Pulse - August 2023 - 11

Chime in!
Tell us why you like working in the veterinary field,
whatever your role. Send an email with your name,
title and affiliations to marilyn.iturri@gmail.com. Put
" vet med " in the subject line. Submissions are subject
to editing for clarity and space.
They are definitely my role models. Their
level of dedication, compassion, understanding
of the profession -- if I could be like anybody, it
would be one of them.
I'm very surprised to hear some colleagues
say they wouldn't encourage others to be veterinarians,
that they wouldn't do it over again.
That's shocking to me. I have accomplished so
much thanks to my profession. It is the greatest
in the world by far. I wouldn't want to do
anything else.
Most of my peers, people in my age group,
feel the same. Perhaps they're not very vocal.
They're busy working, are happy with the way
things are. We're not discounting problems, the
mental health concerns. It's so concerning to
have so many mental health problems. But the
majority of vets don't have those.
All my peers, we love what we do. Sometimes
we roll our eyes, but we still love the profession.
Phil Zeltzman, DVM, DACVS, FF
Owner of two surgery practices in Pennsylvania, and co-founder of Chronos, which provides remote
staffing to vet practices nationwide.
I
have said for years that veterinary medicine is the greatest field ever, and that there are countless opportunities
for those who keep an open mind and open eyes and ears.
I absolutely love veterinary medicine. I am a
board-certified surgeon, so I am fortunate that
I see fast, positive results shortly after surgery.
We help the disabled run and play ball again.
We allow the suffocating to breathe again. We
alleviate pain. How amazing is that? Very few
people can say that in this world.
I love vet med because of the people in it:
colleagues, nurses, receptionists, managers, industry
folks.
I also love vet med because of all of the opportunities
it has given me beyond clinical
work: mentoring, lecturing all over the U.S.
and abroad, organizing conferences, starting
several companies, writing, owning a variety of
types of practices, and meeting all kinds of interesting
people. The list is endless.
That said, I am very aware and saddened
that there is widespread pain, overwhelmingness,
burnout, compassion fatigue, and worst
of all, suicide, in our profession.
I have a lot of compassion for my colleagues
who struggle in the trenches. It's tough enough
to be a practitioner, let alone to be a practice
owner at the same time. Practice owners wear
multiple hats: clinician, business owner, HR
guru, peacekeeper, tax strategist, master negotiator,
financier, teacher/mentor, marketing
expert, life-long learner, and so many more.
So many things [about the work] feed my
PULSE
AUGUST 2023
soul:
* Thank-you notes from happy clients.
* One of the biggest compliments is to get a
referral from a previous client.
* Proper healing of a difficult fracture on
follow-up X-rays.
* Videos of happy patients who were severely
dyspneic.
* Compliments and happy updates from referring
vets.
* Seeing nurses succeed at tasks they were
struggling with before.
* Nurturing a positive culture in my practices
and businesses, so they're islands of happiness
in an ocean of struggle.
* Creating solutions that make a difference in
our profession.
* One of my biggest joys is when a client tells
me how amazing one of my nurses is. That
feeds my soul.
How do I keep going when I have a bad day?
Thankfully, I have very few bad days. Yet I am
my biggest, most ruthless critic. So I try to reason
with myself when something goes wrong.
I tell myself it's an exception, a fluke, an accident,
not the norm. I think the hardest thing to
accept is when we do almost everything right,
and a client gets disproportionately upset
about something seemingly insignificant.
Some, thankfully the vast minority, blow
things out of proportion, twist facts to fit their
story, and sometimes blatantly lie about what
happened. The challenge is to focus on the 99%
positive, even though our minds are amazingly
good at obsessing about the bad 1%.
For the same reason, we obsess over the single
1-star review, and brush off the 600 5-star
reviews.
I also try to learn from the incident, so it
hopefully never happens again.
Early in my surgery career, I met Myron
Downs, a board-certified surgeon in Athens,
Georgia. He taught me principles I still
remember to this day, and I try to pass them
on to younger colleagues. For example, he explained
to me once that an internist can be brilliant
at medicine without knowing much about
surgery--this is with all due respect, I could
never do what internists do! But a surgeon can
never be great at surgery without some knowledge
of internal medicine.
A simple, but profound truth.
To that, I would add, a surgeon also needs to
know about anesthesia, and pain management,
and endocrinology, and neurology, and critical
care. That's why I love surgery so much. It is a
very diverse field it's hard to be bored in.
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Pulse - August 2023

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