My COVID Diaries: enjoy the everyday and you will enjoy every day

When I graduated from the University of Nottingham School of Veterinary Medicine and Science in 2016, Bradley Viner (the then president of the RCVS) gave a speech about our future lives in veterinary practice.

He spoke not of life-or-death moments or surgical innovation, but the humdrum of the everyday. He reminded us of the importance of the routine; to reframe the mundane into precious moments where there is time to build relationships with our clients and our patients.

Enjoy the everyday, and you will enjoy every day.

From speed to slog

A few months ago, I was delighted to discover the word “coronacoaster” for the first time. It summed up perfectly hurtling through the relentless ups and downs of early lockdown life. No day was routine or mundane, not least because we were not completing any of our usual routine work.

There was a certain thrill to this. We may not have been battling on the front lines of ICU ventilators, but the patients we were seeing were urgent and important. They were the life-or-death moments.

Several months down the line, life in practice feels less like a coronacoaster and more like a relentless slog. For me at least, it is mentally easier to battle through a crisis than the torrent of routine that was waiting on the other side.

Our personal protective equipment no longer feels like battle gear, but another way in which the everyday is so much more difficult than it was before.

Appreciate the mundane

While practice life in a global health pandemic is probably not what Bradley was envisaging when he spoke to us about the routine, his advice could not be timelier. With the uncertainty of heading into the winter months, now is the time to appreciate our ability to perform our mundane work.

When I was doing harrowing emergency out-of-hours shifts in the worst weeks of the pandemic, every animal I saw was gravely ill. I had never considered that routine appointments such as vaccinations were the moments in my day that I got to spend with healthy patients and happy carers; the respite from illness and bad news.

I longed for the everyday and feared what would happen if we could not vaccinate our animals, cut overgrown claws before they grew into pads, check up on our golden oldies… even squeeze over-full anal glands.

Bradley spoke of the importance of these appointments to build relationships and bonds. It is certainly harder with social distancing, face masks and time constraints.

But when life is so uncertain, and many of us are taking animals away from their carers to examine, our ability to build trust has never been so imperative – or skilful.

Battle on

When you are battling through the slog of lockdown practice it is so easy to forget the things we feared and the things we missed. It is also easy to forget how important our work is.

For all the veterinary team out there battling, do not forget what an amazing thing it is you are doing – or why you are doing it.

From the emergencies to the humdrum of everyday, you are doing a magnificent job. Keep on battling.