[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.
[My beautiful senior Rupert, whose massive size didn’t stop him from trying to cram himself into the smallest beds possible. Padding (and a sweater for old, cold bones) helped a little.]
As the standard of pet care and the knowledge of veterinary medicine both grow with leaps and bounds, we’re seeing pets begin to live longer and longer lives. Our sweet seniors are no different than people as they age; the organic machinery of bodies begins to wear out and break down no matter how hard we work at supporting and repairing what we can. The golden years of our pets can be an uncertain time and one full of hard decisions, but it can also be some of the best times of our lives together — and a time when you can give back to your best friend all that they’ve given to you. As Cicero wrote, “Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.”
[The one and only group photograph of Team Rainbow Awesome in its entirety.]
Yes, that’s right — back to Botswana. Will I ever really leave? One of my veterinarians there has returned already, this time with the wife in tow, and reading about their adventures has left me almost painfully nostalgic for my time there. I started the trip with two vets and ended the trip with two different ones, but those couple of days in between when I had all four were something in-between exhausting and magical. I still miss this team and the wild, crazy, incredible surgery days we had together. I was so lucky to work with such talented vets. Despite all my attempts at group photos, we only managed to take a single one mere minutes before the first of us abandoned the group in order to go run a half-marathon (who does that, right?) but the day leading up to the photo will always stick with me.
Appropriate pain control after this little kitten’s chest surgery meant a quick start on physical therapy and a fast return to health!
There’s a running joke in veterinary medicine that our job is harder than human medicine for two reasons, one: that we’re required to treat more than one species and two: that our patients can’t talk to us. While I have no interest in restarting the ‘who has it worse’ argument (especially with close family members who work in human medicine!) I do want to address one of the most difficult parts of veterinary medicine: the where does it hurt conundrum. How do you identify and treat pain in an animal which can’t tell you how much pain it’s in or even why?
Recall: they did not offer.
Recall: they did as they were asked
hoofbeats in the dust, dragging heavy burdens
the noiseless tread of swift paws, nosing among brush
for mines, the beat of wings below the clouds
passing messages where no one else could,
returning bloody and battered
or not at all–Recall: they did as they were told
ran beneath the cannonfire, into the guns
to bring back the wounded or stand at their side
until help could be found, carried their riders without question,
bore loads too great for any others through mud, rain, snow,
until they too, had fallen–Recall: they gave all they had
in body and soul, saved countless thousands
who in turn would save thousands more, recall
the love in a dog’s eyes and a gentle tongue when all else seemed lost,
the rusty purr, the softness of feathers,
the sweet scent of a horse’s breath–Recall: they did not offer
but were asked, and told, and gave all in return
for us, a sacrifice that we might know peace,
recall: the animals of war, who gave and gave again,
who never questioned why.
This isn’t an overly popular opinion, but I really enjoy being on call. Sure it can get busy, and there’s nothing like working until 6:00am only for your day shift to start at 7:30, but the people I get to meet and the animals I get to help really make it special. You never quite know what’s going to call in and I’ve had everything from ear infections and vaccines (yep, really) to dog C-sections, hit-by-cars, and one memorable bear attack. Large animal call is particularly interesting for me as I don’t do a ton of large animal medicine on a daily basis, and calving season is an (exhausting) highlight of the year.
“Call Seasons” explores the difference between call shifts in summer and winter, and the incredible beauty I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by, both inside and out of vet med.
Kenny, our team’s MacGyver, uses rebar, barbed wire, and twine to set up a saline drip.
Back to Botswana. Both at the clinic and on the road we were working in less-than-ideal conditions, performing less-than-ideal surgeries. Weighing the risks against the benefits, particularly in communities where we knew we’d only be temporarily, with no option for aftercare or allowing a week or so to perk up prior to sterilization. I monitored more than a few hair-raising spays and neuters (and will never stop being in awe of the vets who not only performed those surgeries, but did so with a smile), but one that always sticks with me took place our last day of my first outreach, in Gumare. We had intended on only doing a quick morning there before hitting the road, but as anyone who’s ever worked in vet med knows (and with apologies to Robbie Burns), the best laid schemes o’ techs an’ vets gang aft agley. We met her in the late morning, one of those difficult cases of sterilization trips where one has to weigh lives in the balance and make a decision for the benefit of all. These are not easy decisions and these are not easy cases. But this is what we do.