Working Relationship

When I was a young slip of a lad (which is rapidly becoming far longer ago than I care to comfortably admit), love seemed a very long way away. This was no bad thing, because at the time I was dreaming of dragons, and swords, and all manner of things generally deemed unhealthy for a young chap to think about, but which never did me any harm. (Quiet! Who's blog is this, anyway?)

The years have passed, and I have achieved many things of which I am proud, some of which I am not proud at all, and some ambitions which have never come to pass (like never managing to get a 20th level magic-user. Bah. I suppose our dreams must surpass our reach, though). But, of all the things that bring me happiness and pleasure in my absurdly forrtunate life, the greatest is the happy series of accidents which allow me to hold a cat's small intestines out of the way so that the woman I love can stitch up its diaphragm.

My wife and I work together, which to some people would sound like a cruel and unusual punishment, or at least fodder for a crappy 'gentle' sitcom, but for me it is a source of pleasure and fun, and more than anything else makes my job an awful lot easier.

If I go on in this manner of how blessed and happy I am to have such a beautiful, loving and lovely wife I suspect you are likely to vomit all over your computer, so I'll try and explain why before too many electrical goods are wrecked. (Also, as I'm tapping away here it occurs to me that this particular entry seems to have more than a touch of 'luvviness' about it, rather than my usual alcohol-fueled misery. It can't be a coincidence that I've just finished reading Stephen Fry's autobiography, and if this torrent of sugary cheerfulness is too much for you to take, then please send Mr Fry an angry letter of complaint. It's definitely all this fault.)

My wife and I are fortunate to have a similar attitude to work. Fortunate because it prevents blazing rows in the practice, which would be awkward and embarrasing for our nurse and vet colleagues, and distressing for clients and their animals (although I can't help feeling that a blazing row would be closer to the 'family' atmosphere we like to promote at our practice than the more usual good-natured abuse). We like to get on with things - if there's an op on the board, or somone in the waiting room, we'd like to operate on them, or take them into our consulting room (hopefully not getting the two the wrong way round), and get the job done. If there's something outstanding, we find it difficult to sit down, relax, have a coffee, read a textbook, ponder our next move.

This isn't the only way or working, nor is it the best, but it's the way we like to work and so it means we don't get frustrated with each other. It also means that when a cat with its stomach herniated up into its thoracic cavity comes in as an emergency, as happened this week, we know each other well enough to get on with the job at hand with a minimum of panic and stress.

It leads to a more-or-less harmonius working relationship. There are some drawbacks to working closely to a loved one. The principle one that springs to mind is that if another vet does something which we would do differently ourselves, we generally keep quiet about it and don't say anything. There's no right or wrong way to do things, after all, and a lot of approaches to cases work as well as each other (unless you're doing it differently to me. In which case, you're just wrong. Okay?). If I or my wife do something that the other considers to be wrong, however, we'll generally point it out to each other. Forcefully. Often prefaced with the phrase 'You bloody moron! Don't you know that...'

It also makes for very tedious talking-shop evenings at home. If we were more diligent, perhaps we would have a 'no-vet-talk at home' rule, but neither of us can quite muster up the energy to enforce such a thing. Plus, there is then the dreadful danger that either my wife will start talking about horses, or I will start talking about zombies or the imminent rise of the machines, and I think that the veterinary world is a slightly less tedious solution for us in these cases (though I would like to once again pledge my allegience to our metallic masters. Just in case.)

So, a happy working relationship, and blog that is, on the whole, cheerful! The only problem I have with my wife's veterinary abilities is that she seems to believe that surgery is, is some way, clever. Well, I'm sorry to tell you it's not. It's not big, and it's not clever. You could literally train a monkey to do it. It is not brain surgery (unless, y'know, it is). I'm proud to be a medic, and my feelings on this matter in no way reflect my own ability with a scalpel. At all.

Ahem.

Battle of the sexes

It's just possible that, because of my profession, I have a slightly skewed view of humanity. In fact, I'm certain of it - and reason I'm certain of it is because of my answer to the question 'What is the main difference between men and women?'

My answer would be 'Women seems to like pus a lot more than men do.'

This is perhaps a surprising answer. AFter all, aren't the fairer sex made of sugar and spice and all things nice?

(Incidentally, what a horrible, sexist poem that is - so all boys are made of slugs and snails, eh? Might as well say that they're made of dog turd and have done with it. Imagine if the lines of that poem were reversed?)

Anyway, if that is true, then it must also be true that opposites attract because I have yet to work with a woman who didn't look upon the prospect of bursting a ripe cat bite abscess with a glee that would more normally be associated with a minor lottery windfall.

What is it about pus that is so exciting and endlessly fascinating to girls? To me it's a foul-smelling mix of white blood cells and bacteria that is better removed by necessity from an animal. To the ladies in my life it's like wine produced from God's own vineyard. They actually battle over who will get to lance the abscess when a particularily unfrotunate specimen comes in.

