I'm back! Sort of. With two young daughters, a new house and an ever growing practice I am finding i have less and less time for life's other pleasures. I will be posting more regularly than I have lately but more sporadically than I used to. I will not be sticking to a schedule as much either. The best way to catch blogs as I post them and to keep up with me in general is to follow me on facebook.
I am consistently amazed by the seemingly unnoticed complexities of our everyday encounters. The field of veterinary medicine, especially in community practice, is a hectic blend of encounters. We see you in appointments, have you drop off your pet for surgery, call you back with blood work results and sometimes even come to your home. Veterinary medicine, again-especially community practice, is a very high emotion world as well. Early on this wasn't as strong for me as it is now; the pets I was treating for serious diseases or even euthanizing were all still new to me and hadn't had a chance to imprint themselves on my psyche. It was a lot easier to maintain my emotional distance when I didn't know about the pet's trips to camp every summer or that the owner's son had just moved out west a few days before a bad diagnosis. As foreign as it was to me then, it is unavoidable now.
I am constantly trying to read the emotional tea leaves people wear on their faces and in their eyes and I shift conversations and lines of questioning to match what I am reading. That should have said what I think I am reading. I get it wrong sometimes but I am getting better. Really, the last vestige of emotional wilderness for me is the modern device known as the telephone. I just can't seem to read people well over the phone and it leads to amusing exchanges.
I received a phone call several months ago from a client who had let her dogs out on the back porch. The dog had been sprayed, directly in the face, by a skunk. This always happens at night and I have to encourage those vets who might be reading this to at least take client phone calls at night so that you don't miss out on these exchanges. To me a skunk spraying is not a medical emergency, to me it is a containment emergency. If one of my dogs were sprayed by a skunk I would be frantic to contain them before they touched anything I owned. That smell never leaves. But if you have never witnessed a dog having been sprayed by a skunk, it is most easily related to a recently pepper sprayed hippie. The results can be dramatic.
Needless to say that telling a client that her dog being sprayed by a skunk, even in the face, does not constitute a medical emergency would be inappropriate but I am constantly sidelined by the tangents telephone conversations take. Her concern wasn't that the dog was sprayed by a skunk or that it was hyper salivating. Her concern was that there were clearly some chemical substance that her dog had also been able to get into. On her porch. In the middle of the night. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of being directly present during a skunk spray, it smells like a tire fire in the middle of a chemical spill. They smell awful and not just rotten, organic garbage awful. It smells industrial. I have had no less than one dozen people tell me that their dog has been sprayed by a skunk and has also gotten into some horribly caustic chemical. The opinions on origin have ranged from industrial waste from the limestone slurry plant to old kerosene. I have had several of the same people call me the next morning to inform me that I do, in fact, know a little something about the subject and it was just a skunk.
Herein lies the crux of our tale tonight. This person clearly loves her dog a lot and is horribly concerned that it may have been exposed to something awful. Also the dog is in discomfort and if indeed it had been exposed to something caustic it is truly suffering at the moment. This is an emotional but (from my end of the phone) slightly humorous moment. I am tasked with, over the phone no less, dissecting her knowledge that her dog was sprayed by a skunk away from her fear that her dog is going to die from poison it most certainly did not encounter on her porch. Seems easy enough. But it has to be accomplished while still acknowledging her concern and not marginalizing her role in this. Of course this story has a happy ending and the dog does fine. But the complexity of the conversation that ensued to get the dog owner back from that ledge where she would have needlessly put her recently skunked dog in the car and rushed it to the hospital only to have me say, "Yep it's a skunk" pales in comparison to some of the more serious conversations we have while juggling phone calls, appointments and surgeries.
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