Tools of the trade

Batman has his utility belt, Indiana Jones has his whip and crumpled fedora, James Bond has his gadgets, and Mickey Mouse has his… er… big white gloves(?).

All iconic characters have their tools of the trade, without which they feel naked. Vets – who are, of course, iconic and “superheroic” characters themselves – have theirs, too.

Stethoscopes

Nothing marks you out as a medical professional (or, potentially, a safe-cracker) as quickly and surely as a stethoscope.

If I start consulting without a stethoscope about my person, I am distracted and twitchy until I can locate one – and, as most vet nurses quickly figure out, the ability of veterinary surgeons to locate objects is slightly below that of Mr Magoo.

A few ways exist to keep hold of your stethoscope. One is to hang it on a hook or one of those plastic stethoscope holder thingies in your consulting room, but it’s not very satisfactory to me and leaves you open to stethoscope theft by other vets who, unable to find their own stethoscope hanging on a hook in their own room, have an uncanny ability to rapidly locate and pilfer someone else’s.

The second option is to have it in your pocket – either trousers or consulting top – but the inflexible earpieces generally make me feel like I’m walking around with a semi-erection.

So, I favour the third, and occasionally derided, option of draping it around my neck. It’s convenient, lightweight and gives my hands something to play with while my brain is otherwise engaged with top-level thinking. Also, I think it makes me look cool, even though I know this is something of a minority opinion.

Thermometer

Back when I were a lad, thermometers were fragile tubes of glass that generally needed a centrifuge to get the mercury back to the bulb so you could use it again.

I am a man easily swayed by nostalgia, who still rails against the name change of Marathon to Snickers, but have spent far too long scrabbling about on the floor of my consulting room trying to work out exactly how to pick up a bead of mercury without breaking health and safety regulations to feel even a second’s regret that we are now blessed with plastic (and occasionally rubbery) electronic devices.

Unlike my stethoscope, I usually leave thermometers in my room so I can place them back in their sterilising solution, but they are the cause of one of my biggest pet hates (if you’ll pardon the expression) in veterinary medicine…

I don’t know what kind of mentality it takes for a vet to take a patient’s temperature and then not wipe the thermometer clean before dunking it back into the solution (typing it out, I can barely believe it actually happens), but the number of times I have picked out a thermometer after taking over a consulting room from another vet to find a winnit of animal turd clinging to the end – as welcome as Piers Morgan turning up at your house-warming party – simply beggars belief.

I have tried asking, I have tried crying, I have tried soft and hard language, but it continues to happen. When I was a clinical director, I wanted to introduce a policy whereby any vet found guilty of this heinous crime would be forced to lick the thermometer clean, but I was informed this wasn’t compatible with the company’s health and safety policy.

Pens

It happens every year – you return from BSAVA Congress or London Vet Show and survey the mountain of pens you have managed to accumulate on your tours through the trade halls.

“That,” you think, “is enough pens to last a lifetime. I will never be short of a pen again!”

Oh, poor naive fool you are.

Within three weeks, you are back to spending minutes at the start of every surgery desperately trying to locate anything that will make enough of a mark for you to sign the vaccine certificates.

The explanation for this is simple, as every fan of the late, great Douglas Adams will know – left alone in the darkness of a drawer for any length of time, pens will quietly slip through wormholes in space and time, slowly making their way to the fabled pen paradise planet, where many wondrous and highly biro-orientated pleasures await them.

Until a method can be found to prevent this escape, we will simply have to keep refilling our pen load at conferences and hoping, this time, our stocks will last for the rest of the year.

Scissors

I have never personally owned a pair of scissors because, like every other vet in the history of the profession, if I need scissors I simply borrow them from the closest veterinary nurse.

And, like every other vet in history, I then immediately forget this was supposed to be a temporary arrangement and that I swore on my children’s lives I would give them back as soon as I had finished using them, and slip them into my pocket, only to absent-mindedly put them down somewhere else.

I will then forget not only where I put them, but that I had ever even borrowed them at all.

I am constantly amazed more vets have not been found stabbed to death in their practices, dozens of pairs of scissors protruding from their bodies, each with a tiny bit of coloured plastic wrapped around the handle to identify the perpetrator. This is probably the only way a nurse could give a vet a pair of scissors and be certain they would know where they were afterwards.