[One of our clients on Christmas Eve brought one of the best Christmas presents I’ve ever gotten: homemade bread, still warm! My vet and I snapped a quick selfie to commemorate the occasion.]
Christmas on call. Always an adventure, and this year no more or less than any before.
[A classic veterinary Christmas shot — ‘Santa’ was my veterinarian coworker-slash-roommate and the patient resisting the snuggles is ‘Pollywobbles’, a kitten I fostered while she recovered from a hypoxic brain injury. Turns out that getting a partially deaf and blind kitten to look at the camera is really hard.]
Christmas is fast approaching and with it comes the season of emergencies. After volunteering to take call for the week of Christmas and New Years this year, I found myself contemplating what the holiday season means in vet medicine and what I want clients to know — both to protect themselves and their pets, and to help them help us.
[The end of the trip and the entirety of our equipment packed away, leaving nothing more than an empty firehouse with a few disused sets of equipment on the wall where hours ago had been 50+ dogs, three surgery tables, two prep tables, a recovery area, a pharmacy, a makeshift reception table, and a crowd of people.]
In 2015, I went on a trip with the Canadian Animal Assistance Team to two small communities in northern British Columbia (Fort St. James and Hazelton). With 11 team members during the first round and 12 during the second, we sterilized and vaccinated two hundred and eighty two animals, along with performing an additional one hundred and forty one vaccination/wellness exams. The time will always stay in my mind as an example not only of the amazing camaraderie in the volunteering veterinary community, but also the incredible generosity of the communities which hosted, housed, and fed us along with bringing us their animals. To see so many people come together from so many different walks of life and unite in the common goal of improving animal welfare was inspiring. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” Our last day in Hazelton made that clear for me.
[I originally posted this image (a dog’s ear covered in ticks) on Facebook captioned “I guess he was a little…ticked off!” The dog was treated for tick infestation and at time of discharge was parasite-free!]
Black humor and other coping mechanisms are a fact of life in veterinary medicine. Sometimes I forget that not everyone sees things the same way we do. The above picture, much to my surprise, received quite a bit of flack for the pun in the caption. People were upset not because the pun was terrible (I will freely admit that!) but because they saw it as making light of an animal’s suffering. The sad fact is that veterinary medicine is full of suffering; whether you’re in general practice or specialty, wildlife or shelter medicine, spay/neuter or disaster relief, and we all find our own ways of dealing with it. I think I had forgotten that. For me, this was an interesting picture showcasing a heavy parasite infestation in a village dog. The dog was with us to be sterilized and treated. I knew that we would be alleviating his discomfort as well as we could. I also knew that in the weeks before and after I had seen and would see so much worse, from gangrenous legs to massive blunt trauma, emaciation and deliberately inflicted injury. And I knew that my sorrow, my discomfort, my anger, my personal emotions — none of that would help my patients.