New Year’s Eve party. They had, inexplicably, broken into the feed store. ‘Cake’ is the concentrated form of cattle food that dairy cows are fed when they are being milked. It is high in energy and designed to fuel them to produce gallons of milk. They usually receive controlled amounts of a few kilograms twice a day at milking time. These greedy (or hungry) animals had broken down the door of the shed where the food was stored, and eaten about a month’s worth of food in one evening.
When a cow eats too much cow cake, the concentrated food is rapidly fermented in the rumen – part of its four-chambered stomach – and it produces a cocktail of chemicals that creates exactly the same effect on the cow as beer does on a human. The whole herd was suffering from acidosis. I surveyed the scene. Some cows were standing around the perimeter of the field, simply staring at the hedge, as if not sure what to do or where to go. Some cows were lying down in inappropriate places, their heads lolling to one side. The odd one even had its tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth. Any animal that was trying to move around was travelling very slowly and methodically. Mostly, the moving cows were meandering in a wobbly way and occasionally one would topple over into the mud. All that was needed to complete the scene were a few party hats.
The diagnosis was easy enough, but what on earth was I going to do to treat the whole herd? It was clearly not going to be fixed by a few cups of strong tea and a round of bacon sandwiches! I could not treat a hundred cows – I didn’t have sufficient drugs in my car, or even in the whole practice. Handling that many drunk animals would surely also be a silly idea – cows would be falling all over the place as they were corralled into a handling pen and this would only cause more problems. I decided to leave the mild cases as they happily stared at the hedge, and concentrated on the more serious ones – the cows lying on the concrete with their heads lolling and their tongues hanging out.
I stomach-tubed about ten animals with a mixture of tonics that was basically equivalent to twenty litres of Alka-Selzter each, and then moved on to the worst two cases. In these two I decided that the only proper thing to do was to perform a rumenotomy. This is a surgical procedure where an incision is made through the skin on the left side of the cow’s abdomen and into its rumen, the largest chamber of the cow’s system of compound stomachs. I emptied out the stomach contents of each of these two animals into a large bucket, then flushed them out with warm tap water. This was the bovine equivalent of having their stomachs pumped. It worked well and I am happy to say that all the cows survived that day. I returned home several hours later, smelling very badly. I clambered over the slumbering bodies of my vet friends who were suffering from their own, beer-induced, acidosis, to make my way to the shower.
My next job involved making a lot of strong tea and a few rounds of bacon sandwiches.
9
Working with the Herriot Vets
In 1996, as I was graduating, Jim Wight took the decision to scale back his work as a veterinary surgeon in order to write the biography of his father, Alf Wight. It was decided that the practice should take on a new graduate – me – to fill Jim’s full-time role, while Jim continued to work at the surgery two days a week. Jim was a great enthusiast and endlessly positive. I love being around people like that, as it is a contagious attitude. He had a wealth of veterinary experience, and the stories he told were sufficient in themselves to confirm the extent of his talents as a vet. Most of his stories were of his own exploits, but he could equally regale his father’s old tales, with style. He would always describe his clinical cases in elaborate detail, with great flourishes of ‘fantastic’ or ‘amazing’. My favourite of his anecdotes was one where a farmer had phoned to request a visit for a vet to examine his bullock. Apparently it had a lump on its side ‘as big as a colour television set’. The amusement to Jim and to me was the implication that a colour television set was very much bigger than the black and white variety.
When I started in Thirsk, Jim was in the practice on Mondays and Fridays. He was very popular, especially with the older and more established clients who had known him for years, and had often known his father as well. We always knew when he was in the building by the all-pervading smell of pipe smoke, as he puffed away for much of the time. At that time, the practice also provided a veterinary surgeon as inspector at the local turkey factory. The role of the vet was to oversee and uphold the health and welfare of the turkeys before slaughter. This job took up a lot of time and none of us really wanted to do it, because, important as it was, it was both unpleasant and incredibly tedious. It was a great testament to Jim that he continued to cover these monotonous shifts with the turkeys right up until he retired.
As a newly qualified vet, I was brimming with new knowledge and bursting to put it all into action. However, some supervision was often prudent, and Jim was more than happy to help. I had decided to do a tibial crest transposition on a Yorkshire terrier. This is an operation carried out to correct a slipping kneecap. The crest on the front of the tibia (the shin bone), just below the knee, is moved, to bring it better into line so that the kneecap stays in its groove, instead of popping out. It was an ambitious operation for a vet who had only been qualified for five months, and at many practices I would not have been allowed to embark upon it. This kind of thing, though, was not unusual at Skeldale.
The philosophy was, and still is, to encourage our new vets to ‘grasp the nettle’ and get involved in more challenging surgery, obviously under close supervision, as this is the best way to learn and progress. In much the same way as Frank had supervised my first caesarean section, twelve months previously, Jim sat back, lit his pipe and prepared to talk me through the procedure.
The surgery that morning was about as tricky as it got for a new vet. It was technically challenging, fiddly and fraught with the risk of serious consequences if things went wrong. However, Jim offered calm and reassuring words of encouragement as I sawed through the top of this little terrier’s tibia, having first drilled tiny holes in it so it could be carefully re-attached in the correct position. He didn’t handle any of the tissues, just as Frank had avoided contact with the cow, for the very same reason, I suspect – that it would have meant foregoing his tobacco. This didn’t matter, though, since his description was so clear. My only concern, as he peered over the surgical site to inspect my work, was that ash would fall into my little dog’s leg and contaminate my sterile op site.
It wasn’t long after I started work that Jim decided to retire completely. It was a shame that I didn’t get the chance to spend more time working with him, as I am sure we would have made a great team. Jim’s role as senior partner was taken over by his long-time friend and colleague Peter, with whom I still work. Peter spent much of his early career working with Jim and when the two of them get together, over a pint or a Chinese meal, or both, the anecdotes flow freely. Pete’s whole existence is devoted to the practice and its wellbeing, and I sometimes fear what will happen when he is eventually worn out and has to retire!
: The Life of a Yorkshire Vet Page 8
