Learning to be a vet is hard enough _ to do the training in a language that is not natural to you is even more astonishing. Here Norwegian Trude Mostue talks about her early days and the life and times of being a practising vet in the South West of England.

So you want to be a vet? You know what it’s all about because you’ve watched the successful BBC series of vet programmes that have been running from the 1990s where every angle was covered _ from the triumph and joy through to the heartbreak and sense of hopelessness.

Talk toTrude Mostue about the profession and you soon find out that, in spite of her high-profile TV work, she’s a vet through and through. A real one. That’s what she trained to do _ coping with the tough five-year course in a language that was foreign to her and coming out of the experience qualified and smiling.

But as she says, to be a vet you need a calling, a determination to succeed and a genuine passion for your career.

“I knew I was going to be a vet when I was 10,” she said. “I remember going with my mum and dad to this animal vet near our home in Norway. He basically dealt with farm animals but had this little consulting room for pets in the
basement of his farm.

“It was very basic _ it was not like a small animal surgery at all. _ but we took the family dog, an American cocker spaniel, because she had a tumour in her mouth. She ended up being put to sleep.

“But for some reason I decided there and then that this was what I wanted to do. He said to me ‘Are you sure because all you do is wash your hands all the time?’

“I said that’s fine. I’ll wash my hands all the time. I just thought it’s great. I’ve made my mind up now and I can work hard to become a vet from now on.”

“I know it was a very mature sort of attitude for a 10-year-old and I wasn’t that wild about animals at the time. We had cats and dogs and I liked them but I’m more potty about them now.

“At the time I thought it was a nice profession, a nice mixture of being outside and then doing surgery, I liked the idea because I was good at needlework _ my mum taught me at a very young age.

“I couldn’t be a doctor and take the responsibility of doing surgery on people. As a vet I could talk to a lot of nice people and even then I had worked out that actually being a vet is not all about animals - it is very much about communicating with the owners as much as the animals.”

But when you are 10 and have a plan for the future, it must be daunting as well as challenging to realise that after finishing school you will have five years of veterinary learning to do _ and there is little concession to college holidays for the wannabe vet.

Trude arrived in England in 1990 to join the Bristol Vet School because it was felt more vets were needed in Norway. Although she wasn_t planning to stay, she has remained. Her battle for qualifications and future was watched every step of the way by the BBC for their vets series and today she is settled in the West Country with two cats, Dudley and Kevin, her partner Howard Thomas, daughter Freya and has a new baby on the way.

“Back then I spent all my holidays on farms,” she said. “You do lambing and calving and progress into working in practices in your spare time - just to see practical work first hand _ everything you are being taught is in context.
“It is hard. I had friends doing English literature or history and they had holidays and that was great for them. But I was like all the other vet students and we had to go and work on farms.

“It’s a big commitment that course and it’s a fantastic profession when you’ve finished but I would say the training is very hard _ it takes a lot of focus and you really need to know that it is what you want to do, otherwise you’ll become tired, disillusioned and fed up even before you start to work.”

So what happens once you are qualified and you have your first job? What can you expect? No two days are going to be the same and no two practices are going to be run in the same way

Trude explained her regular working day as a vet in practice. “I’d get up at around 7 o’clock to be in the surgery for eight where I looked through the patient list _ to see what sort of operation and appointments were waiting for me in the waiting room.

“Then I’d start to consult from 9am until 11am when you see all kinds of cases. It can be anything from first and second opinions, checking operations you have done before and animals you have to see before they are neutered. You also take in animals for operations.”

It is a time when the vet is entering the unknown. He or she has no idea what is waiting for him/her. “I_ve had a lot of snakes brought into me and got used to them so they’re not strange anymore,” said Trude. “There have also
been quite a few tortoises. They’re quite common. But some of the chameleons and other reptiles make me go a bit funny.

“There are also a lot of parrots. And the big ones are very expensive so you worry about treating them because of the value. In those cases I encourage people to go to avian specialists.

“Then there was the time I was presented with a fish that had eaten another one. Big fish eats smaller fish. The trouble was that the smaller fish had a dorsal spine that prevented the bigger one from swallowing it all the way
down.

“I was handed a bucket and saw the tail of the smaller fish sticking out of the mouth of the bigger one. The owner was worried both fish would be killed so I sedated the bigger one and managed to remove the smaller, dead one.”

“Once the surgery is clear you tend to start operations from about 11am working through until 2pm. Note - there is no lunch break incorporated into this day. Never is with vets but there is with all other staff in the practice!”

Trude can clearly remember the first time she was handed a scalpel. “I was so nervous in college,” she said, “that the professor was threatening to throw them at me. I was very cautious and I made sure I had experienced vets around me if things weren_t going as I wanted. I’ll always ask for help because it is about the safety of the animal _ not my ego.

“You have to crack on with everything you have to do before you start to consult again at 2pm. What really takes the time is knocking the animals out and sedating them. When you’ve finished you have to ring the owners to report how it has gone. We do it all ourselves, although we do have the help of qualified veterinary nurses. They will help us to hold the animal while we do it.

