A Day in the Life of Vet Student
For pretty much my entire life, I have been what is commonly known is rural New Zealand as a “townie”. The last 3 years of my life however, my career as a vet student has flung me in the farthest corners of the peaceful New Zealand countryside.
The 26th of August, 2019. I am having my first day of a rural vet practice clinical placement.
I wake up sleepy and sad to be leaving my all too warm bed heated by an electrical bed warmer.
My feet hit the cold floor. It’s 6.34 am. The sun has risen but I can’t see her behind the storm clouds, so the light in the air is the harsh fluorescent moody kind of light which makes you want to snuggle back into bed and sleep some more (which is kind of a permanent mood for me anyway but I mean whatever).
I hate the beginnings of placements. A new place. New strangers I have to interact with. The beginning of a period of interrupted sleep patterns. Boxed food. I generally try to avoid packing myself food (only because I’m lazy), but if you don’t have food on placement, you’d rather as well be dead. The work really builds up an appetite. You will find yourself eating literally anything you can get your dirty poopy hands on.
I get in the car and start driving. It was supposed to be a 30 minute drive according to Google maps, but nothing could have prepared me for the roads I needed to traverse that morning. I shall attempt to describe the drive using just a series of multiple single words:
windy, death, narrow, death, inappropriate-speed-limits (yes I’m aware these aren’t single words), death, SUVS-with-impatient-drivers-sticking-to the-bum-of-my-car, death, rain, wind, RAIN, death, 25kph recommended hairpin bends, death, DEATH
I arrive bright and early, 10 minutes before I am supposed to be here, just so I time to give myself a pep talk in the car.
“Okay, Sana, you can do this. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. You aren’t going to die. It’ll be fine. Just like your other placements. You’re okay. Breathe, breathe. Yes, like that. In… out….”
I walk into the clinic carrying my multiple pieces of paraphernalia and introduce myself at the reception. This is a huge clinic. Bigger than any of the others I’ve worked in so far.
They make me wait for a bit before taking me into the back room and introduce me to the vet I’ll be working with today. The center has about 5 large animal vets whom I will be working closely with over the next two weeks.
We start getting ready for the first call out of the day.
I’m wearing work pants, a long sleeve t-shirt under a polo t-shirt under a sweater, two pairs of socks (cute pink patterned ones under a proper pair of farmer work socks), and a pair of steel toed work boots. I am still really frikking cold. My toes and fingers are ice-blocks.
Before we go out, I don a pair of overalls, wet weather overalls, and a rain jacket. I put on a beanie I’m willing to ruin, and switch my boots for a pair of gumboots. As I said, it is really a terribly stormy cold cold cold day.
We get in the vet’s truck. It is really nothing less than a magical thing. It holds everything that they might need during a call out. Starting with the syringes, needles, and drugs, right down to a 6 foot metal calving jack which I will describe a little later.
The boot of the car generally has a fitted wooden trunk with draws filled with stuff. On top of this, there are tubs full of the most random things. If it’s a UTE (utility vehicle), the sides open up as well and hold more vet thingamajigs. The backseat has even more stuff! (surprise)
We get into the car and start driving.
Our first call out is a farmer who wants to do some spring bloods.
(A little background on this: Spring is the season during which cows generally give birth over here. So the season is also called calving. After cows give birth, they get their calves taken off them and put into sheds on milk powder or milk from different cows so the mother can be put into a milking herd and her milk collected and sold. Generally, after calving, and after milk production starts, if the cow hasn’t eaten enough during her pregnancy, her body can go into a negative energy balance state, where she is producing more than her body has/can make. Her calcium and magnesium levels are the first to drop. If this happens, she can collapse. The farmers usually try to treat this themselves in the beginning by providing them with calcium/magnesium supplements with an energy formula. When this doesn’t work, they call out the vets.)
Spring bloods are done to check how the herd is doing nutritionally and whether they have any deficiencies. Usually, we take around 10 blood samples and it can serve as proxy for a herd of around 200-ish cows.
We get there and get everything else set up. The farmer has already taken out 10 cows for us and lined them up so we can get right to it.
It is my first time taking blood from a cow.
In our practical sessions during the last two semesters, we’ve drawn blood from sheep. Cows are a little different. From sheep, we usually take blood from the jugular vein under the neck. In cows, we take blood from the blood vessel under the tail.
