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First steps

There are probably as many stories of my life as a student as there have been as a qualified vet, but they are likely to be more of ‘The Confessions of’ type and not really consistent with the tone of this particular book, so I’ll start the day after I qualified.

After registration, I’d barely got over the euphoria (and hangover) of qualification celebrations before I went straight into a sole-charge small animal locum virtually the next day. The job was originally intended for a fellow student, but unfortunately he failed his final examinations. He was aware that I hadn’t yet found employment and asked if I would cover for him, which I was glad to do, both to help out a friend, but also because part time employment was beneficial before I found a permanent position. I arrived at the practice on the first morning and the vet literally gave me the keys and said see you in two weeks with the parting words, ‘there are two bitch spays in this morning. I’d like you to do them by flank incision’. This would have been a huge leap of faith even in the originally intended employee, but he had at least been a student in the practice so they knew him, but to take on a new graduate they knew nothing about would be almost unbelievable today.

I had performed several bitch spays, but only by midline. ‘How hard could this be’? I thought to myself, ‘I spay cats via the flank, so this will just be like a big cat’, and got on with it without a second thought. This is something that would just not happen these days. The requirement of practice development phase (PDP) and the mentoring system would not encourage it and probably quite wisely too. But the faith of my first employer was not without foundation. – I had had more than adequate experience from uncrowded university classes, which again is barely possible with today’s large class sizes, and from seeing practice with a vet who was an amazing mentor and had allowed me to perform many procedures that students would rarely get the opportunity to practice these days.

The freedom I was allowed, with little or no supervision from a qualified vet, in all honestly flew very close to if not crossed the line of what would now be construed as professional misconduct. But there was no better learning environment and I’m pleased to say that nothing suffered as the result of this. I am thus indebted to the late and very great Wyn Griffith Jones for the opportunities he gave me while seeing practice and the confidence this instilled in me, and who was more important in the progression of my career than any single person other than Clive Matthews from whom I bought my practice.

With this confidence in myself I was prepared to wade in to whatever was presented to me. But much more than this: sadly the modern generation of graduates has had the fear of God drilled into it so much about potential client litigation and disciplinary action from the RCVS, that they are scared to do anything they have not been shown to do many times previously and performed under direct supervision on several more occasions.

This first stint as a locum led to another four weeks in the same practice but on the large animal side. After the practice owner came back from his vacation he was amazed by how much more money I’d made than he usually would, simply from following practice pricing policy, so I requested and got a pay rise from £50 a week to the princely sum of £80 which was top dollar for a graduate in those days (how things have changed). Clearly I had justified their faith in me. The first story in this book relates my experiences on the farms during that happy time.

After this first taste of employment was over I had already found a more permanent position in a very up-market small animal practice in South West London, but despite feeling I did a good job, I was replaced after six months because my down-to-earth attitude didn’t really fit in with the practice philosophy and posh clientele. However, breaking a window with a football (from the inside!) probably didn’t help my case.

At this point I realised that I was missing working in the country and on farms and moved to a mixed practice in Nottinghamshire mining country. The word grim is not descriptive enough for a village that didn’t seem to have moved on since DH Lawrence lived there and wrote his novels about the area. Plus I was put in digs with an a ogre of a woman who would not let my girlfriend visit and whose cooking made my pathetic efforts as a bachelor look like haute cuisine. I didn’t feel I had the support I needed from the practice either so, realising I’d made a mistake, I gave in my notice and left after a month of purgatory.

So on to another mixed practice in the Somerset. By this time I was beginning to realise that the idyll of working in the country was not what I had dreamed of and was already steering towards specialising in small animal work. I was finding the difference between large animal and small animal work difficult to reconcile.

I may spend a day mainly dealing with preventative herd health or routine hoof trimming and disbudding and, all too often, the interesting work of in-depth diagnosis, treatment and surgery were impossible due to economics. I would then return, sweaty and dirty, with no time to freshen up, to an evening surgery where cases needed extensive working up, but I didn’t have time after all day on the farms and where client expectation was sometimes beyond what was practically possible at any cost, which required a totally different mind-set. I realised that I found the greatest challenges and interest from internal medicine and surgery and opportunities for these are rare in farm practice. I enjoyed my stay there, but due to the conflict between the different workloads and because I felt I was being taken advantage of with unfair large animal work rotas which were not in the original job description, I left after six months. I’ll admit this was with a little push because I wouldn’t give in and toe the line.

Next stop was a practice in Kent which was one hundred per cent small animal and, although I also enjoyed my stay there, there was, as in other practices, always a conflict between what I wanted to do and the restrictive practice philosophy. This position was anyway only a temporary position in my mind as I had already found the ideal practice in West Middlesex, but couldn’t start there for several weeks.

So my last period of employment ultimately became my own practice. Having had six jobs now in less than eighteen months, I went back to the future as it were and was in sole-charge of a branch of a larger practice. The practice principal, the aforementioned Clive Matthews, had a similar ethos and philosophy on life and practice to myself and we got on famously without the conflicts that had occurred when working with others whose working practices I did not always agree with. I was at last again given my clinical freedom. Clive and I agreed to differ: if we had opposing opinions on a case he never interfered and he let me do things my way. If it meant making the odd mistake from which I learned, then this was accepted, indeed encouraged, and I revelled in this working environment. It confirmed what I’d always really known: that I wanted to work by myself from now on, being able to make all my own decisions and this was where I wanted to stay.

The fact that my girlfriend was also now living in the area and the opportunity to regularly go and see my beloved Arsenal play, in no small measure helped with this decision of course! I made Clive an offer on the branch surgery, which he very generously accepted, although the price was barely market value, and we remained friends and co-operated together until his recent death. When the day came for takeover I proudly replaced his nameplate for mine and the rest, as they say, is history.