Time flows strangely in a veterinary clinic.
“You never realize how long fifteen seconds is,” my coworker says, “until you’re trying to get a heart rate on a fractious cat.”
We all laugh. It’s true, isn’t it? There’s nothing longer than fifteen seconds when you’re doing your best to keep your stethoscope on the chest of a writhing tornado of angry claws and teeth, when even five and ten seconds seem like an age and the numbers you’re counting blur together as they rapidly approach and then blow past the two hundred beats-per-minute mark. Time just seems to flow differently when your stethoscope picks up on the deep rumble of a growl and you suddenly realize just how close your face is to the dog’s teeth. But then, that’s not such a strange thing. Time always flows strangely in a veterinary hospital.
There’s the endless minutes when you’re waiting for a machine to finish calibrating or self-cleaning or just plain old turning itself on, always at the worst possible moment when you need those blood results STAT but time seems to slow to a crawl as the machine whirs and ticks and refuses to let you touch it. There’s how the rapid change of technology has spoiled us horribly when it comes to x-rays: back in the day we used to manually develop the film over fifteen or twenty minutes for each radiograph and now there’s direct digital with its two-second lag time between taking the xray and seeing it flash up on the screen. In between were the six-minute automatic processors and the two-minute cassette digital and it’s bizarre just how long those two minutes can seem when you’re used to the two seconds.
Tw0 hours can go by in a flash when your caseload is seventeen patients and you’re waiting for the next tech to come on shift. Ten hours can go by even faster when it’s a long weekend and no one else is open so everyone floods into your hospital, jumping from emergency to emergency, inducing vomiting on one patient then starting an IV on another snapping some radiographs on a third then back into the lobby for another triage only to run to the back with the seizing dog, push Diazepam and pass off to another tech just in time for the hit-by-car to get gurneyed in and it never ends, not even when your shift does.
Two minutes is forever during a code, feeling your arms creak as you do compressions and wait for someone to yell time to switch. Trying to keep the rhythm and the depth consistent, one and two and three and four and one and two and “Two minutes!” switching off and no time to breathe before you’re pushing epi and atropine and studying the ECG tracing and hoping, hoping, hoping…
Ten minutes drags like forty when you’re on hold with the lab, picking away at notes that you didn’t have time to finish yesterday but still keeping half an ear on the phone until you realize you’re starting to whistle the hold music under your breath. Ten minutes goes by like thirty seconds when you’re prepping for surgery and have an impatient vet tapping their foot behind you, every stroke of the clippers seeming to jump the clock forward another few minutes. Ten minutes is how long it takes an animal to go from awake to asleep and sometimes even back to awake again if it’s a three-minute scope and the reversal kicks in quick.
A few seconds is all it takes for an animal to go from alive to dead, whether they’re the sweetly silent seconds of a euthanasia as the pink liquid in the syringe slips slowly into the vein or the frantic, desperate seconds of a looming code, scrambling to grab endotracheal tubes and epinephrine and knowing that all too soon you’re going to have to start those compressions.
And four and a half years goes by in what seems like the blink of an eye, like just yesterday you were standing on the stage at graduation with your heart in your throat only half-able to believe it was happening, like just yesterday you were writing exams and studying your textbooks every night, like just yesterday you weren’t a technician, you were’t anything– but you are. You’re a tech and you’ve been a tech for four and a half years, and the time ahead of you that you’ll spend still being a technician spills out in front of you like an endless road, smooth and sweet, flowing in that strange way that time does in a veterinary clinic.