I really enjoy taking students around in my little yellow car to visit the various clinics I serve in my ambulatory ophthalmology referral service. It gives the students the opportunity to see a range of veterinary practices and a variety of ophthalmic cases that wouldn’t necessarily come to the Queen’s Veterinary School Hospital. And the car journeys between vet surgeries give us the chance to discuss the diagnosis and treatment of the case we’ve just seen, be it a Spaniel with glaucoma, a Pug with a corneal ulcer or a Labrador with retinal degeneration.
However, even better than that are the discussions we have about “life, the universe and everything” to take the title of Douglas Adams’s third book of his glorious The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series (if you haven’t delved into them, consider that your homework tonight!). But I digress – let’s get back to conversations with our wonderful students as we zip around East Anglia from eye to eye.
A more philosophical take on the question might be whether the reason for journeying is the destination or the path along the way
A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with one student in the car about their upcoming final exams and how on earth we could test six years of study in a week or so. The trouble is, if your focus is just on those little tests, how do you keep going through months of lectures and clinical rotations?
A more philosophical take on the question might be whether the reason for journeying is the destination or the path along the way. I had been suggesting that the way to learn the plethora of facts required of those final exams was to have clinical cases, rather like the hooks in the primary school cloakroom where everyone hung their satchels and coats. If you remembered the details of a particular disease by focusing on a case you had seen, it was so much easier to recall them.
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I remember the first day of our final year back in 1987. Dick White, then lecturer in surgery at the Cambridge vet school, had just come back from a sabbatical year in the veterinary college in Tennessee with lots of ideas of how to change our course. We were going to have a lecture-free final year – the only problem being that we still had two lectures a day to finish the course. Never mind – a lecture from 8am to 9am and one from 5pm until 6pm left the rest of the day lecture-free for clinical cases.
Before that 8am lecture, we’d have to SOAP our cases, of course. Soap?! Did we have to bathe the dogs and cats every morning?!
But, before that 8am lecture, we’d have to SOAP our cases, of course. Soap?! Did we have to bathe the dogs and cats every morning?! We were yet to be introduced to the plethora of acronyms Dick had brought back from the States: SOAP – subjective, objective, assessment and plan – just being the first.
My first rotation was soft tissue surgery, with my first case being a diminutive German Shepherd puppy with normal buccal mucous membranes but a cyanotic vulva, all explained by the machinery murmur audible on auscultation. A classic case of patent ductus arteriosus with the difference in mucosal colour explicable by the entrance of the ductus into the aorta caudal to the position of the carotids, so that oxygenated blood passed cranially while deoxygenated blood flowed caudally. I can just picture the dog and her owner now – “David will call you morning and evening to tell you how Jimbo is doing,” said Dr White. “If he doesn’t, his ass will be grass!” The owner looked a bit confused, but shrugged her shoulders and left the dog with us and left me to scurry off to the library to find out all there was to know about PDAs.
So, all I know about the condition links with that case, and the same could be said from husk in calves to colic in horses, and the huge number of other cases seen during my clinical years. All well and good, you might say… But, if you spend your student life focusing on the tests at the end, you can get yourself in a real state. The key thing, said this student in the car, who had obviously spent some time thinking these things through, was to make sure you enjoyed the journey rather than just focusing on the destination. How true!
He wasn’t the first person to think that, of course. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American essayist, said the same: “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” And Confucius said, “Roads were made for journeys, not destinations.” But is that right?
If all we are focused on is what lies in the future, our objective, we risk missing so much enjoyment along the way
Are you goal-orientated, where the destination is everything – reaching the finish line, completing the project? From that view, roads are tools to get us somewhere. Or are you more process-orientated, when the journey is where the meaning lies – each step shapes us, teaches us and gives life depth. The road itself becomes the point. What do you think? To my mind, it has to be a bit of both, doesn’t it? If all we are focused on is what lies in the future, our objective, we risk missing so much enjoyment along the way. But without a destination, we risk meandering aimlessly along. It has to be like walking along a path with your eyes on the horizon, we might say – but still noticing the trees, the weather, the people beside you. Both matter: one gives you purpose, the other gives you meaning. And if you thought that last sentence was from deep in my soul, I have to admit that actually it was straight from ChatGPT with whom I’ve been exchanging thoughts as I write this – but that’s the subject for another perambulation!