It seems to be quite specific to abscesses, too - I've yet to work with a female that will jump up and down with excitement at the prospect of picking maggots out of a rabbit's backside, or providing relief to an obstipated cat (obstipation is like constipation only much, much worse. Think of a cement mixer and you'll be in the right ball park). But thrust a juicy cat bite abscess towards them and they'll be charging for the scalpels quicker than you can say 'purulent'.

(I'm mostly talking about cats here for a few reasons. Dogs are less likely to get into a fight than cats - there's a reason for all that rolling on the back, submissive behaviour. Cats don't do that so much. If they don't get on, they'll generally settle it with physical violence - they're a bit like rednecks in that respect. Rabbits, on the other hand, simply have a problem with their pus. It's more like cottage cheese than anything else, and doesn't squirt satisfactorily out of a hole like lovely cat pus. You generally have to scrape it out with a curette. Apologies if you're eating, by the way.)

This may or may not be a surprise to you - I bet you are either a perpentrator or a victim of the lesser phenomenon, though - humans seem to be another source of endless fascination for daughters of Eve. Anyone who has ever sat through an evening having their spots squeezed (or squeezing the spots of) their siginificant other knows what I'm talking about here. In any case, I'm more than happy to hand the victims of feline violence to my female colleagues for rapid and gleeful lancing. Hey, it saves me a job.

Well, there you have it. The lesson for tonight - there's something in the feminine psyche which takes great delight in seeing nice fresh pus oozing from a gaping wound. Whether this lesson is of any use to anyone is another matter entirely. Hey, I don't make this stuff up, I just report it.

And please, next time your cat has a suspicious sweling on it's head two days after getting into a fight, ask for a female vet. They, and I, will be very grateful.

Happy Anniversary!

It was a momentous anniversary last week, as I'm sure you all know. No, not the forty years since mankind first walked on the moon. Something much more important. Well, to me at least.

It has been ten years since I became a Bachelor of Veterinary Science (decidely not hons) and a member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (which, I have just worked out, means that I have paid the Royal College so far roughly £3000 for the privelidge of being a vet. Yay.).

Ten years. Several ways of celebrating this anniversary spring to mind, but as I no longer have a firearms licence, and all the pentobarbitone is at the practice, I'll settle for a glass of beer and a Blog entry.

I've being trying to think today when the idea of being a vet first curdled it's way into the youthful cream that was my young mind. I'm fairly sure that I've narrowed it down to a holiday in Germany when I must have been about eight or nine. I always took several books to read with me, and one was a copy of 'Every Living Thing' by James Herriot...

(... and yes, I'm very aware that it's a massive cliche that I decided to be a vet because of James Herriot. What do you want me to do, lie? In retrospect, it's a shame I didn't base my career choice on one of the other books I took with me - Deathwing over Veynaa by Douglas Hill. I could have ended up as an intergalatic Legionnairy of Moros with an adamantium skeleton! Now that wold have been a fun job)

...and I loved that book. It all sounded som much fun, and the guy was helping animals! For a living! When I was a child, I loved animals (Not in that way, before you start, okay), and I loved Biology. When I read that book, it just made perfect sense to combine the two. Plus, it sounded really funny when James Herriot wrote about gruff Yorkshireman having to explain that their dog 'had a problem with his...with his pencil, Mr 'Erriot).

So I was very fortunate - from that time on, I had a sense of purpose. I knew exactly what I was going to do for the rest of my life. That nagging, insistent voice at the back of my mind, that was always telling me that I should try and make the world a better place, would be silenced! I would be making the world a better place with my day job! I could even spend my evenings playing rolepaying games and computer games, and not feel guilty about it!

The determination lasted through all the teachers, and all the careers advisors who told me that it was a waste of time (seriously, has anyone -ever- recieved one useful scrap of advice from a careers 'advisor'? My wife's told her she should be a florist. Though, considering my current feelings towards the profession, maybe we should have listened back then), it lasted through my GSCE's, through my A Levels, and right up to that final glowing day when I recieved my one (and only) offer to go to Bristol, to study being a vet.

I have now been a vet for twice as long as I studied to be one. I am older, arguably wiser, and a whole lot tireder. That nagging voice, the one that I hoped would finally shut up when I was doing good deeds and getting paid for them, is not fooled, and though it has grown quieter over the years, it has never been silenced. My job does not consist of doing good deeds, all day, every day, as I imagined it would. And though I may relieve some suffering, I also help to perpetuate it in the form of helping dog and cat breeders continue to spawn the various mutants that they seem to consider 'cute'. The best thing I do, the honest-to-goodness kindest act I generally perform, is euthanasia, and with the best will in the world, it's hard to feel good about oneself for repeatedly killing small animals.

Ten years gone. My attitude to my job is, and I suspect, always will be, mixed, but it has brought me the greatest thing in my life so far - my wife - and for all the wonderful years we've had together, I actually feel it was worth it all!

There are many more things I could write about, but I'll leave them for another time. For now, sit with me and raise a glass, for years gone by, and to absent friends.

Cheers.