When working with cows, it is really really easy to get covered in poop. If you aren’t in the industry, you’d be surprised. Farmed cows are just always pooping, especially when they are being handled. Their poop is also usually semi-liquid so when it falls on the concrete floor, it does a wonderful acrobatic job of splashing up and covering parts of your body you didn’t even know existed. I learnt my lesson early after spending my summer two years ago on a dairy farm. But that’s a story for a different time.
Because of this constant poop assault, you need to be covered well and also know which parts of your body to expose (your hands upto your elbows, cuz its easier washing poop off skin than it is washing it off sleeves).
How to draw blood from a cow: Ensure cow is properly positioned so the bum is facing you. Lift tail up and with your other hand, feel for a little divet on the bottom part of the tail close to the body. The divet will be shaped kind of like a ‘B’. Right in the center of the B, you will find the blood vessel. It’s a bit of a juggle knowing what to hold using what fingers. Because while holding the tail and feeling for the hard-to-locate-blood-vessel, you have to uncap your needle and pierce the skin; all while not poking yourself or dropping the vacutainer (which collects the blood due to a vacuum) in the 5 cm poopy slush on the floor.
My first cow, I had to pierce about 3 times to find the right spot. My second cow, I dropped stuff, didn’t find the blood vessel and once I found it, I lost it. So I didn’t get quite enough blood. My 3rd and 4th cows were fine.
Cows tails get quite wet and poopy so they’re difficult to hold. Also, while you’re drawing the blood, it IS totally possible for the cow to start pooping on you. It gets everywhere, the stuff. And it’s not like all of them stand still and don’t move.
SO, a more accurate picture is you standing close to the bum of a pooping cow trying to hold on the tail desperately while it’s wildly struggling and you can’t let go because the needle is stuck up the tail!
Lovely.
Our second call out was nothing short of shocking.
It was supposed to be just a retained placenta/foetal membranes. Sometimes after cows give birth, their placenta doesn’t detach and come out (as afterbirth) which is supposed to happen. So a vet goes over and has to remove it manually.
As a 3-year veterinary veteran, I thought I’d seen some things. Nothing could have prepared me for this.
We arrive at the farm and in an open hay shed at the front, the farmer’s wife is waiting for us. A little bit of a mental picture adjustment for the reader: In India, when we think farmer, kissan, we usually think of a tanned man in a lungi and a dirty shirt – shoeless. Well, that’s my mental picture anyway. This is how they have always been portrayed in movies and because I’ve never had anything to do with farming in India, this mental image just stuck with me//
In New Zealand, the term farmer means something else entirely. The word farmer is used to refer to a man who actually owns the farm, either a sheep, dairy cow, deer, goat, or pig farm. Sheep and dairy cow farms are the most common.
Farmers here have really surprisingly appropriate gear. Water proof trousers, good sturdy gumboots, either a waterproof overcoat or a woollen fleece pullover or jacket, topped off with a beanie (usually gotten free from Farmlands or any other giant farming stores. Each piece of gear costs on average 200$. So if you’re looking for an industry to invest in…
So the farmer’s wife is all decked up in expensive looking waterproof gear (yes it is still pouring and very very windy). She has her legs crossed, hands in her pockets; and is sitting really casually on a hay bale while her dogs run around her. The expression on her face is almost amused tinged with a 2% strain of boredom.
The cow we are supposed to calve is behind her. On the floor. She looks so done with everything, the cow I mean, not the wife.
We get out of the car and start collecting our gear.
We walk over, exchange pleasantries and start examining the cow. She has a slightly high rectal temperature and her breathing is laboured. She looks a little bloated.
The vet immediately dons a glove sleeve (A glove which goes up all the way to the shoulder) and sticks her hand up the cows vagina and gasps.
“There’s a calf in there!”, she tells us.
Since we were called out for retained foetal membranes, we were assuming that the cow had already calved (given birth). Finding another calf in there is a little bit of a big deal because twins aren’t very common in the dairy industry.
“Why don’t you go ahead and have a feel”, she tells me.
I am all too exciting to be sticking my hand in there.
I put on a glove sleeve, making sure to stretch it at the top like one of my lecturers taught us.
