CryptAwkward

Anonymous said:  =) In Australia can vet techs/nurses get specialty certifications? What kind of education and liscensing requirements does a vet tech/nurse need? In the USA there is a movement to rename vet tech to vet nurse. What is your opinion on this?

Most vet nurses in Australia that use the term ‘qualified’ mean they have a Certifivate IV in vet nursing.

They can, should they choose, pursue further education with a Diploma in either general practice, surgery, or emergency and critical care.

I quite like the term ‘vet nurse’ though I understand that there are vet techs overseas who do not like the term because ‘they are more than a nurse’.

Trouble is, ‘vet nurse’ makes a very clear picture of what the job entails, hands on caring and nursing our veterinary patients. While vet tech, if you’re not familiar with it, isn’t immediately clear what it does, it sounds much more removed and impersonal, like you’re dealing with machines.

Vet nurse just feels more appropriate for a medical setting.

Hyperkalaemia ECG changes in 15 seconds. 

High levels of potassium destabilise the cardiac membrane causing arrhythmia’s which lead to cardiac arrest. This can be a real life-saving opportunity if you can catch and treat it!

Made this and thought you would enjoy 😊

Sometimes a veterinarian has a client who is suicidal.

They don’t really ever tell you this directly, but it happens. While our main duty of care is to our animal patients, we can’t discount the need to be there for our clients in a professional setting. You have to look out for them when you can, and in light of those atrocious, guilt-tripping posts going viral about being in the room for euthanasia, I wanted to share this story with you.

No cute pictures or gifs on this one. I’m serious.

As a veterinarian you don’t remember every euthanasia you perform. You hold the recent ones in your heart and mind for a while, but you certainly lose count as the years go by. These moments were intense for the pet owners, but you have to let them wash over you or you end up going mad with the grief and pain. But some you always remember.

My very second euthanasia was a little terrier called Roxie. And Roxie had congestive heart failure.

You can manage congestive heart failure for a while, and we’d been doing so, bu tit’s only managed, not cured. There’s no new heart transplant waiting for that dog, only a controlled death when the time comes.

Roxie’s owner was never… well, there was always something odd about him in those months of her treatment. Something intense that I couldn’t quite explain. A little odd for sure, but I was working in a new town far from home, where everybody seemed a little odd, in their own way. I was a newly graduated veterinarian and pretty green, everything was on the brink of overwhelming all the time and I probably missed warning signs.

But the day finally came when Roxie needed to be put to sleep. She was suffering, and not breathing all that well. And honestly, even with the best medicine available at the time, we’d run out of ways to make her comfortable. She couldn’t have a new heart, all we could offer was a smooth, peaceful death.

We always gave people the option: they could chose to stay for the euthanasia if they wanted to, for as much as they wanted to, or we could take the pet out the back.

He’d already made up his mind.

He chose not to stay with her, to let us take her out the back.

But he sobbed and wailed and assured the little dog, earnestly, that he would “See her soon. I’ll see you soon.”

And it wasn’t until I had already carried her, gasping, out to the back when those words dawned on me.

He wasn’t burying her at home. She wasn’t to be cremated. He hadn’t wanted to see her peaceful body after she passed.

So when exactly was he going to see her again, ‘soon’?

I didn’t know what to do. I was a new vet, still green and wet behind the ears, and vet school hadn’t prepared me very well for what to do if you think your client is going to kill themselves.

So I told the practice manager, because that’s what a new vet does when they’re stuck. I was scared. This little dog needed death, but she was quite possibly the only thing keeping this human alive, and he was not prepared for her death. Or rather, he was potentially prepared in a very wrong way.

I am eternally grateful that the practice manager went and talked to him. Talked about the dog’s life, talked him into cremation instead so he had to wait at least two weeks for her ashes to be returned, talked about making a space for them at home. Talked him into having someone else pick him up from the clinic.

Quite probably talked him into living.

I often regret that I can’t do more for people’s pain. But on my mind right now is the thought, what if he saw those guilt tripping posts. Those awful, mean-spirited, judgemental, cruel digs at someone’s personal grief.

Would he be able to stand it now, all those years removed?

What if someone else in a similar mindset reads them, with the grief still fresh?

