How to Bring Down the Mood - a vet student's experience of grief
At my ripe old age of 20, I don’t believe I have anything to really preach about. I still have a lot to learn and a long way to go in terms of becoming a functioning adult with a good credit score and a solid collection of Tupperware. However, experience is experience and wisdom can come at any age. Now, I’m not claiming to have any wisdom whatsoever, but what I can provide is experience. So now I’m going to really bring down the mood and make everyone uncomfortable by talking about death and how overwhelming a place vet school can be when you’re trying to grieve. Sorry in advance.
I lost my dad to cancer when I was a kid so I was introduced to the concept of death pretty early. Grieving as you grow up is a weirdly unpredictable experience and I don’t believe you ever reach the end of grief. There hasn’t been a day so far that I haven’t thought about my dad. Whether that’s with heart ache or a smile (or both) varies from day to day but I don’t think I’ll ever reach a time when I won’t hurt. There are happy times too though and death can give you a lot of perspective, gratitude and some level of understanding of how hard people’s grief experiences are to understand. I’m grateful for those things but anyone who has lost anyone knows they don’t outweigh the cost. I wish I’d had more time to get to know him but I do know he loved animals and, to me, that’s a pretty good place to start in working out what kind of a person someone is.
As it turns out, I also really love animals. I love them enough to be sitting here about to go into my third year of vet school. I’m fairly impressed I’ve made it this far all things considered. Now, my dad passing only makes up a small part of the ‘all things considered’ I’m referring to because half way through second year my granda passed away due to cancer. (Trust me, I was shocked too when I found out Father’s Day could get even worse than it already had been.) My granda was brilliant and he was an animal person too so, again, that tells you a lot. It’s not even been a year since he passed yet so I won’t get too caught up in trying to break down exactly how that all went but I’ll just say it really sucked. And vet school did not help. Funnily enough my years of holding the ‘dead dad’ card and hours of counselling didn’t do me many favours either. Turns out you can’t train for grief.
To lose someone so influential to my life while 200 miles away from home and still trying to do university as normal wasn’t great. Vet school is a stressful, demanding and fast paced environment at the best of times. When deadlines loomed and I started to see ‘cancer’ and ‘death’ and ‘sickness’ on every page of every book I opened, in every lecture and in every single one of my attempts to learn, I found it really hard to heal. Don’t even get me started on ‘end of life’ and ‘euthanasia’ discussions, and I have a really healthy relationship with euthanasia as a concept so I thought it’d be fine. But it seems to always comes back to the cancer talk and I just wasn’t ready.
Weeks and months passed and an unspoken expectation started to creep in that I’d be totally back to normal and should be keeping up with lectures while somehow catching up on weeks that I’d missed all in time for exams. There was the pressure to still feel a little sad, the pressure to feel okay, the pressure to hold it all together but still exhibit some level of distress - but only enough that it would still be socially acceptable to see friends and classmates and still learn and do well and look after myself and accept and move on and remember and and and… It quickly proved to be too much and it was unsustainable.
Upcoming exams in May finally twisted my arm around about March and I threw myself in to some sort of unhealthy, depressed, cramming over drive. I passed my exams and I did pretty well on some aspects and less well on others. Thinking back to it still makes me chest tight and my stomach curl as if I’m on the sketchiest tightrope you’ve ever seen… over a canyon… and the canyon is on fire. The experience is firmly on my list of things I never want to do again but it’s over now so I’ll take my newly renewed imposter syndrome and roll with it.
Summer has been better. I’ve started talking about it more and giving myself space and time to rest. I’ve found a community of support within my friends and family and even myself. I’ve loved Clinical EMS so far and I’m excited about the thought of being a vet again. I found little moments between being in sunny Glasgow and going home to the quiet of the Moray Coast to grieve and heal and I’m ready to move forward (but not on). The whole thing does make me wonder though, how many other people are going through something similar in vet school? There are bound to be people sitting all around me drowning in the expectation of being a vet student while trying to figure out life again after losing someone. People who didn’t conform to the couple weeks out of university and then back to business as usual. Maybe there are even people sitting there after reading this that feel like they’ve been on that tightrope. Or maybe I’ve just successfully brought down the mood and made everyone uncomfortable – who knows?
Whether you are in the same position, a different position or no position at all in terms of grief, I hope you are looking after yourself and I want to encourage you to reach out and start the conversation. More talking and more awareness can only do good. There is no set journey or way to process losing someone and everyone experiences it differently - but doing it in silence or alone is never going to work in your favour, so speak up. If you make a couple people uncomfortable then they are probably one of the ones that needs to hear what you have to say. Death is often a difficult topic, but aren’t all the things worth talking about a little harder to broach?
Going forward, I hope to create some sort of solidified resource or community in the future which people can turn to when faced with the loss of someone. I want to turn my experience into something good and start up these trickier conversations. But right this second, I’m still healing and I’m still resting and that’s okay. I might never have a fun filled Father’s Day again, but life is good and I am happy. Let’s start talking about it.
Good resources – tried and tested!
Niamh Young - Glasgow Senior Rep