I’ve fired a lot of vets in the 12-1/2 years since I welcomed animals back into my life. Sometimes I think there isn’t a vet left in Seattle that I’ll talk to, let alone pay to take care of my kids.
That makes me The Cantankerous Dog Lover, standing up for better, more common sense relationships between vets, professional animal services providers, our multi-species families, and our culture. What works, what doesn’t, and why? How can we come together and create a compassionate, interdisciplinary multi-species community in our fast-paced, complex world?
Okay, clarification for those who think I’m cantankerous just to be … cantankery. We have some great vets in Seattle, and I use them. But our favorite is in Port Hadlock (on a good day it’s a 5-1/2 hour round trip via ferry and car), with backup from an emergency clinic and an acupuncturist/herbalist each 30 minutes away.
But that’s beside the point. For now.
The point is that my vets are my partners, not my bosses.
This, surprisingly, rules out a lot of them, just like that. Past time for that to stop.
I think vets trying to be in charge is cultural, affected by the exclusivity of specialty training (like most professions) and larger societal preconceptions. I think veterinary medicine is donkey years behind human medicine in how it treats its clients (but human medicine is only an ooch better, a real concern for all of us). Like specialists, vets are locked into a patriarchal structure where ‘father knows best.’ Surprisingly, the vets I’ve seen who are the worst about this have been female. Shocking, isn’t it? Shouldn’t women who have risen to the think about their cultural preconceptions? Or do the barriers they face create more?
This is a topic that covers a huge territory, which we’ll be doing here.
But for now, this is what I know.
I’m a pharmacist’s daughter. I worked with my dad in his store from age 12 through college. We were in a small farming community, so the first thing my dad taught me was that the farmers wouldn’t come in from their fields to go to the doctor. They’d come to my dad at the end of the day for supplies, and my job was to calmly look at a gaping wound and efficiently gather the things they needed to clean, treat, and bandage themselves until they could get to the doctor.
I learned the common sense things we sometimes don’t get when we treat our animals, because emotions and money and balance and species and what’s just plain right get confused. I learned the simple first aid things we can also use on our dogs, and I have (from upset tummies to cuts).
My dad believed in drugs, in Western medicine. But he also believed in vitamins and healthy eating. Today he’d be a compounding pharmacist with an herbalist’s bent.
I believe in drugs, too, when necessary, and at our house we use a combination of prescription, over-the-counter, herbal, and homeopathic remedies. I’m also a professional intuitive, so I can (sometimes) look at things and see how they work. I will always be grateful that, on a Sunday afternoon when my eldest dog was suddenly contorted in pain, I spread everything I had out on the counter, closed my eyes, asked for the best help, and picked a bottle of leftover Rimadyl. And no, I don’t do this for other people.
We keep Traumeel at our house, and it works, too. And we do massage, and chiropractic, and PT, and energy work, and anything else that makes sense and that experimentation proves works.
I believe in what works, and I keep finding out what does. And doesn’t.
I believe in science. When I was 9 my 14-year-old brother, Randy, was dying of leukemia. There was no hope for him, and my parents, shocked and grieving, agreed to one thing that proved both how brave and humane they were. They allowed the use of an experimental drug, hoping that some day it would help other people.
We buried Randy a few weeks later.
Fifteen or more years later, a friend developed leukemia, and lived. Years later, my dad developed rheumatoid arthritis, and they had a drug that helped him. Today that drug is helping a close friend with rhuematoid.
The drug is methotrexate. It was the drug they experimented with on Randy.
There are consequences to our actions. Methotrexate is one of them. I am proud of my family’s contribution to that research, and grateful that it has helped people I care about. And thousands, perhaps millions, more I will never know.
I am also a DES baby. My mother took diethylstilbestrol when she was pregnant with me and my brother, to help with morning sickness. Years later they learned the horrible things that DES could do to babies, something my mother felt guilty about until she died. My brother is fine. I had rare congenital reproductive health issues traced directly to DES, and had multiple surgeries, not children. Those DES babies like me who are still alive have uncertain futures, which everyone has, but ours are complicated by a bad drug. Period.
And, finally, I’ve been physically handicapped for over 20 years, after failed foot surgery. What happened then, and next, changed my life.
So did a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who came to live with me in 1998. Murphy had so many issues that people told me to ‘get rid of her and get a real dog.’ When she was 2. I didn’t. I researched, I gave her opportunities, I experimented, and together we both got well, in ways I never expected. Today, Murphy is healthy, happy, a bit arthritis, and heart clear at 12-1/2. And there’s another healthy, heart clear Cavalier, my tri boy, Alki, who’s 9. And Grace the Cat, healthy and goofy at 7-1/2.
My multi-species family is thriving because I took charge of their care, and because I listened to professionals who knew what they were talking (or writing) about, from vets to holistic care providers. And because I resisted recommendations that didn’t make sense to me. But the things I have to keep learning to save us are astounding. The average person can’t learn that much about caring for a dog, and shouldn’t have to. It seems that all our amazing technological achievements have simply made life more complex, more difficult to live. Why is that?
I hope we can change that by talking about what we want and what it looks like in community. With our vets and all the other providers who really do care and want to be part of a team. Our team as families.
So here’s a long way of explaining how I became The Cantankerous Dog Lover. Really, so you don’t have to. Here are some of the things we’ll explore through the best medium out there: storytelling.
- What happens in our multi-species families, what do we do, what we think
- Common sense in veterinary care
- How high tech helps—and hinders
- Alternative care: supplements, holistic care, energy work, animal communication
- What makes sense when, and why
- How we establish a great partnership with our vets
- How we explore alternatives
- How we establish boundaries
- How culture affects care, and what we can do
- How we live with uncertainty
- How we help our dogs live graceful old ages
So, to start. Our vets matter. What is your single best experience with a vet? Keep it short. What happened, and what do you think now?
(c) 2011 Robyn M Fritz
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