My journey in the profession – am I the oldest VN in England?

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 morning, all carefully labelled. The first assistant on shift (usually me) got to set up the faecal pots. This consisted of taking a bit of poo, mixing it with solution and topping it off with a cover slip. Then, 15 minutes later, all the cover slips were placed on microscope slides, and I went looking for worm eggs. Dogs were not routinely wormed – instead, faecal analysis was done and if eggs were found, wormers were dispensed. It is a smelly job, but so satisfying when you find a worm egg.

One striking difference about ancient veterinary medicine then versus now is that clients were very reluctant to spend any money on pets that weren’t cats or dogs. I never saw any treatment given to small furries. If they got sick, they were euthanised. Some vets used a box and gassed them down, but some just knocked them against the side of the prep room table. Sorry – this was a long time ago. We only ever had one reptile patient – a snake that was refrigerated as a method of anaesthesia.

Scary old days

There was no monitoring until induction was over with. I used to love cleaning all the dead fleas off the bottom of the box after we took the cat out. We didn’t have all the lovely parasite treatments available today. We had malathion – like sheep dip. Flea dipping a cat should be classed as an extreme sport. A day of dipping left the assistant a bit twitchy herself, as malathion affects the nervous system.

Between the chemicals, the manual restraint for x-rays, the halothane inhalation and daily exposure to faeces, it was far from all the health and safety parameters set in place today.

When I started working in the UK, I got my first job at the RSPCA in north London. I joined just as Animal Hospital was taking off and we regularly had queues that extended out the front door and down to the bus stop. The BBC had made our hospital famous, and I think a lot of people showed up because they wanted to be on television.

Oddly, the crews didn’t film the characters effing and blinding us when we asked for a £10 donation towards £200 worth of medication. They skipped over the junkie who shot up in the toilets and missed out on the lovely woman who was hand-rearing a pup on Guinness. Instead, they rolled their cameras around and complained about rabbit poo getting caught in the wheels.

I did have my 15 minutes of fame as the “hedgehog lady”. I was very into hand-rearing hedgehogs at the time and my efforts were filmed, featuring two of my babies – Dominic and Luigi.

When I wasn’t busy being a telly star, I learned how to be a veterinary nurse through total immersion. We had seven wards at the RSPCA and they were always full to the rafters – two dog wards (20 dogs each), three cat wards, a wildlife ward and an isolation ward. Each ward had one nurse assigned to it to feed, clean, exercise and medicate all the patients. Sometimes, we were so busy there was no extra pair of hands to place a catheter or take bloods, so we put a tourniquet on the animal and did it on our own.

At night, two nurses ran the whole show. If an emergency came in, we rang the vet for orders and then went ahead and carried out any necessary procedures. We often gave pain meds and put RTAs on a drip, maybe taking an x-ray. I remember us once dealing with a suspected bloat case – we gave it hyoscine butylbromide and put a huge needle in to deflate the abdomen.

There weren’t so many rules then about what nurses could and could not do. The vets often did 80 consults per day or 20 ops, so we only called them in at night when it was completely beyond the capability of the nurses. However, the qualified nurses at the RSPCA were awfully capable. They did castrates (dog and cat), lump removals, all the x-rays, aural haematomas and euthanasia. We worked not just with dogs and cats, but also with rats, turtles, ducks, deer, foxes, heron and even a goat. You never knew what was going to be in the wildlife ward – it was like an assortment of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans.

I learned so much while working at the RSPCA, but it was definitely sink or swim. There just wasn’t time to gently lead students along and coax them to try new skills. In the theatre, you had to time your anaesthetic so that the patients woke up as the vet finished the last stitch. The table was wiped down and the next patient started right away.

We dreaded Fridays. This was the day when we had to move along all the strays to kennels or catteries. Sick animals could not go to rehoming centres as they would spread disease. We nurses took home way too many cats with flu, FeLV, FIP and so on. Eventually, a cap was set on how many cats a nurse could rescue so that we didn’t inadvertently start our own cat sanctuaries.

Fast-paced environment

The team was, for the most part, great to work with – truly dedicated people from the receptionists to the nurses, vets, ambulance drivers and inspectors. I learned so much, but it has permanently affected the way I nurse. I get bored easily because I learned in a fast-paced environment, and I grew so used to working independently and often making my own decisions that I have to remind myself to consult with others and ask for help. I don’t regret a day of my time at the RSPCA – plus, I got three great cats and a husband out of it.

My husband was transferred out of London when our son was born, which forced me to leave the RSPCA. I moved into part-time work at a private practice. Going from charity work to private practice is like moving to another universe. In private practice, vaccinations, parasite treatment and neutering are the bread and butter. We hardly ever did any of these things at the RSPCA, so despite being a fully qualified nurse, I felt as if I was going in on my back foot.

I was not helped by the less than endearing staff that sneered at my lack of experience when it came to “routines”.

