me,’ Lucy said gloomily. ‘I’m not keen on horses. I prefer cows, so give me a cowshed over a stable anytime.’
‘I’ll watch your back with the horses if you watch mine with the cows.’
She grinned. ‘Deal.’
Lucy and I were close, and there wasn’t much we didn’t tell each other. We had a lot of interests in common; we were both musical and also sporty, outdoor people. We played a lot of tennis together, but when it came to running our paths diverged; Lucy ran marathons while I was happy to settle for a mile or two with the dog.
Thank goodness we’d got into the same rotation group. I didn’t know the other three girls on our rotation – Grace, Jade and Katy – but soon after we’d been given our groups at the end of the autumn term, Lucy and I met Grace at the Christmas Ball. She bounced up, put an arm round each of us and said merrily, ‘Hello, girls, I think we’re going to be working together.’
Lucy and I laughed. ‘Nice to meet you, too. See you on Black Monday.’
‘Yup,’ Grace called, as her boyfriend Miles led her away, ‘it’s going to be a laugh.’
Black Monday was the first day of rotations. So-called, no doubt, because it was the day on which every single student was filled with unmitigated terror.
For us it fell on a bitterly cold day in early February, when the five of us gathered at 8am by the whiteboard in the RVC’s Equine Hospital, ready to begin large animal imaging, all of us pale with lack of sleep and visibly nervous. Grace, in total contrast to her appearance at the ball, was jittery and anxious. ‘Not good with horses,’ she muttered.
Jade had a bit of experience with horses but none of the others did, so I felt lucky. But liking horses and knowing how to treat them were two different things, and I’d spent the previous weekend cramming over my textbooks, trying to memorise every possible horse complaint.
For equine work we all had to wear green overalls with our name tags pinned to the front. Rumour had it that if you forgot your name tag you failed the rotation. I wasn’t absolutely sure that this was true, but just to be safe I’d had mine within sight all weekend. Underneath the overalls I had a thick fleece and, like the others, I was wearing sturdy boots padded out with warm socks.
The Equine Hospital was part of the Large Animal Clinical Centre. We’d been into the barn around the back during training, but until now we’d never entered the hallowed portals of the main building, which was a working hospital open to the public. Before starting we were given a tour by one of the more junior vets. It was an impressive place, with consultation rooms, an imaging centre offering bone-scanning, MRI, CT and X-rays, two surgical theatres, and three stable blocks, one of them the Intensive Care Unit. We would be back here again later in the year for equine medicine, surgery and orthopaedics, but this time our focus was the imaging suite.
Everything in it was large scale. It had to be. And, as we quickly discovered, imaging a horse was no mean feat. To take a CT (computerised tomography) scan, a human would be asked to lie on a flat bed while an X-ray tube rotates around their body. With horses, only the head and neck fit in the tube, so if any other part of the body needs to be imaged a standard X-ray has to be taken. The machine is suspended from the ceiling, with handles either side, while the radiographer moves it around the room like a submarine scope. It can be positioned anywhere around the horse, while someone holds a receptor plate on the end of a long wooden pole on the other side. Not easy, and it gets more complicated than that, because the angles have to be right so that the horse’s bones don’t get superimposed over each other.
Kitted up in lead gowns and gloves to protect us from the X-rays, we spent a lot of time learning the right angles to use, and then running out of the room while the image was taken (all bar the lucky two holding the horse and the plate) and back in again.
But our first job that grey February morning was to assist with bone-scanning, or to give it its technical name, scintigraphy, on a large grey Arab stallion. The clinician in charge that day was Jackie. In her mid-thirties and very friendly, she was aware of how nervous we all were and went out of her way to help us and make sure we were enjoying ourselves as well as learning.
The Arab stallion was lame, but there was no obvious reason why. Hence the bone scan, which is a good way of locating where the problem is when it’s not immediately obvious. Before the scan the horse is given an intravenous injection of a radioactive substance that spreads around its body, binding to areas where the bone is trying to heal itself and emitting radioactive rays that show up on the scans.
As one of the others stood holding the heavily sedated horse and stroking its nose, the scanner was moved around it, section by section. And, as we discovered, it takes absolutely ages. It’s not unusual to spend four hours scanning a horse, so we were taking it in shifts, holding the horse, observing the scans with the clinician or doing the other vital job – catching the horse’s radioactive pee in a bucket.
I was the lucky candidate first up for this job so, bucket in hand, I hovered around the horse’s rear end. I felt pretty silly and, to make matters worse, Lucy, who was holding the horse, kept catching my eye and making me laugh. As I lunged forward, just a moment too late to stop another waterfall of radioactive pee hitting the floor, Lucy snorted with laughter. ‘Just wait till it’s your turn,’ I mouthed at her.
It seemed like an age until we finished, but the end result showed that the horse had an inflammation in the pelvis. The only treatment, as Jackie the clinician explained, was rest and pain relief.
Over a brief lunch we chatted to the other three in our group. Now that we were underway, Grace had begun to get a little of her bounce back. Katy was quiet, but prone to cracking wicked jokes. And Jade was funny and very upfront – she said what she thought. They were all lovely, but I did wonder if, as we were going to be together so much, personality clashes would emerge.
Lucy and Jade were both trying out online dating, which led to a lot of laughter and discussion along the lines of, ‘Oh, look at him, what do you think? No, he’s definitely not my type, what about this one? That one looks like one of the horses, but here, take a look, this one’s quite hot.’
Grace, Katy and I weren’t in the market for dates, so we provided second opinions and back-up. Grace was living with her boyfriend, Miles, Katy wasn’t looking for a relationship and I had Jacques, the lovely South African I’d met during my gap year. By then we’d been dating long-distance for almost four years. We used Skype and our phones to stay in touch, but I missed him.
Apart from the horse pee/bucket challenge, things appeared to be pretty straightforward so far, but that afternoon we faced a much bigger test. An X-ray on the hock (the joint in the middle of the back leg) of a lame horse showed that a lot of things were wrong. This horse was elderly and the hock showed little bone protrusions, erosion, swelling and ankylosis, or bone fusion.
We had to stand round the X-ray and point out to Jackie what we saw, taking it in turns to come up with new things. This was a scene we would be repeating many times throughout rotations, in which students sweated and panicked, and clinicians looked patiently (or impatiently in a lot of cases) at them waiting for answers. If the person before you said the thing you had planned to say, you just had to come up with something else. The clinicians were never satisfied until they had squeezed multiple answers out of each of us.
Once we’d exhausted the list of visible irregularities, Jackie asked whether we thought the ankylosis was hurting the horse. My horse Elli had been through this, so I knew that once fused the bones in the two immobile hock joints no longer hurt because they had stopped moving. Feeling a
