Category — Hopes and Dreams

Much delayed, this was my story from day 3.

The day started with a fascinatingly tragic case. A dog with a brain that’s pretty much fried and had been for a long time, with an interesting selection of neurological signs which weren’t consistent from day to day. It wasn’t all there, and it wasn’t worth keeping it alive. So I started my morning putting down a much loved dog that needed death much more than it would have benefited from treatment. Brains don’t fix themselves that well.

Then I put a cat to sleep, with the tearful owners requesting to be there as she drifted off. That’s always an anxious moment, because it is their last memory, and while you cannot make it a happy memory you do your best to make it gentle.

I was expecting that sort of morning to put a downer on your day.

Turns out it doesn’t. [Read more →]

The first day of work as a new vet is always nerve wracking for everyone. You don’t want anything to go wrong. You don’t want to look stupid or foolish or totally lost, and you definitely don’t want any clients to realise that they’re your first client (and patient) as a brand new vet.

In my case you’re also trying to learn a dos program (It’s 10 years old!) and find your way around a rather disorganized place with no real duty other than ‘do the vet stuff’.

As a new graduate vet you are a little limited in what you can do, because you’re not as experienced and you do take more time to work through things. So while I couldn’t spay one of a dozen rabbits, or join the semi-specialist surgeon, I did get a chance to do basic sorts of things, get to know the clinic and staff and meet some of the locals.

The first day was pretty good I felt a little stressed at the end, but pretty good. It was the second day that was the hard one. [Read more →]

Our big Graduation Dinner was held in the Melbourne museum. It’s very classy, with drinks served around the skeleton of a gargantuan pygmy whale an several of the exhibits open for us to wander through during drinks and nibblies.

Walking under the bones of dinosaurs and through the room full of stuffed animals was oddly nostalgic. So many species, stuffed and preserved in the one room, some rarer than others, every single one of them the domain of vets. The best doctors treat more than one species. [Read more →]