“The veterinary nurse will give injections, sedatives that need to be given before you give them the induction agent to put them under for the operation. Nurses can also do blood sampling but apart from that the vets do everything _ whether it is X-ray, thorax surgery, orthopaedics.

“These days more and more vets are specialising in areas of care and I never have any hesitation in seeking help.”

The day is disappearing fast and it is easy to see now why today Trude, with her home commitments, is not a full -time vet practitioner. “I was very much a general practitioner and that really means I did most of everything - but
when it came to the nitty-gritty of orthopaedics I thought it was safer to send the animals away to a specialist,” she said.

“After I’d done the morning operations you keep an eye on the animals waiting for them to recover and meanwhile you are also starting to get ready to consult again at 2pm.”

A lot of Trude’s work is about understanding what is wrong with an animal that can’t tell you what the problem is. As she says, to communicate with animals you have to be able to communicate with their owners.
“You have to remember you are dealing with animals in awkward situations, when they are frightened and you have to learn how to calm them down, let them sense you are there to love and care for them. A good vet’s nurse can
make a huge difference.

“Dogs are easier to understand because there is a pattern of reactions _ fright aggressive, aggressive and shy and timid. Most of the time you are faced with fright aggressive. The animal is away from its owner and scared. You just have to give them time and patience and the right tone of voice and smooth movements are all part of the process.

“Some dogs, however, are quite hard to read _ those strange breeds. Bullmastiffs and boxers, for example, have so much skin on their faces that it is hard to read their expressions. There is just one facial expression _ and you’re in deeper trouble if the tail has been docked because that is another good indicator.”

A confessed cat lover, Trude admits that the felines of this world are even harder to understand.

The working day continues. “Sometimes you send the animals home after operations but most of the time you are taking in new clients and doing first-opinion consultations. This session lasts about an hour then you have a little break from around half an hour _ but only if it is quiet.

“I did three consultations a day, the last session running from late afternoon until about 6.30pm. Normally, if suitable, I’d send home the animals I_d operated on that day, taking time to speak to their owners about the care needed _ things like that.

“By the time you have cleared up and left everything in order it is about 7.30pm and home is beckoning _ it’s quite a long day.”

But the big problem for vets is money. How can they let an animal suffer or die just because the owner cannot afford the fees to make it better? Trude is a passionate advocate of pet insurance, a huge sector of the insurance market that is growing fast.

“Money is hard to deal with because, the problem is, and it is a problem for most practices, is that they are privately owned and only run by private people _ it is like a business, like the shop on the corner,” she said.

“Obviously you have to run it like a business and you have to charge. I know people think vets are very expensive but if they understood why we are expensive I think it would make it easier to pay the bill.

“On top of that if you see what the bill includes you will very soon find out that most vets undercharge because of this moral dilemma. Because you are in a caring profession people assume you only do it just because you care _ and yes, we do care, we love being vets, and we want to be vets because we care about animals and we want to make them better and we want to stop suffering. But at the end of the day we are also running businesses and we need to cover all our costs.

“It is hard when you come into situations where you understand that people have problems paying bills. You know already you have done an op _ and this happened to me very often _ you also knew you had done an op much cheaper than you should have done. I’d totally undercharge and the clients still had problems paying.

“It is a standard situation and it only creates bad feeling because in one way the vet feels he’s really tried to help and really tried not to charge too much, less than I should do, and the client’s still unhappy because they don’t have the money.

“This is why I am encouraging people to insure - in a way we are really like Bupa hospitals - and if you have got an insurance policy you can relax. We can also relax.”

As Trude says being a vet is not a calling _ not a road to riches. “It is not really about us making money,” she said. “Most vets probably earn less than a plumber. A call-out for a plumber costs about £80; to call out a vet is around £20-30. And people still resent that and think we should do it because we love animals. There’s a lot of emotional blackmail.”

“Insurance is about responsible ownership of pets. People might be cynical and say, of course, vets want it because they get their money _ and, yes, that_s good too. Ultimately, my main motivation for inspiring people to take out insurance is so they don’t have to think about money when an accident or illness happens to their pet. It should be care without compromise _ that’s my motto.”

Trude also believes an influx of women into the profession will change old and tried methods _ what she calls the James Heriott myth - for good.

“You can_t live and breathe a profession 24-hours a day because you_re going to end up resenting it, you_ll lose your family and friends. There_s no-one who loves their profession that much.

“Vets and dentists have the highest suicide rate, because it is a lonely profession where you care and care and care. The hours are antisocial, you are under financial pressure, you are constantly underpaying yourself. You can end up having a family at home that never see you _ a miserable wife or husband who doesn’t understand.

“Perhaps that’s why most of the time vets team up with vets because they understand the dynamic and if they don’t they get divorced.”

“But things are changing because about 70-80 per cent of graduates are female. Females want babies and they have more priorities. I think once you get a baby and a family your outlook changes and you realise your work doesn’t mean everything. I think the future is going to be much better, more flexibility.

“And that_s got to be good for vets.”