I am sure the vets who worked there were decent enough at routine procedures, but they were astonished when I asked if they wanted a kidney cat put on a drip. The head vet looked at me, jaw agape and asked: “You know how to do that?” I felt like Dorothy – I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. This same vet also used ether to anaesthetise animals. That is not a typo. I did say ether. You pour it on some cotton balls and put it in a mask and hold it over the animal’s muzzle. Yes, the vet and nurse got sleepy as well, but that was okay because work was so slow at this practice that we had plenty of tea breaks. After the frantic pace at the RSPCA, I was bored to tears.

It wasn’t long before I applied to work elsewhere and found a job at one of those practices tucked inside a pet store. There, I was not bored. There were only three nurses and two vets covering all shifts – we did offer 24-hour service – and the vets also covered a second practice. The nurses were responsible for clinics, reception, debt collection, insurance, surgical and medical nursing, as well as helping care for the sick animals in the shop, which were all kept in our lunch room, including the parrot that turned out to have psittacosis. One of our vets was a new grad and had never done a bitch spay. I think the most stressful day I ever had as a nurse was talking this vet through his first spay.

“You need to cut deeper, the uterus is under a muscle layer. Uh, now you need to tie that vessel off, quickly.”

It took four hours and was a nightmare, but the dog lived and the vet got better. I got more grey hairs.

I think the worst part of the job was sexing the small furries. I have never been an expert with rabbits or guinea pigs, and discerning their gender when they are young is not my forte. My solution to the problem was to get the textbook out and let the owner decide if they had chosen a male or female pet.

After enduring so much overtime at the pet store practice that I barely saw my son for a year, I decided it was time to move on and tried one more private practice. I was hired as the only qualified nurse and told to “whip the staff into shape”. Well, that went over like a loud fart in a small elevator. The unqualified staff were hugely resistant to change and quickly grew to despise me. Luckily, I was saved their vitriol when a job came open at the Queen Mother Hospital, RVC. I was off to university veterinary medicine, another sort altogether.

Brilliant minds

The Queen Mother Hospital is the largest small animal hospital in Europe and attracts some impressive scholars. Some of the most brilliant minds in veterinary medicine have taught there and it was a privilege to work with them. At the other end of the spectrum, we had veterinary students who were just learning their clinical skills.

Not only did we have a range of abilities, we had a virtual United Nations of nationalities – loads of Italians (all neurologists) Germans, Chinese, French and the odd American.

I was originally hired to be a “consult nurse”. This meant I worked with the outpatient testing in dermatology and ophthalmology. This suited me entirely, as I was working on my dermatology diploma at the time. I was also an assistant in the pharmacy and every seventh weekend did two shifts in ICU. This was a big stretch for me, as my acute care skills were weak since I so rarely worked on the medical wards. We saw some challenging cases – tetanus, liver shunts, heart valve replacement – things you’d never see in general practice.

While I loved working with the dermatologists and ophthalmologists, I was less keen on pharmacy. We had to source drugs from all over the world and often on very short notice. Some of the drugs were hugely expensive, and it could be hard explaining to a vet that I couldn’t just spend £1,000 without permission from the hospital director. Naturally, the emergency orders always arrived on Friday afternoon.

After three years in the hospital, I joined the clinical research team and worked with professors who were doing cutting-edge research. Mostly, we took bloods or assisted with imaging and then collated results. While the knowledge acquired was fascinating, the work could be tedious. There was an awful lot of time spent on a database or arranging samples in the freezer. Yet, it was an excellent method of progressing veterinary medicine without doing any invasive testing on animals. All samples had to be collected while doing diagnostic testing. You basically just took an extra few millilitres and donated that to the research project.

Many drugs on the shelves now were ethically trialled in our studies and I feel proud to have been a part of that work. There just wasn’t enough contact with animals, though, and I ended up giving notice and returning to general practice for a year before my family was transferred again. It was a shock to go back to medical and surgical nursing, and I had a lot of catching up to do, but I really enjoyed interacting with patients and even their owners, and decided that I would stay in general practice.

Our next transfer was to West Sussex where I had no difficulty finding another job. Being a qualified veterinary nurse with several years’ experience makes you very employable in veterinary medicine. While at that practice, I did the BSAVA Physiotherapy Merit Award and earned a certificate in canine massage.

I was able to specialise in nurse clinics and lab work, as the practice was large enough to allow nurses to pursue their main interests. Nurse clinics were an innovation that started when I was qualifying and now they are standard in most practices. Clients have begun to see the knowledge level of the nurse and appreciate our assistance. And now I am in another county and find myself working with a dermatologist, doing specialist nursing again. There was no such thing as specialist nurses when I started out so many years ago.

When I was teaching SVNs, they used to tease me about how long I have been in the profession. It is a wonderful job, fulfilling on many different levels. We are asked to grow continuously, both academically and emotionally. I feel I am a better person because I have had the opportunity to be a veterinary nurse. Certainly, it’s been an interesting 30 years.