#vetproblems

Everyone in the vet industry has a terrible client story. The one that I’m about to tell isn’t even the worst but it just happened and it has me worried about my doctor that I work for.

She’s the owner of practice in a rural area so it’s just me and her that work here and we see mostly large animals and with the small animal on the side to get us through the times of year that large animal clients don’t need us as much. 

It’s vaccine and coggins time for most of our equine clients. Go out to the farm, give them a shot or two, draw some blood to send off, and do a quick exam. It takes no more than 10 minutes if the horse is a good one. The place that we send the coggins test off to takes no more than a week to send the results back to us, then we mail that off to clients for proof of negative coggins. As a business policy, we don’t send this off until the bill has been paid.

We get a friendly call from a long time client/neighbor of the doctor, asking for the coggins paperwork. I call back reminding her of the policy that we’ve had since the practice opened. 

She goes berserk. 

She chews on me for a bit. Calls back to chew on my doctor once she got back from her farm call. Now I’m having to block the MULTIPLE posts she has put on our Facebook page (I left the first one with our response on it but now she’s just copying and pasting). She and my doctor are Facebook friends so she’s getting blasted in PMs as well.

I don’t get it. This woman has always been a great client, listens to us, follows instructions to a T, calls when she has questions, an absolute dream to deal with until today, and cares for her animals the best she can. The only complaint that we have is that it takes a couple notices to get payment for the work we do for her but we’ve always been paid in the end. I sincerely hope that she’s just having a bad day and we just happen to be who she’s lashing out at but she’s got me worried about my doctor.

My doctor has been down in the dumps anyway because we’ve had several combative clients recently (our theory is because tax season just got over and has people on edge about anything money related). This client is just another in a long string of them but the cherry on the top is that she’s a farm neighbor to my doctor. They’re friends. As far as my doctor was concerned, they were on good terms. So this client’s aggression is hitting her harder than it usually would. It has me worried just in general as another vet committed suicide nearby recently. I don’t think she’ll go that far but mental health is on my mind.