The Book

What book? Most of you probably know by now, but some of you don't as it occurs to me that I haven't actually formally announced this on the blog, only on social media. So here it is: ECW Press in Toronto (https://ecwpress.com/) will be publishing a book version of "Vetography" in the spring of 2019!

It will initially be released in Canada, the USA and the UK, with formal book launches and readings in several cities. Illustrations by a well-known cartoonist are being discussed (no, I can't tell you who yet...) and an audio book version may be released as well. About 80% of the book will be drawn from the blog posts and about 20% will be new stories and essays that won't appear in the blog.

I just met the publisher again yesterday and we have settled on the title: "Confessions of an Accidental Veterinarian - Inside the Curious World of Pet Medicine"!

As the saying goes, stay tuned...

An Hour Spent Sitting At A Fork In The Road

2:00 pm, Friday, January 13, 1989.

I had promised him I would call with my decision by 3:00 at the very latest. I had exactly one hour left and I felt no closer to making up my mind than when the problem was first presented a month ago. My brain was beginning to whir uselessly like my rusted out Honda Civic spinning its wheels, stuck in a snowdrift, just polishing the snow to ice under the tires. A lot of noise, a lot of vibration, a faint burning smell, but no forward motion.

To remove myself from all possible distractions I headed up to the mezzanine level of the library at the veterinary college. This was the home of obscure unread journals and a clutch of spartan study carrels. Nobody else was up there. I picked out a carrel and proceeded to stare at the bare wood partitions in the hope of clearing my mind and coming to a decision.

Nope. No decision. Just more whirring and wheel spinning and, to extend the Honda metaphor, now also regular puffs of black smoke.

Aargh! 2:20 pm! Only 40 minutes left!

The decision was at one level just about my summer job for the four months between third year and fourth year vet school. But at another level it was about my entire career and working future. This was the problem. Summer job decision? Easy. Done it many times before. Entire career and working future decision? Not so easy. Even the decision to enter vet school wasn't as hard as it offered a wide range of career options, including my original plan of going into research and teaching. But with this decision I could feel the funneling beginning in earnest, and it was freaking me out a little.

2:40 pm.

The choice was between a job offer at the Veterinary Infectious Disease Organisation (VIDO), where I would assist in cutting-edge research and make contacts with scientists and their post-graduate programs, and a job offer at the Small Animal Clinic at the vet college where I would gain practical hands-on experience in a clinic setting and get to know my instructors for fourth year. To that point I hadn't worked in a clinic yet and felt profoundly unready for fourth year, which was very clinically oriented. Almost all of my classmates had worked in vet clinics before, often for years. But VIDO was an incredible opportunity for someone who was focused on a research career. My mind began flipping back and forth, like putting the car into forwards and reverse, forwards and reverse, forwards and...

2:55 pm.

I continued to stare at the partition. My heart rate was high and my palms were damp with sweat. People, especially at that age, can sometimes attach far too much importance to decisions they need to make and get far too stressed about them, but all these years later when I look back at that moment it is even more clear now that it was in fact an absolutely key decision, easily one of the three or four decisions I have made in my life that have had the most profound long term impact. The stress was unhelpful, but understandable. I needed a couple minutes to walk to the phone (pre- cellphone days) and as I did that I still didn't know what I was going to say.

3:00 pm.

I called the director of VIDO and declined the offer. You already guessed this outcome, but I sure didn't. I don't recall a conscious decision having been made. It was as if my subconscious mind directed my mouth.

The summer at the vet college Small Animal Clinic was a fantastic experience and after fourth year I followed my future wife to Winnipeg and began to work in a private practice, temporarily I said...

Pet 911

There isn't one. No doubt some people call 911 when they have a pet health emergency on their hands, but I don't know what the operators tell them beyond "call your vet". The real "911" for such emergencies is obviously your veterinary clinic's phone number. If your clinic is not open it will (or should...) have information on the answering machine regarding who you should contact when they're closed: sometimes an on-call veterinarian and sometimes an emergency hospital that your clinic refers to.

You probably knew all this already, but it never hurts to cover the basics. Now that I know that you know what to do when there is an emergency we can move on to the more interesting question of what actually constitutes an emergency.

Fortunately, true emergencies are much less common in pets than in humans. If you look at the eight most common emergencies in people - chest pain, stroke symptoms, accidents, choking, abdominal pain, seziures and shortness of breath - really only the last two are at all common and easy to recognize in pets. They do get abdominal pain, but it's harder to tell and is fortunately less often life threatening (no appendix in there to burst). Dogs and cats rarely have strokes and even more rarely have "heart attacks". In fact, coronary artery disease is unknown in our pets. Yes, they do get other kinds of heart diseases, but these tend to be chronic and do not often result in a sudden worsening constituting an emergency. True choking (i.e. not coughing or gagging that sounds like choking) is also less common than you might think. And pets do have accidents, but far less frequently than people, maybe because they don't drink or drive or ski or cycle or take showers or clean their guns or play with matches or rewire their homes or try to create viral videos...

As an aside, when I started in practice in the early 1990s "HBC" was a fairly regular emergency presentation. This had nothing to do with the Hudson's Bay Company, but rather it is our abbreviation for "Hit By Car". These days far more dogs are on leash and far more cats are kept indoors, so we may only have a handful of HBCs a year. Similarly, "BD-LD" is on the decline. Can't guess? "Big Dog - Little Dog", which is a traumatic dog fight injury where the size and strength differential leads to serious wounds in the "LD". We still see this, but people generally seem to be more aware of dog behaviour (generally - not universally), and again, more dogs are on leash. That being said, the increasing popularity of off-leash dog parks is preventing BD-LD from declining as quickly as HBC. Cat fights are far less common though than they once were. (Unfortunately we do not have an acronym for those.)

So now that you know what not to worry too much about, what should you worry about? When should you call "Pet 911"? The AVMA has provided a useful list. I will summarize an amended version here:

1. Severe bleeding or bleeding that doesn't stop within five minutes.
2. Choking, difficulty breathing or nonstop coughing and gagging.
3. Inability to urinate or obvious pain associated with urinating.
4. Eye injuries.
5. You suspect or know your pet has eaten something poisonous such as antifreeze, xylitol (in sugar free gum), chocolate, grapes, rodent poison, etc.
6. Seizures and/or staggering.
7. Fractured bones, severe lameness or inability to move leg(s).
8. Obvious signs of pain or extreme anxiety.
9. Heat stress or heatstroke.
10. Severe vomiting – more than two major bouts in a 24-hour period, or combined with obvious illness or any of the other problems listed here.
11. Refusal to drink for 24 hours or more.
12. Unconsciousness.

I worked in an emergency clinic for a little while after I graduated, which is a story unto itself, and I can tell you that 90% of what called and came in was not on that list. But that's absolutely ok. A good emergency service provides peace of mind. They can often triage on the phone whether your pet needs to be seen or not. Consequently I can give you a greatly simplified list of when to call:

1. Your pet appears to be in distress (or, conversely, very lethargic).
2. You are in distress about something regarding your pet.

Don't hesitate to call. You're not bothering someone. It's their job to help and they are happy to do it. Unless you are drunk and it's 2:00 am and you want to ask why your cat is staring at the wall (true story). Then reconsider.