Tales of a Veterinary Assistant (for National Veterinary Technician Appreciation Week!)

And it's not just for veterinary assistants, veterinary technicians get it all the time too. Is your human nurse at the hospital in training to be a doctor? Probably not, they're just nurses, the backbone of the medical community. Totally important in their own right.

Marshall tax! Thanks for reading everyone, and remember if you want to give your neighborhood veterinary clinic some love for National Veterinary Technician Appreciation Week, make a donation to your local shelter to help out those in need.

Unless your breeder has a licence to practice medicine, they are basically just pet pimps who sell off of their puppies and kittens as product. No offense, there are some great breeders out there in the world, but there are also a lot of horrible ones. More common then not we see breeders give owners horrible advice that they end up following such as: don't vaccinate your pet for anything other than rabies or they'll die, feed only grain free or raw diets or they'll die, don't spay or neuter your pet or they'll die, MY PERSONAL FAVORITE ONE THOUGH is 'this is a low maintenance breed, they have no predisposed illnesses and don't require any preventative care.' Spoiler alert, that's not a thing.

We're gross. We are attracted to gross things. Holes in faces, maggots popping out, ear mites on slides, parasite eggs in fecal floats, aspirating masses, we are just a weird gross bunch. Even if I'm not at work to see something weird or gross, I'll see it on snapchat from a co-worker.

You know your kitten is tiny when we gotta bust out the rodent scale for grams (or as I like to call it, the drug scale). When the mastiff comes in for dental cleanings or needs to be observed, we don't have kennels big enough for him in the observation room, so he just hangs out with us in the office.

If I can give anyone advice regarding putting their pets down, it's this: You aren't a terrible person for making a call for them. If your pet is sick and suffering and there isn't any treatment that is going to make it better, you're doing the right thing by them, even though it hurts you it releases them from pain. I've been doing this for almost three years, and euthanasias are always the worst part. Next to that is the people who have pets with chronic conditions and they just don't do anything about it. "Sir, your dog is going to be in pain and could possibly loose his eye if you don't give him this medication." is easily followed with, " Look, I work full time and I don't have time to medicate my dog/this costs to much to maintain/he got better last time without meds." I can't stand it. I worked 60 hours a week between two jobs and went to school but my dog still went for two twenty minute walks a day, I could have easily medicated her in that time if I needed too.

PUUUPPPIIIIESSSSSS. Kittens are cute too, but I'm all about the puppies. Plus, I'm constantly learning cool new things from random facts about animals to anatomy from taking xrays, to physiology when discussing how something works in the body. I get to see some weird ass shit, my phone has about 100 pictures over the past year of adorable animals I get to see and cool medical stuff. Another favorite part of my job is that when clients actually take the steps towards treating or maintaining a chronic condition, and IT WORKS!!! Dogs that previously were covered in skin lesions and had no fur, come back with a full thick coat! Cats that were dramatically underweight and looked half dead from thyroid issues, come back nice and plump and are chasing after mice again!

This sucked, so much. My clinic is about 30 minutes outside of Chicago, so a lot of people assume they don't need to use flea and tick or heartworm protection because it's not a grassy area outside. I don't really get that connection, because insects can live pretty much anywhere where they have a food source including in your house. Flea and tick protection can be expensive, but so can sending out a tick borne disease panel ($200ish) to test for other tick borne illnesses (we've had one dog with one tick come back with two tick borne diseases), about 1-2 months worth of doxycycine (depending on weight, probably $80 for a big dog), and then a QC6 test for lyme antibodies (probably about $100ish) So to save $100 a year on good flea and tick products, this guy is out almost $300 on testing and treatment and potentially exposed himself to lyme disease in the process if that dog brought more ticks into his house. Oh and he still refused to buy flea and tick protection from us.

I felt soooo bad for this dog. He's a Dogo Argentino, barely a year old at the time, and had chronic skin and stomach sensitivity that the owners just didn't want to care for. We have a large, roughy 6ftx5ft walk in kennels in the back that I put a nice fuzzy blanket and a bowl of water in for him. Maybe 10 minutes after putting him in, I smell it. I go to the back and he's standing there completely surrounded by bloody liquid diarrhea. I go to open the gate to get him out and he manages to slip in his own shit and fall in it. Everyone can hear me panicing outside the kennels. He gets up and SHAKES IT EVERYWHERE. It's on the walls, it's on the floor, it's on him, now it's on me. He's too big to shove into our dental sink to bathe so I have to hook him up to the wall and hose him down with our cleaning hose. Good side is I used the $20 medicated shampoo the owners wouldn't buy for him to help with his skin stuff. Bad side is I spent the next hour of my shift cleaning his run, himself, and me.

We have profiles for all of our patients that we can mark if they're aggressive. Not only is it marked that the dog is aggressive and will bite, it's marked that the owner does not muzzle the dog. Greeeeat. So I walk in with a muzzle and the owner immediately is upset, she says that we never have to muzzle him as long as she holds because he's more scared of us then anything else. I'm relatively new at the time so I figure you know what let's give this a shot. I tell her to hold onto her dog (he was a mix, probably about 50lbs) while I listen to his heart and her idea of holding onto the dog is just gently holding his face and telling him how much she loves him. I barely even touch him with the stethoscope and he goes to snap at me. Growling, teeth out, everything. The owner holds onto his head a little more firmly and I kneel down again (I'm new and stupid, again) and the dog goes INSANE. He starts snarling, barking, thrashing, the owner is just holding him telling him he's going be okay and I tell her to let go of him, but before I can finish yelling the dog turns around and bites the owner in the arm. She lets go and the dog runs into a corner. She chases after him telling him she's sorry and she doesn't blame him, I grab the muzzle and hand it to the owner to put on the dog, and she again refuses and says that I scared him and that's why he reacted. I leave the room to consult with the doctor and we go back into the room, the doctor tells the lady either muzzle her dog or come back again when her dog calms down, and THEN THE BITCH MUZZLES HER DOG.
tl;dr I don't care HOW sweet your dog is at home with you, if it says in my screen your dog even lifted a goddamn lip at someone it's getting muzzled. If your dog gives me the side eye and a little growl while getting a temperature, it's getting a muzzle. I'm not sacrificing my safety, your safety, or the safety of my doctor because you feel bad about muzzling.

