Lucky Dog : How Being a Veterinarian Saved My Life (9781770893528) by Sarah Boston

Author:Sarah Boston [Boston, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Itzy, Kickass.to
Publisher: House of Anansi Pr
Published: 2014-05-02T20:25:29+00:00

VETERINARY MEDICINE HAS SO many options for personalized treatment, but one of the most common questions I get asked is “What would you do if it was your dog?” The options for my patients range from euthanasia to palliative treatments to full-on curative-intent therapies. Many of our clients are terrified of making mistakes and they are often too emotional to make good decisions. Complicating things further, most clients feel that they are being judged. This is because they are being judged. By everyone. There is a wide range of opinions on how to treat animals with cancer. This would be fine if everyone would be just a little bit shyer about asking personal questions and offering up their uninformed two cents about the choices my clients make for their pets and the expense involved. It’s not really worth trying to explain to a non-animal person what your dog means to you. You can’t. It’s kind of like how new parents tell childless people that they can never understand the parent–child bond, and how the love they share with their new baby is the greatest, purest love in the world. I think that, on some level, they do this in order to make barren couples (like the one I’m part of) aware that they will never experience a love like that and, basically, feel as though our lives have no purpose. At least I remain blissfully ignorant of how great my life could be, and I really dig my dog.

I do my best to dodge the question of what I would do if it were my dog. It is not my dog, so I can’t really answer. I try to help my clients by getting them to focus on their goals and limitations. This will usually lead to a good plan. Sometimes the goals are not reasonable. For example, I had a client with an eighteen-year-old cat in renal failure, with lung cancer, who told me that he would like to go ahead with treatment and was hoping his cat would live for another five or six years. Your treatment goal cannot be a miracle, but it can be long-term control, a good quality of life and, sometimes, even a cure. Cancer treatment means redefining success.

The limitations can be financial, but it’s not always about money. Sometimes the limitations are time-related, or related to the other things that are going on in a client’s life. I recently saw a golden retriever with a large sarcoma on his head. It probably could have been removed and the dog cured, if we had seen them sooner, but they let it get so big that even a radical surgery was unlikely to have a good long-term outcome. Usually this type of delay stems from neglect, a lack of funds, or ignorance and fear. But in this golden retriever’s case, it was none of those things. The owners had an eight-year-old son with leukemia who was undergoing chemotherapy, and they just couldn’t juggle everything. They

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