The Undercover Vet: Starting new jobs!

On a couple of occasions on starting new jobs, I've not had the best of debuts! The first memory came when I started to work as a vet on my very first day. I had just qualified from university and was all eager to crack on with the job and to start applying the skills that I had learnt. As vets, part of the training involves spending time at veterinary clinics watching and practicing. I was quite confident after graduation, since I had spent a lot of time in charity hospitals like the RSPCA. This meant that I had seen and dealt with a relatively large number of animals as a student.

So in my first job, the boss decided to be kind and give new graduates longer time slots for consulting and eased me into the job by letting me start off with "easy" cases. Vaccinations are a great way for new vets to get used to handling and examining pets, in addition to talking to owners. My very first consult as a vet was therefore a vaccination, which should have been dead easy.

Oh no no no! - the female cocker spaniel that was to be my first patient, wasn't going to play by the rules and ease me in. She decided to make me look like a complete prat (not difficult I must say). After checking her, all I had to do was give her the general vaccination injection into the skin of her neck and the kennel cough vaccination into her nose. Kennel cough vaccines involve squirting some fluid into the nose of the dogs - easy, huh?

The injection into the neck went smoothly but once the dog saw the syringe of fluid going towards the nose - sheer pandemonium!! The dog had experienced the unpleasant feeling of fluid going into the nostril before (vaccinated against kennel cough before) and now was absolutely going to do everything in her power to prevent it again.

She was uncontrollable - she flicked her head all over the place, wriggled like a snake, tried biting and howled in agony, giving everyone else in the waiting room (and probably the street), the impression I was some animal abuser! I tried everything to try and get that 1ml of fluid into the nostril but no joy whatsoever!!

In the end, I had to take the dog around the back of the hospital and get at least 2 nurses to pin the dog's body to the ground and one nurse to hold the head still, so I didn't need to aim at a moving target! Eventually success; the fluid was in the nose and we were all dirty and sweaty from wrestling with the dog on the floor.

I was pretty embarassed by my first ever consult. I looked incapable of just giving a small squirt of vaccine into the nose without needing to spend a considerable amount of time and resources (3 nurses) on a "simple consultation". I absolutely made sure that next year, when the dog needed the annual kennel cough vaccine again, I was busy doing something else!

The whole incident reminds me of a joke where the vet tells an owner, when about to give a injection to a dog, "Don't worry it's just a small prick with a needle". To which the owner replies "Yeah, its what he's going to do with it that worries me!"