His name is Oso, and he's a medical marvel. He got hit by a car last year, back legs completely paralyzed, and he came back a month later perfectly fine. No explanations. We suspect magic. He comes in for limping, we take xrays, and we find three bottle caps passing through his intestines. The next day he manages to pop them out like it was no big deal. We do not advice this for future bottle cap injesters as they will need surgery to remove the bottle cap from said intestines. Unless your Oso and your made of magic.

These are the things that make us say, "We hate humans, but we love animals."
I get it. Times are hard. That's why we give you a break with office visit waivers, but what is the point in coming in to a doctors office just because you had a coupon to, if you aren't going to listen to us. We warned him that his puppy was overdue on vaccine boosters, we warned him the dangers on socializing an unvaccianated puppy, but he didn't listen. He went right from our office to walking his dog around a park, and came back a week later because his puppy had been vomiting, had diarrhea, and was lethargic for two days. First the owner contested the office visit charge because you can't use a coupon twice, and then he contested the $25 charge for a parvo snap test to confirm what we all suspected was parvo. Dude was pissing off my doctor so much she said fuck it and just did the test anyway as a freebie, came back parvo positive. He refused all treatment and took his puppy home, and we never heard from him again. I get what it's like to not have money, I'm swimming in debt myself, but maybe you shouldn't have gotten a puppy if you couldn't afford basic preventative care for it.

It was a Sunday with a doctor that was covering at our hospital. The doctor was formally an ER vet, but now teaches anatomy to high school students and fills in as a vet when we need her. The owner brings her dog in for vomiting, diarrhea, and lethargy. We do x-rays and find a lot of inflammation in the intestines, the doctor is concerned the pet has a foreign body. Now, our hospital is not an emergency clinic, in the 15 odd years that the place has been open we've only ever done one exploratory surgery and that was a decade ago. Some how, this doctor pulls strings with our practice manager to let us close down the hospital and move all of our remaining appointments (that were not sick, they just were coming in for vaccines) to the next day so she can do a last minute exploratory surgery on this dog. There were only two nurses, me and my shift lead there, and I'm not surgery trained so she had to go into surgery. BUUUT I got to record most of the surgery for the doctor so she can show her students. I'm currently doing a biology course in school right now to get my CVT and I learned more in an hour recording her pulling out intestines and organs and explaining how they function then I've learned in a month reading my textbook. Even better is we didn't find any foreign bodies, and she identified he had an intussusception (basically the intestines bunch up on themselves having inconsistent narrowing of the passage ways for material to pass through and get backed up sending) and was able to fix it all, for about $500 less then an ER was going to charge the owner.

Just because the steak is organic does not mean it won't give your dog pancreatitis.

Also, we were starting the baby shower portion of the meeting for one of my co-workers. My practice manager ran outside to her car to grab a gift, and saw the Pomeranian collapse in the parking lot with the owners. We're a corporately owned hospital, which has it's perks and it's negatives. One of the negatives is the constant moderation from corporate goons to make sure we're keeping our numbers up and doing things by the book, so we have to have quarterly meetings with our director of medicine (a vet that doesn't really practice much anymore and just tells other vets how to do their jobs) and our director of sales (who had previously managed a district of star bucks). It was like a scene from Chicago Med or something, our PM kicks the door in and calls for help, all three vets are ON IT, the rush into the surgery suite, I've never seen an intubation that fast, manual breaths are being given while O2 is being set up. They're assessing the situation, getting the ECG and blood pressure hooked up, calling for drugs, meanwhile I'm just sitting there (they had enough people in the suite, adding more just causes confusion) staring down the corporate goons who are just casually trying to chat up the other VAs and CVTs while wondering what the fuck was going on. The doctors managed to resuscitate the dog and transfer them out to a stable ER facility.

Again, fucking breeders. The most useful bit of information that a small dog breeder can give to a new owner is to watch for signs of hypoglycemia and to make sure their yorkie is getting the right amount of food continuously, they're metabolisms burn through food so quickly that they can get low blood sugar and if not treated they can die from it. This yorkie had a body temp of about 96f (normal for a dog is about 100.5f), had little response from physical stimulation, and had pale gums. Again, we aren't an emergency hospital so we recommend tranferring out but the owner refuses because she doesn't have the money, she dropped 2k at the breeders last week to get the puppy. Doctor runs her in back, we set up a warming pad and a ton of blankets to warm her up, and doctor administers warm fluids and sugar water. Before that when we took her glucose level it was at 60 (80 is low end of average) We have to hand feed her nutritional supplements every 15 minutes for the next two hours to get her blood sugar back up.

Skunk smell is oil based, so anytime your dog gets wet you're going to smell it again faintly, but the shampoo recipe really works better than anything else on the shelf. Just don't let it get into the eyes or mouth and let it really soak in for 10 minutes before thoroughly rinsing, you can also use your own dog shampoo (don't use human shampoo, dogs have a different ph balance in their skin than humans do and they need their own shampoo) after. You only have to use this skunk mix one time after they get nailed, it's not good to continuously use hydrogen peroxide on the skin like that.

EDIT: Yeah my cat tax is like the 2nd pic, I don't know how to change it so you get to bask in the glory of my cat even more.