Glove sleeves has an amazing remarkable capacity to roll down and bunch up at the elbow just when you’re getting really poopy which defeats the whole purpose of the thing.
Stretching it along the axis towards the top of it constricts the plastic a little so it holds the arm and has less of a chance of slipping down.
I put a little lube on my palm and stick my hand in.
The first sensation you feel when sticking your hand into a cow, whichever orifice it is, is warmth. A whole lot of warmth. This wasn’t my first time inside a cow. I’ll probably write about that another time.
So I stick my hand in and start advancing it further up the canal, and before long I can feel a small hoof. I push further until I feel the chin of the calf. Yup, she had a twin left inside.
The farmer’s wife tells us that she calved over a week ago, and so the vet explains that the calf inside her has probably died and already started rotting.
So now, we start to extract the smelly rotten calf.
We try getting the cow to stand. It’s hard enough trying to get a calf out of a standing cow, and near impossible to get one out of a recumbent cow.
The farmer brings a tractor and lifts up the bottom half of her body into standing position using a special holder that clasps onto the protruding hip girdles of the cow.
The vet pumps a few litres of lube into the cow using a special pump and then puts her hands in and tries pulling the calf out using the forelimbs. We pull for about 10 minutes before deciding that we need the calving jack. Oh yeah, time to bring out the big guns.
The calving jack is made of two metal pieces. The first piece is a 6 foot hollow tube thingy which isn’t actually round, it’s more cuboidal in cross section. The second piece is kind of like a holder ting that sits on the hip girdles of the cow.
You have to attach ropes onto the legs of the calf (while it’s inside, yes) and a rope onto the head. These ropes are attached to the handle of the calving jack and you basically jack it backwards. This motion makes it easier to pull the calf out. Physics, yay!
So we try that for about like half an hour and we only just about manage to get it out halfway. So the head is out now, and it’s pitifully hanging out the mom back side.
The cow’s vagina was doing a really terrible job of dilating: it wasn’t.
So we basically chop the calf in half using a hunting knife. Yep, that’s what we do. The calf was dead, please remember so you don’t get more freaked out than you already are at this point.
The next thing we are going to do is chop the rest of the calf into pieces while it’s inside the uterus and then remove each piece individually.
There’s a special apparatus that does this. Its basically a sharp wire that you need to get in and around a point where the body bends; we chose to get the wire between the legs.
Once the wire is around where it needs to be and both the ends are out, you need to insert them through two tubes and attach the ends to handles.
Making a sawing motion cuts whatever needs cutting inside.
So I hold the apparatus and the vet starts sawing. It takes us an hour until we make a cut through the flesh and bone.
She puts her hand in again and pulls out one leg, and then pulls out the other leg with a bit of difficulty because it’s still attached to the hip bones.
Every bit of that carcass smells exactly like what it is, a rotting mess. The teeth were falling out, the fur was coming off in tufts. It was exactly what you’d expect from a decomposing body.
So yeah, that was a tough calving.
But it doesn’t end there.
She puts her hand back inside to feel for any more debris that needs removing and she find instead a hole in the uterus!
I put my hand in and can feel the flaps of a really large hole through which I can also feel the stomach and the kidneys. Because of this hole, we are pretty sure that some of the infected rotting stuff has entered the usually sterile space of the abdomen. The cow is doomed.
After spending around 3 hours getting out the calf to save the mamas life, it was so sad to find that hole which had obviously been there a while. There was no possible way to treat that, and the cow was going to die a slow and painful death if we didn’t do anything.
So we spoke to the farmer and he said he would shoot it and that was that.
It was so heartbreaking.
We come back to the clinic really demotivated.
After lunch, I go out with another vet to treat a ‘down cow’. Cows go down due to the whole deficiency thing I already explained above.
It was s t i l l RAINING. It was still cold. It was still windy. And out we went.
I’ll keep this last call out short: the vet didn’t have a four wheel drive, the cow was in the middle of a field, we had to walk half a kilometre in the rain and kept coming back to the car because we forgot things, the wind was stinging our faces, the cow was shivering, we treated the cow, it wasn’t getting up, the rain got heavier, it got colder. Yeah so that was our last call out.
I got home at like maybe 5.30, showered and went to the library to study.
And that concludes a day in the life of a vet student.
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