A Client Liked Me

Today saw the end of surgery and the beginning of medicine. Hoorah! I like medicine.

Well, except for the part where we sat around for an hour before anyone came up with anything for us to do. We're on "drop-off medicine" this week, which are day patients that come in for treatments or diagnostics. This translates to us sitting in the treatment room until an animal arrives, the four of us crowding around to find that it just needs a vaccination and microchip, someone doing the vaccination and microchip, then we go back to sitting and waiting again.

My patient was a border collie in for some skin stuff, lumps and itchiness. The obvious step was to stick a needle into the lumps and do cytology, but since the poor attending clinician was the only vet on for three rosters (drop-off and consult medicine, and first-opinion surgery), my day involved a lot of chasing after him and waiting as nurses, students, interns, and vets snatched him this way and that. First I had to wait for him to check over my patient and confirm what we were going to do, then we had to get set up, do it, and talk to the client. In between every step was a lot of "Let me do this one thing," and then him disappearing.

And I mean disappearing. He steps through a door and then he's gone. As in literally nowhere to be found in the hospital. I suspect this has to do with going around in circles and entering rooms just as he leaves them, but I can't be sure. Sometimes he goes off in one direction, only to appear in a consult room on the other side of the hospital. I don't really know how he does it. I'm not even annoyed by the continual "I'll be right back this time for real, I promise" because I don't understand how it's even physically possible for him to be in so many places at once and do so many things at the same time.

After six hours of this, we finally got around to doing the fine needle aspirate, which involved both pokey-pokey and suckey-suckey maneuvers. We sent some off to the lab, and I stained the others. I didn't see anything on the slides and when I was describing them to the clinician, the best I could come up with was, "I couldn't see any cells. There's a bunch of... blobs." I got my classmate to look, and she confirmed my diagnosis of "blobs." He laughed at me, saying something like "is that your morphological diagnosis, blobs?" and then went on to observe, "oh yeah, there's your blobs." There really wasn't anything else on the slide to see.

The client was actually someone who works in the same building, which was very convenient because all I had to do was walk down the hallway to give her an update on her dog or ask her a question. The clinician also went down to talk to her a few times about treatments and diagnostics, so she got a pretty steady stream of information about her dog. I did up the discharge form, grabbed the meds, and went over everything with her before she took her dog home. When I asked her if she had any questions she said both I and the clinician had been very thorough and she felt very up-to-date and like she could easily come ask us any questions if they came up in the future. She thanked me for being so clear with everything and taking good care of her dog; she felt very well taken care of. To be fair, I mostly parroted everything the clinician told me to tell her, but I still consider it a success! She's my favourite kind of client: friendly, pleasant, and wants the best possible for her animal.

I can count my client interactions on one hand just about. So here it is, for the record: my first client to express that they liked my care of their animal!