As a locum, there’s an element of impostor syndrome as you walk into a new practice. This practice is paying a higher rate for your services, you had better perform and make your rate worth it. You want them to want you back. You want the practice to say: “They’re expensive, but they’re worth it.” Right? My impostor syndrome has gone beyond that; I put myself through extra certificates and qualifications to try and validate myself and make my hourly rate seem worth it. However, now I have these extra letters after my name, I need to live up to the expensive standard the practice is expecting ..read more

Despite saying I’m a one-cat household with my hospice foster Moxie, we have recently been sharing our household with a new friend. Moxie may be a geriatric lady but this hasn’t stopped a large tom cat from following her through the cat flap. Billy as he is now known is a 6kg, big-cheeked hunk, but very shy. As he announced his arrival with a massive tom cat spray of pee over my sofa, I felt he should be rewarded with being neutered and found a nice home. Furry foundling Fast forward two weeks and thanks to the local Cat Protection scheme he has been chipped and neutered. He’s developing into ..read more

Qualifying as a veterinary nurse was a long-awaited moment for myself and was a career that I had wanted for as long as I can remember. It is a job that I imagine everyone finds difficult for different reasons and at different points in their career. I expected to find certain aspects of my career hard, but little did I think it would be a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and learning to navigate everyday nursing life alongside it that I would find most difficult. In the early years of my career, OCD felt debilitating and lonely. The nature of our work only amplified the impact ..read more

Don’t forget to reflect on the things that made you smile today. I still have little things I do at work today that I was shown 20 years ago; little habits that make my system easier – the use of muscle memory and routine, an order of which I do things because that’s the way I was taught. Some of these things have come in and out of fashion, and I have always stuck with the practice’s SOPs, but there are some things I do that I learned myself the hard way. Carly-isms For example, I’ve had one too many syringe/needle disconnections and drugs exploding where other people have handed it to me. As ..read more

Theatre practice. It’s a funny world, the world of asepsis and sterility. To an alien, the rituals we go through to prevent infection – our repetitive, obsessive attitude towards touching certain things after a period of cleansing – must seem very bizarre. And this weird ritual continues once we enter theatre: Don’t touch anything unless it’s blue or shiny and on the instrument trolley. Don’t scratch your head. Don’t blow your nose. Don’t speak too much. Don’t move around. The rules are endless, and all you want to do out of that list is scratch the itch that immediately occurs once you’ve ..read more

There’s a constant pressure in the industry to do something else. Whether that pressure comes from us wanting to branch out and experience different practices, different countries, different disciplines, or whether its pressure from society for you to change it up a bit. It’s almost like you can’t possibly be happy in the same job, with the same role for 5, 6, 10 years – that’s repetitive and boring, isn’t it? The same people. The same rota. But, what’s wrong with that? You know where things are, you know how the practice works, you know the clients, you know the computer system, it’s familia ..read more

I began my career in veterinary medicine as a “veterinary assistant” in California during the 1980s. I had no training initially, but after I began working with animals, I did a grooming course and enrolled on an animal science course at an agricultural college. At that time, there were few qualified veterinary technicians. Our jobs included manual restraint for all x-rays (yes, you read that correctly), lab tests, monitoring anaesthetics and general nursing care. One task that stands out in my memory is the morning faecal samples. There would be a nice little pile at the front door in the mor ..read more

You know the conversations with clients that start with them announcing “I did some research”, which is code for “I Googled it and you’re not doing it right”? How can we change this? The truth is, we can’t. The internet has all the information in the world in your pocket. Let’s face it, we’ve done it, too. Sat in the lab packing up the blood sample being sent off to a different country for a specific test. A quick Google to educate ourselves, expand our knowledge. We will use that information in the future when another case comes through the door. That’s okay. So why is it different when clien ..read more

With 13 years as a blogger for Vet Times under my belt, you may think that writing comes easily, but this December it has felt very difficult to come up with a festive post. Previous articles have considered the chocolate etiquette of clinic life and the frozen turkey “gift” given to our team on Christmas day, but this Christmas is coming to us with a very different vibe: the Twelve Days of Christmas are being brought to us not so much with a partridge in a pear tree, but an XL bully in a muzzle and livestock not-a-leaping as they are in lockdown (or worse) because of bluetongue – oh, and a si ..read more

Let’s set the scene: It’s Friday afternoon, you’ve had the blocked cat and the chocolate-eating Labrador, your patients are comfortable, on fluids, settled, recovering. It’s been a hectic but manageable Friday, so let’s mop the floors and empty the bins with some banging tunes – come on Friday feels! Then the phone rings at 5.55pm. A dog who has been vomiting and hasn’t eaten for a few days is now lethargic and needs to be seen as an emergency. The client insists the six-year-old spaniel, a very good boy, has never eaten anything weird or wonderful in his life. Abdominal palpation identifies d ..read more