A Test of Patients: The experiences and musings of a veterinary surgeon

By Martin Atkinson

'the experiences and musings of a veterinary surgeon' - A collection of short stories recording some entertaining aspects of Martin's life as a veterinary surgeon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Astoria Publishing
• Release date: Apr 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781903802076

Martin Atkinson

Martin Atkinson qualified from Liverpool University in 1975 and spent the first five years of his career in mixed practice in various parts of the country. After a spell as an assistant in small animal practice in Middlesex he bought the branch surgery from the previous owner and set up sole-charge in 1981. After five years the building was extensively modified with a large purpose-built extension into a state of the art clinic and re-named St Martin's Veterinary Clinic after the local parish.

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Introduction

I qualified from Liverpool University in 1975 and spent the first five years of his career in mixed practice in various parts of the country. After a spell as an assistant in small animal practice in Middlesex I bought the branch surgery from the previous owner and set up sole-charge in 1981. After five years the building was extensively modified with a large purpose-built extension into a state-of-the-art clinic and re-named St Martin’s Veterinary Clinic after the local parish a stylised image of a church appears in the practice logo to signify this link.

Contrary to popular belief I haven’t entered self- anointed sainthood. When naming the clinic, I just wanted to signify our link with the local community, albeit a little tongue in cheek, but to add relevance, St Martin was known as a carer of animals – St Francis light if you like. In addition to my writing, I developed a special interest in feline cardiology and internal medicine.

Like most vets I chose the profession because of a compassion for animals and the desire to help them. Couple that with an interest in science, and becoming a vet was an obvious choice. But, even before I realised that this was the direction I wanted to take, I had a love of writing – I wrote a home newsletter about my toys and pets at a very early age and initially had thoughts of becoming a journalist.

As a vet, journalistic outlets have obviously been somewhat limited, but I satisfied my urge to write by preparing articles for local newspapers and magazines, being a long-standing editor of the local Rotary Club Bulletin and, later, by writing articles for veterinary journals. ,

This book is a collection of short stories recording some entertaining aspects of my life as a veterinary surgeon. It is by no means a definitive account of my career – that is something I’ve never felt the urge to record; I fear my life has not been interesting enough for that.

In general, the content of the stories is true, although some characters, times and places may have been modified slightly to enhance the plot and protect those who may wish to remain anonymous!

The time span between the stories is spread over many years, however most are timeless and as relevant now as when I experienced the events which inspired them.

Some are records of my personal experiences, but many are a record of my more interesting patients, colourful owners and some of the more interesting, entertaining cases I have seen. I confess that one or two are fantasies or musings on matters with apparently little veterinary content, but even they are loosely based on real events or make a relevant reference and it should be obvious which they are.

The chapters are in rough chronological order, but this is not absolute and, because the stories were not originally written in sequence, a few events mentioned in passing in one story are then expanded in another. Consequently, although I’ve tried to avoid too much repetition, a little has been unavoidable. I’ve tried to make the content entertaining and relevant to both veterinary and non-veterinary readers and kept technical matter to a minimum – or at least explained its relevance as far as is practical in lay-man’s terms.

As all vets will know, some pet owners can be, shall we say, difficult or a little eccentric and I was concerned that a non-veterinary audience may think some of the stories are over-critical of my clients, but I believe that anyone who has worked with people, especially in a retail or professional environment, will recognise these types of characters and not take offence. However, sometimes it truly does seem that the animals are more sensible than their owners and probably the vet as well!

Finally, it had been my intention to donate any earnings I make from this book to my chosen charity VETAID. The last chapter tells the reader a little about the objectives of this charity and of the trip I made, along with a number of other vets, to Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in order to raise funds and actually visit some of the projects on the ground amongst the Maasai.

Unfortunately, VETAID has recently ceased to function as a charity. However, I feel the account of our trip to Tanzania is still of interest especially as on most charity fund raising events the participants never get to see the fruits of their endeavours. To actually observe and participate in the projects we were helping to fund was both exciting and a privilege.

Earnings from the book will now be donated to a number of charities including Cats Protection, The Dogs Trust, PDSA and BSAVA Petsavers.

Martin Clive Atkinson, BVSc, MRCVS.

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.

Cross country runner

Being a fraction short of six foot yet weighing only a tad over ten stone in my cotton socks, I’ll be the first to admit that I am not built for large animal work. These are proportions which are not conducive to wrestling recalcitrant steers or pulling out calves reluctant to face the outside world. Brute strength is not everything as I know there are some tiny female vets out there who can perform calvings like shelling peas, but clearly they possess skills that I never had. I have long realised that my future lay in small animal practice, but for a short while after qualification I tried to live the dream of working as a country vet. The trouble was that my physique was the source of amusement for the farm hands. They were not impressed that I regularly cycled over one hundred miles in a day or could run a marathon in well under three hours, and whereas I consider, somewhat vainly maybe, that I have the frame of a finely honed athlete, to them I was just a weed.

Their world was one where the biggest and the toughest got the most respect and a vet who couldn’t restrain a cow single-handed while trimming its foot at the same time was not made of the right stuff. For the events they preferred to prove their prowess, maybe like tossing hay bales with a pitchfork or arm wrestling while drinking twelve pints in the Ploughman’s Arms, I was not even on the start line. Also, being a fairly shy young man from a rather protected background, although pretty self-confident, I was not (maybe somewhat surprisingly after five years at vet school) at ease with the excessive usage of what you may call agricultural language and had my leg pulled for that. However,