Dear Debt, It’s finally come to this. After years of struggling with you. Waiting for you to change. Feeling dragged down by you. Feeling ashamed of how big and scary you are. I just can’t do it anymore. I know now that I can’t keep hoping you will change. You will never change as long… Read More
Blog
It’s Just Business
Vets are notorious under-chargers. According to one source, veterinarians give away the equivalent of $60,000 in services every year. EVERY. YEAR. Apparently, medical math and financial math are two very disparate mathematical species, and we are much better at calculating complicated CRIs than we are at adding up money dollars. We often hear the call… Read More
Running from Scissors
From the beginning of veterinary school, I suspected I was not going to be a surgeon. In the first semester anatomy lab, cadaver dogs were issued to groups of four students. Ours was a shelter dog we named Barney. We used him all semester to figure out where muscles, tendons, bones, and organs were. On… Read More
Thanks for the Reminder to Feel
As vets, we have wins and losses. That’s the job. And amidst challenging clients, long work hours, insurmountable debt, huge caseloads and attempts at work/life balance, it is easy to lose track of why we entered this field. We advocate for the innocent, we heal those who are deeply loved (and in that process, those… Read More
No One Warns You About the Loneliness
Everyone tells you that you will learn more in your first year as a veterinarian than your year on the clinic floor in veterinary school. They tell you about the long hours, the mountain of debt, the anxiety and the high rate of substance abuse and suicide, but we are not warned about the loneliness…. Read More
“What Can We Do?”
I have a bad habit of checking social media first thing in the morning, which I know can really set the day off on the wrong foot. This morning, I woke up to see a post from a veterinarian friend that she had two veterinarians in her life commit suicide this week. As I read… Read More