I helped two very deeply loved pets to the other side of life yesterday. I sat with couples; fragile, raw with grief, agonising over whether this was the best thing for their old friend. Tears fell like gentle summer rain. I sedated their old friends, and then gently, with reverence, slowly injected an overdose of […]
Euthanasia: It\’s hard to know when… Read More »
I had been hard at work in my first job for about 4 months. A lot of the early nerves and tension had faded away, and I was feeling a bit more confident about being able to cope with whatever came in through the door. It was a quieter day, when a lady brought her
An Unusual Lameness – Legge Perthes disease Read More »
A Saturday morning. I thought this locum was pretty bad, but this day proved to be the icing on the cake. I only had a week to go, and I was counting every minute of every day, hanging out to be getting back home to my friends, and away from this horrible boss, the rows
A Little Black cat Read More »
London was an interesting place to work in – I did quite a few temporary locums there. I would pack up my backpack, hoof it down to the local train in Newcastle Upon Tyne, and wait. The train would hiss to a halt; I\’d scramble to get my pack on, grab my guitar case, and
A very smelly tomcat Read More »
Being on call. Afterhours! The bane of many a vet\’s life. You watch the phone like it\’s a viper, ready to strike. I remember my first job. At first, being on call was a bit of a novelty, really, nothing too terrible. However, the boss I worked for at the time could have taught fishes
A weekend from hell Read More »
It was a short locum, a month or so of work. The clinic was in one of the homogenous, grey cities that teem across the landscape outside of the M25 motorway that rings London. I found my way through the tangle of rail, rocked by the clatter-sway of the carriages through endless soot smeared suburbia,
A Dangerous Drug Indeed Read More »
I woke up early this morning, and all the animals and pets who have touched my life paraded through my memory. I grew up on a cattle property in North Queensland, way out in the bush, 60 miles from the nearest town, so I have been surrounded by all sorts of animals all my life.
Animals who have touched my life Read More »
It was a quiet moment, a rare and valuable thing in the practice I was locuming in at the time. It was so frantically busy that you seldom got to take more than a hurried gulp of your cup of coffee before some urgent task popped up. I was chatting to one of the other
How to deal with a difficult client? Read More »
It was years ago, well into my time in my first job. I had been to this blokes dairy farm quite a few times, and he was a funny bugger. Not funny ha ha. Just funny – difficult to talk to, hard to find a connection. It was always an uphill battle to have a
It was a quiet tropical day in the vet hospital. Not much to do, so I was chatting to the vet nurse out front, waiting for the phone to ring, something to happen. A car pulled up in the car park, and a lady came in with a small cardboard box. \”I\’ve got a frog
An Operation on a Frog Read More »
