Sometimes you just can’t prepare for what life is going to throw at you.
On Saturday morning I got a phonecall telling me that a good friend of mine, also a vet, had been involved in an accident on a farm she was working on. The agricultural vehicle she was driving down a track had somehow tipped down a bank into a ditch, and she had been trapped underneath. She was declared dead at the scene.
I’m still coming to terms with it at the moment – it hasn’t sunk in properly yet and I at times I just don’t know what to think or feel. I had only known her for a few months, but we had become good friends – she was such a lively, innovative and confident woman and such a huge inspiration to a vet-in-the-making such as myself. She had also gone into Vet Med as a graduate student, which is how we got chatting when I did work experience at the practice she was working at last year. Since then we’ve met up every week or two and discussed vetting, life, the universe and everything, drank wine (a lot of wine), and done a load of other fun things. I had even started doing bits and bobs for her successful business she had recently set up – I was supposed to be working for her this week.
I suppose as well as a friend, I looked upon her as a role model, someone who’s shoes I would like to be in in a few years time. We had both been graduate Vet Med students, both gone through similarly tough family times during university and both had a similar outlook on life. Similarly, she said that she could see a lot of herself in me, and the way she talked about Vet Med is one of the few times I’ve felt that anyone else has actually understood the madness of going back to university for five years to get into this career! I will carry many, many of her words of advice through vet school and out into practice. I’m still in exam-season at the moment, so trying to pick myself up and get on with it has been difficult, but I know what she’d say – I can almost hear her in my head going, ‘pull yourself together woman and get on with it!!’.
Rest In Peace Louise.
