No more lectures for fourth years!!….. If we all pass exams that is!
At Liverpool vet school the time had come for us all to leave the safety of the lecture theatre and move on to greater (and scarier) things. In the next couple of months, we have our last set of exams to tackle before being let loose into the veterinary world to begin our rotations. From then on, we are assessed weekly on our practical capabilities and our ability to apply and use knowledge we have had drummed into us over the last 4 years. It’s both a frightening and exciting step and makes us one step closer to our end goal of being fully qualified veterinary surgeons.
As part of our end of lectures send-off we were all instructed to come in fancy dress for our last day with the theme entitled ‘if I wasn’t a vet.’ Our house is conveniently situated amongst a cluster of charity shops which always prove themselves to be a treasure trove when it comes to finding all manner of fancy dress costumes… and it didn’t disappoint! I went as a midwife (clearly I’ve never wanted a clean or easy job!) and managed to pick myself up a nurse outfit and three plastic baby dolls to kit out my costume – I learnt later that I never want triplets as manhandling three ‘babies’ all day was quite a challenge and I definitely feel for the parents who have to do it full time! Beth took a unique approach to her wish to be an interior designer and made herself an intricate lampshade headdress while sasha went as an Olympic skier, though for fear of taking somebody out with her real skis she accompanied her outfit with some fake cardboard ones. Rachel resident ‘pony wanker’ made fun of her own obsession with dressage and went as a ‘dressage queen’ complete with over 15 hand-crafted rosettes (which were subsequently lost or stolen throughout the night), and a child’s hobby horse as her ‘trusty steed’.
The last day began with a number of practicals; a group of us were out in the blistering cold on Liverpool’s dairy farm assessing causes of mastitis, being followed around by possibly some of the friendliest cows on the planet who queue up for a tickle. The rest of us were tackling the public health issues of dairy products by making cheese. It was clear that last day giddiness was being felt by all, including the lecturers as we all got stuck in with great and slightly messy vigour into making halloumi. It’s safe to say I think there would have been a few public health issues with our cheese making process!
At lunch, everyone started arriving in their costumes, it was fantastic to see everyone dressed up and all the effort everyone had gone into (an excellent procrastination from revision) making their outfits. Some of the most entertaining costume ideas went to the fellas in our year who seemed to jump at the chance to swap genders … there was a sexy police officer, the Queen of England and a drag queen (who’s make-up was alarmingly fantastic). Everyone piled into the lecture theatre equipped with a last lecture bevvy, the lecturers seemed to be having just as much fun as we were and couldn’t keep a straight face while watching us all parade in.
After the lecture we turned up the music and headed to the common room for pizza and Prosecco. During this time Kay, who had come as a blue peter presenter equipped with blue peter dog and ‘here’s one I made earlier’ model of the vet school, decided to give out blue peter awards to the most deserving costumes. I was on camera duty to document the event (mainly as her grand plan was to send the pictures to blue peter in hopes of getting a real blue peter badge).
We then headed over to the Leahurst bar where there was games of twister to be played, nostalgic 90s pop songs to dance to and alcohol cheap enough to fill your boots on (my baby dolls worryingly featured in a number of comedy shots the moment I took my eyes off them). We drank, danced and sang the night away until the small hours of …..actually although it felt like 3AM we staggered out of the vet school at 10’ o clock at night. The villagers of Neston, who are thankfully quite used to vet student antics just laughed at us as we wandered good naturedly home and showed great interest in what we’d been up to. Beth who had had significant quantities of prosecco could not quite direct her legs to navigate the cattle grid and had to be rescued as she sat howling with laughter in the middle of it. After a long and giggly walk home and a quick trip to the Chinese for prawn toast (we got some interesting stares as I had stolen some fairy lights from someone’s costume and was wearing my trophy proudly like a scarf and Beth was still wearing her lampshade – the man did put us some extra prawn toast in though… we clearly looked like we needed it! ) the night was at its end. So, after a not so sorry send off with a bunch of the most crazy and amazing people I’ve come to know over the last few years, we are about to embark on our next adventure together where we are worryingly being let loose in the university hospitals… and on that note, I should probably revise now as I still know nothing!
If you’d like to here more about my adventures at vet school check out more tales here…https://thejetsetvet.com/category/vetting/
