It’s fall again and I’m already back in the swing of things. I flew back to Glasgow on the 4 th of July and started my first rotation of final year on the 6 th. Many of the farm animal and equine rotation start during the summer so all the students can be fit in and I started with the rotation at a farm animal practice near Glasgow. The vet school contracts with a large practice (6 farm vets) in Lanark for vet students to have a rotation in a first opinion farm animal practice. There are three students in my farm animal group and another final year joined us to make four in the rotation. We went out on calls with the vets during the day and took turns being on call evenings and weekends. They also ran several tutorials for us including a cattle foot trimming practical which was very beneficial. Unfortunately, the latest outbreak of foot and mouth occurred in England just as we were starting the rotation, so for the first week all preventive care visits were cancelled and we only went on emergency calls.

After finishing at Lanark, I returned to Glasgow and started my first two weeks of hospital care. All final year vet students are required to spend two weeks (one week of days and one of nights) working as nurses at the vet school small animal hospital and we all dread it. Shifts are twelve hours long and it’s for 14 days straight. Although it counts as part of our required 26 weeks of EMS, I didn’t feel like I learned much and thought the time would have been better spent elsewhere. The university is just too cheap to pay for staff on evenings, nights, and weekends when there are vet students to use.

I managed to get away a few hours early on Monday morning (2:30am) so I had two hours sleep before driving over past Edinburgh to see practice with a veterinary dentist for a couple of days. Quite enjoyed that experience as I had the chance to see a couple of root canals and lean how to take good dental x-rays. Since we were finished early on Tuesday I hiked up the hill behind the town and did a bit of sightseeing. The countryside and seacoast were stunning around the clinic.

Now, I thankfully have a few day off before I jet off to Belgium for two weeks small animal EMS with a vet I met back in 1999. This Sunday I’m very excited to have tickets to the Monty Python Day at Doune Castle. Most of the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was filmed at the castle and they will be reenacting some of the skits. I’ve wanted to go to this for the last few years, but was never in Scotland early enough, so now I’ll well chuffed to be going. Hopefully the weather will behave.

Once I’m back from Belgium, I start my rotation in Specialties and Ethics (whatever that will include) and have rotations through the end of November. I’ve been lucky enough to get 7 weeks off over Christmas and am looking forward to being home for Thanksgiving for the first time in five years. Won’t have much time to spend with my family as I’ll be doing EMS throughout the holiday, but it will still be wonderful to be back in the States