One of the things I really enjoy about my work is having students with me on their extra-mural studies (EMS). By the time you read this I’ll be 60, but these young people really keep me feeling young! For a start, I could get a bit bored with yet another corneal ulcer or what seems like the 100th case of entropion for the year. But if this is the first case a student has ever seen then that is exciting for them and for me too. If a dog has a lid inturning in both eyes, I’ll do one and the student can repeat what I’ve done on the second eye. Honestly, if they can do a cat spay or a dog castrate, an entropion is much easier, with a little assistance! And their questions can really shed a new light on a condition.
Let’s look at this week’s cases – today to start the clinic we had a cat with widely dilated pupils and retinal detachment, a clear case of hypertensive retinopathy. The cat was very dyspnoeic too. But by the time we got to measure its blood pressure, later in the morning, it was 150/120mmHg. How on earth was that the case? I tried to work it out with the two lovely students I had with me, but we couldn’t work out what was going on until we realised that the patient had been given an emergency dose of frusemide to resolve their breathing issues. You might say “every day is a school day” because none of us realised what a profound effect a diuretic could have on blood pressure. The take-home message was always check what meds the animal is on and whether they’ve changed in the last hour or two!
You might say ‘every day is a school day’ because none of us realised what a profound effect a diuretic could have on blood pressure
Actually, there’s another great opportunity that students working with us bring. Last year a great student worked with me to see how many cats over 10 years old had changes suggestive of high blood pressure. Looking at every elderly cat in the clinics I visited in my ambulatory practice, we found nearly 20 percent had such changes: small areas of retinal detachment, retinal blood vessel abnormalities and haemorrhages. Without a student to encourage me to look at every old cat I could find, we couldn’t have had the 200 animals we saw over the year. And then there’s the conversations we have in the car travelling between practices. Monday’s topic was whether cats enjoy being looked at face-to-face in the way dogs love gazing eye-to-eye with their owners. This week’s students said they had been told that cats don’t like that, but is that the case?
The students’ question was a great stimulus to some online research. There’s obviously a lot of science surrounding dog–human interaction, with oxytocin levels increasing in dogs and their owners when they gaze at each other. It had been thought that the same didn’t happen in cats – investigation of cats in experimental settings showed higher cortisol and lower oxytocin in the urine of cats after they were stared at by the researchers. But more recent studies on cats showed the same as with the dogs – oxytocin increases in cats and their owners.
Further, humans had mutual blink synchronisation with their pet cats just as did dogs, suggesting that in both species these pets are having an emotional link with their owners. If you’ve got a dog or a cat you won’t, I guess, find those results surprising. Cats and dogs recognise when their owners are depressed too – cats in particular spending more time physically rubbing their owners when they (the owners) were emotionally disturbed. But, again, maybe that’s not news to those of you who have cats.
Well, you might say that this is a long way from the sort of thing that students should be learning in a week of ophthalmology EMS, but that’s the joy of having veterinary students working alongside us, isn’t it? Just as university as a whole is far more than just learning the details of the course, EMS is so much more than just gaining experience in spaying cats or X-raying dogs.
When I show visitors around St John’s, I take them up to my rooms, built a little more than 500 years ago, in the gatehouse of the college. I say “rooms” as there is a main room at the front, a bedroom at the back, a tiny kitchen in one turret and a washroom in the other. Until about 100 years ago the fellow – the college lecturer – occupying the rooms would have lived there with his students (then only “his” – it was only 40 years ago that the college had female fellows and admitted women!) in the neighbouring rooms. The aim was not just to teach them their subjects – half a millennium ago it would have been Greek, Latin, Hebrew and theology, with maybe maths and law too – but also to show them a way of life.
I feel that EMS should have the same mix – we are showing students who work with us not just the ins and outs of the veterinary career, but how we integrate our professional work with getting a life outside vetting as well
That way of life has changed quite a bit, but the aim to show students a life of continual study and enjoyment in learning, and also of playing hard as well as working hard, hasn’t really altered over all those years. And actually, I feel that EMS should have the same mix – we are showing students who work with us not just the ins and outs of the veterinary career, but how we integrate our professional work with getting a life outside vetting as well. Only in that way can we ensure that students learn how to live a full life. Not forgetting of course that often the students can teach us a thing or too in that regard as well!