04.13.18 | I made this diagram to quiz myself on how to describe each potential dystocia position. Can you name them all? The answers are below ☺️

I had to do it. I saw the meme and had to do it.

“I want to be a vet because i love animals uwu”

Veterinary Emergency Medicine brings out a lot of emotion in people, and most of it’s not good, to be honest. I understand clients often are under a lot of stress and fearing for their animal, but some behavior is simply not acceptable and not only does nothing to help the client or their pet, but it’s unfair to throw that emotional burden onto veterinary staff.

So with that in mind, there are a number of things I wish clients knew when they walk into an emergency vet clinic.

I, the vet, am simply exhausted. The hours in emergency are long, unsociable, with early starts and late finishes. There’s no schedule, just a list of things that have to be done and seen and the order of that list changes all the time as new things come in. I am also coming into emergency land after working full time in GP-ville, so I am tired all the time. And the nurses are tired too.

We’re not paid that well. You might be seeing an estimate of thousands of dollars, but we’re not seeing that sort of money in our paycheck. If you flip your banana screaming at the nurse that now you only have $14 to eat with this week so it looks like you’ll starve, there is a high likelihood that nurse can tell you exactly how to make that $14 stretch all week.

We don’t set the prices. We don’t decide how much things cost. That is a corporate business decision, not made by staff on the ground.

That said, we will occasionally come across something that’s far too expensive to do in an emergency clinic, and may recommend you have it done elsewhere. Non-emergency things that are causing no pain and can wait, for example.

If you need a treatment plan that better fits your budget, by all means talk to the staff on the ground. If you just want to complain about how things are priced, the staff on the ground can do nothing about it, that complaint needs to go to management or corporate. Otherwise you’re doing the equivalent of barraging the cashier at the supermarket.

Sometimes your pet has something urgent and needs to be seen ASAP, but if I’m the only vet in the building there can be cases that are more urgent. If a possible GDV comes in, it still has to wait a hot minute if I’m in the middle of doing CPR.

Sometimes you will be waiting because I have to eat so I don’t faint. Sorry, but sometimes it has to happen.

I can’t allow you to sit in ICU with your pet until its procedure. You’re in the way, you take up time, and I don’t want to be wheeling deceased patients past you. Having clients in our treatment area is extra stressful because it makes you feel like you need to explain every little thing you’re doing all the time. Just let us work.

Sometimes ‘do or die’ situations are going to end in ‘die’ even if you choose ‘do’, despite us doing everything we can.

Yes, I do need you to choose either ‘CPR’ or ‘do not resuscitate’ on the admit form even for a minor concern. I don’t think your dog with a torn nail will need CPR but I will get my backside kicked by management if I don’t have it selected.

The corporate red tape is mind numbing but there’s nothing I as an employee can do to change it without risking my job.

In a corporate practice I’m supposed to refer patients to other practices owned by that corporate, unless the client requests otherwise. If you’re not sure, I can even mention all these practices by name and contact details, but I still need you to say “Yes I asked to be referred there” to keep myself out of hot water. Just say it, okay?

You want to complain about corporate or go to the media? More power to you! But kindly don’t drag individual staff that have their hands tied through the dirt, that’s not fair.

One of many things that can go wrong during anesthesia.

This cat was under veterinary care as normal during recovery, but when it was time to remove endotracheal tube, the cat suddenly bit down and INHALED half of the tube into its trachea.

The cat was put under anesthesia again, and fluoroscopy was used to visualize what we were doing to get the tube out with a grasping forceps. (We tried endoscope, but the scope was too big to enter)

#jasminestudyblrchallenge @justjasminestudying

day 18- make an advice post

Sometimes at the end of an examination as I am discussing my findings with an owner they become upset especially for pain related exams. How could I possibly have found these things when I didn’t do anything? To these clients it seems as if there was some trickery involved and now they are being asked to spend more money on what to them is snake oil. This is partially my fault because I obviously didn’t explain what I was doing well enough. I find more and more that a good deal of the disconnect arises from a lack of basic understanding of biology and science on the client’s part, but that is another story. What happens during an exam that gives a vet enough information to make a treatment plan from?