Dr Liza’s Vet Tales Excerpt – Vet Studenting: Learning Some Horse and
Dr Liza’s Vet Tales Excerpt – Vet Studenting: Learning Some Horse and HealthCare
Growing up in the city, despite my zoo of smaller animals that I kept as pets and my incredible experiences with wildlife, I hadn’t much familiarity with horses. I thoroughly enjoyed working with and getting to know them. As with all animals they have their own characters like a really clever old girl called “Big Bitch” who thankfully only lived up to half her name being huge! She knew exactly when it was time for her to be taken out of her hospital enclosure and for a walk, standing at the ready for me to put her halter on and then indicating to me when she was ready to go back after her walk.
I found some horses to be quite naughty, needing a fair bit of discipline and only co-operating once I had asserted my dominance. I found it amusing how these giants suddenly responded to the comparatively little human with the big mouth telling them what to do.
“Hoover” was a lovely young horse named after a Hoover vacuum cleaner due to his ability to eat everything in sight. He had a rough start being poorly looked after and he was very skinny but at that time he was in his prime and in hospital to be castrated under general anaesthetic. No sooner had he woken up from anaesthetic that he was making up for lost time again eating to his heart’s content!
I worked hard at university, mainly completing my studies during the week and then going home to Johannesburg for the week-end when I would to spend time with my family and boyfriend Ash. I would also help my Mom with her play dough business – making play dough for surrounding toy shops. I don’t know how I did it but I also managed to find time for a couple of hobbies like bodybuilding and massage.
Since in my youth I had seen the fabulous results that the osteopath obtained treating my injuries with massage like techniques and since my brother the martial artist and my boyfriend the bodybuilder often succumbed to injury I wanted to learn how to fix them. And so, I would order various books from our university library and practice different techniques on my brother and boyfriend, generally with good results.
Other family members and friends at university were also willing guinea pigs and some of my friends used to come to my room at the university residence where I lived and I would get to work attempting to help heal their injury with massage whether it was a neck, shoulder, foot or leg injury. As I proceeded to “hit the spot” out would come various utterances like “yeah Liz’, that’s the spot, a little deeper, that feels really good, keep going…”. I think my residence neighbours were a bit confused and had trouble reconciling these noises in the face of how I was generally perceived as a quiet and innocent but friendly person who generally kept to herself and got on with her work!
As part of challenging myself while at university and with my determination to stay fit despite what was often a gruelling veterinary course, I decided to partake in a sport that I thought was the scariest thing that I could do given the nature of my personality…. Bodybuilding, where I would have to wear next to nothing and pose to music in front of an audience of people!
An additional challenge was to bodybuild as vegetarian since building muscle usually requires a high protein diet. Months before Ash had found that his desire to eat red meat had suddenly declined and a few months later he found himself having eaten no red meat and feeling better for it. Being a bit of an extremist and mainly because whenever we went to my grandmother for dinner she would cook us a chicken dish that he had disliked, he decided to give up chicken and fish too. I respected his decision and two weeks later when he shared with me that since he had stopped eating meat he felt a new respect for animals, I decided to try a vegetarian diet as well and we didn’t look back.
I took the bull by the horns so to speak and began training and eating appropriately to help me gain muscle and to provide the muscular definition that I would need to succeed in this sport. I was adamant that I would push myself as far as I could naturally and so I began to learn about the art and science of bodybuilding, how different types of exercise affected my body and how different nutrients helped to energise me, build muscle and help me to burn body fat. My career was short-lived though, much to the great relief of my mother and grandmother I didn’t get very far as some of my competition had deeper voices than my brother and boyfriend!
I was pleased that I had at least achieved my goal of pushing my body as far as I could within the restrictions of my vet study and that I had also managed to stand up in front of a crowd of people wearing next to nothing and posing to music, definitely an experience way out of my comfort zone!
During my escapades building my body, my legs grew quite strong and I could leg press nearly three times my bodyweight. I can be a bit of a stirrer in my way and when I was at the gym occasionally there’d be some macho guy (a different “he” each time) showing off, grunting his way through repetitions on the leg press machine and then breathing heavily and posing in between sets drawing attention to himself which “he” savoured. In this situation I had a special strategy for when my turn came to use the machine and I would wait for my moment…
Just as “he” finished and began to remove, what he clearly considered, a substantial load from the machine, I’d go up to him and ask him to please leave the weight on the machine so that I could use the machine next. “He” inevitably looked on in total disbelief as this little young punk female moved in and with relative ease shifted the same weight he was grunting over!
Bodybuilding taught me a lot about using nutritional supplements for their various pharmacological effects, i.e. gaining muscle, losing fat and supporting the immune system. Each day I would take my supplements and I found that they not only gave me a definite edge on the sports field in my younger years but they would also help me focus on my work as a student and I believe help me to cope better with stress.
I remember one of my classmates asking me if taking my supplements was what made me come to class each morning refreshed with a smile on my face. I replied that I believed that they definitely helped but I was sure that my drinking habits had something to do with it too since most of my classmates would regularly indulge in alcohol many nights at university while I have never managed to acquire a taste for alcohol – a definite drinking problem some of my friends would tell me!
It was not uncommon for some of the vet and vet nurse students, known on campus for being a particularly wild bunch, to arrive at the animal hospital in the morning hung-over and dull lining up for their secretive “hit” of intra-venous vitamin B and fluids to help them get through the day!
One of the most exhilarating and joyous days of my life was the day that I graduated as a vet with great pride being a part my class of 2000 who I loved as the most remarkable and fun class that I have ever had been the privilege and pleasure of being a part of!
To read more about my adventures, read Vet Tales available as a book or e-book from https://www.drliza.co.nz/shop/