[My year came to an end with a massive cold snap (-37C) and a callout delayed by a battery drained by the frozen weather. Luckily a friend came to my rescue, and I made a quick resolution to always make sure my car would start before taking call!.]
2018 is upon us, and resolutions are on everyone’s lips. While I’m not a real fan of New Year’s resolutions I have been recently mulling over some changes I’d like to make in my life. In this profession it’s easy to get lost in the job, but we do ourselves no favours when we stop separating work and play.
Ah, the start of a new year. In a veterinary clinic there’s a distinct air of resentment regarding the changing of the dates; the first couple of days are filled with cursing as the wrong year gets entered into a drug log or vaccine reminders are messed up. Tattoo codes move down a letter in the alphabet and tattoos are briefly messier; our fingers itch to spell out the same three letters they have for the past twelve months. Expiry dates get stared at a little harder; “Wait – it expires this March, right?” Technicians start to turn our minds towards renewing our provincial memberships and checking our mandatory CE hours; I’m sure veterinarians do the same. In our clinic January and February are dental months; we check supplies and prepare for a whirlwind eight weeks of teeth. I turn my mind to restocking our survival kit of juice, protein bars, and quick snacks. Dentals are notorious for being long and frustrating and there’s nothing like hangry vets. We’ve all learned the warning signs and how to press a juice box or granola bar into our vet’s shaking fingers before they get too bad.
I’m not a personal fan of New Year’s resolutions. If I’m going to change my ways I want to do it on my own terms and my own timeline, not because of some semi-arbitrary calendar flip. With that said there is a particular resolution I’ve been mulling over for some time now and what better time than to place it out in the open and hold myself accountable? Especially since it’s one that I think may resonate not just with other veterinary professionals, but with anyone who’s passionate about their work.
So this year’s resolution: To take time for myself to be a person, not always a veterinary technician.
I like to think that I can – if it wasn’t already blatantly obvious – love my profession. Animals have always been a huge part of my life and this job has let me turn that into a career. It has given me the opportunity to give back to my community, to relieve suffering and improve animal welfare in places that need it most, and even to contribute to improving human and wildlife welfare as well. My job makes me so happy in so many ways that sometimes I get lost in it. I was joking around with a coworker the other day about hobbies; when she asked me what I did outside of work I said “I work.” We both laughed at the time but later, I found myself realizing that there was a ring of uncomfortable truth there. I work long hours and frequently volunteer for extra call shifts as a way of improving my skills and increasing my knowledge; when I’m not working I’m usually catching up on veterinary journals, working on continuing education courses, or trawling through the ten-plus Facebook groups for veterinary technicians I frequent, devouring case studies and debates on anesthesia protocols. I feel so lucky to have a job that means this much to me and that makes me this happy, but I’ve recently begun to recognize that at the same time — it’s not good to have all my eggs in one basket. When work is stressful, life is stressful because I don’t really have an outlet that’s not just another aspect of work.
When I sat down to write this, I found myself struggling to develop a list of things I liked or liked to do which didn’t involve my job in some way. I had to step away from the laptop for a moment and look at my room; my overstuffed bookshelf, a photograph of a horse, a partially edited manuscript — to remind myself of those things which make me myself. And slowly, I remembered what I am.
I am a writer, a rider, a reader. I like to hike, to watch plays, to listen to music. I like art, although most of it I’m hilariously terrible at. I like history and literature and exploring the role of women in culture throughout history. I like Netflix. I like to cook. I like to follow politics. I like to try and make my voice heard, to stand up against bigotry and prejudice. I love to travel. I like languages and translated poetry. I like spending time with friends. And all of these things — what I like, who I am, what I do outside of work — do not make me any less of a veterinary technician. Allowing myself a life outside of my career does not make me a failure.
I think it’s easy to slip into this way of thinking in veterinary medicine. It’s a busy, messy, thankless job. Our patients routinely attempt to attack us, spray urine or feces in our direction, and generally resent every single thing we do to try and help them. There is constant stress about money, whether from the outside and clients who disagree with our fees or can’t understand why we’re not able to do things for free or from the inside and our own nagging doubts and desperation to help even when it’s not financially viable. We’re stuck trying to treat patients who don’t speak our language or anything even close, guessing at pain and symptoms and hoping our diagnostics will tell us what our patients cannot. It’s a profession that’s making rapid progress in technology and knowledge but that means that things change just as rapidly; I was taught things in school which are already being recognized as incorrect or not as accurate as once believed. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, to feel like the job is all there is, to work long hours and then go home and study or try to catch up on what you didn’t do that day. But there is more to you than the job. There is more to you than your skills. And there is more to life than a single path.
This year, I hope to be able to teach myself to remember this. To take the steps I need to disentangle my self-worth from that of my profession, to become comfortable in my own skin once more when doing something purely for myself. It will not make me less of a tech or less of a person, the same way it will not make any of us any the lesser for giving ourselves a break. Rather it will make me greater, will make us greater, greater for the happiness and the peace and the well-roundedness that comes with a many-faceted life.
Allow yourself to be human. I’ll try to do the same.
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