Chaotic life of a vet student

ONLY a vet student, I muttered, would find themselves hungover, dehydrated, overheating and chasing sheep around a field at 2 pm on a Thursday.

This was the third time the same sheep had expertly dodged the gate, and my fellow students and I were in hot, dusty pursuit, trying (and mostly failing) to herd them into a pen. We were at the university farm, attempting to practice our sheep tipping and handling skills – a far cry from our earlier activities of the day: dissecting the hindlimb of our cadaver dogs (mine, affectionately named ‘Chad‘), followed by a histology practical and a biochemistry lecture that felt like it lasted a small eternity.

I had unwisely made the mistake of drinking heavily and until the early hours of the morning the night before, and this intense day of contact hours had done nothing to ease the consequences. The distinctive smell of formaldehyde in the dissection room can be nauseating at the best of times, but combined with a weak stomach and a pounding head, it took on a whole new level of assault.

To add insult to injury, two hours of squinting down a microscope and zooming around slides trying to identify the differences between proximal and distal convoluted tubules had done nothing to ease my queasiness. The last thing I needed to follow it up with was a long biochemistry talk in a stuffy lecture theatre, where every protein was a five-letter acronym that sounded like a WiFi password. Yet despite the odds I was able to battle through and make it to here; running aimless laps around a field after some sheep who appeared far more athletic than any of us vet students.

It was somewhere between my third lap around the field and the sheep's third successful escape that a realisation struck me: only vet students live like this.

Only vet students would go from G-protein coupled receptors to chasing sheep in the span of an hour. Only we would find ourselves dissecting preserved limbs on two hours of sleep, then sprinting around a field. It was a packed, exhausting, thrilling, chaotic, hilarious, headache-inducing life.