Your Vet Visit
You got a card in the mail saying vaccines are due. Or, perhaps you are like me when I schedule my dentist appointment and procrastinate 1-3 years or so, and now you need to get caught up. Maybe something has happened to your pet, and they need to be seen immediately. The purpose of this blog is to make you and your pet’s visit go as smooth and efficiently as possible.
First things first, never send your husband. They don’t want to be there. They will agree to either do everything or nothing (usually nothing), and they definitely will not remember anything we told them. No amount of handouts we send home will save them, just reschedule the appointment. As a guy, I get it.
Let’s start with routine visits. There are two significant parts to preventive medicine: vaccines and parasite prevention. Each state, region, and veterinarian will be a little different. My vaccine recommendations will be more specific to Southwest Michigan, so talk to your vet about what is best for your area. But because Steven King had to invent rabies, the rabies vaccine is generally highly recommended or legally required everywhere. If your animal isn’t vaccinated, will they get the disease? Chances are possibly not. But then again, the 9-week old puppy we euthanized last week with distemper probably wished that the dog that gave it to him was vaccinated. I will probably make a post at some point going more in-depth with vaccines and preventatives.
When you go to the vet, especially if you are changing or haven’t been in a long time, try to have a full vaccine and heartworm test/prevention history ready. Knowing when the last vaccines were given helps us to determine if we would recommend certain vaccines that need a booster, or if they are good for 1 or 3 years. For heartworm tests, it is required to have a negative test each year, and a record of consistently getting prevention each month.
If you are coming to your vet for an emergency visit the first thing to do is be patient. The veterinary profession is slowly transitioning. Much like human medicine, we now have specialty emergency clinics that are better equipped and staffed to handle emergency medicine. Most clinics will still see some emergencies, but if they refer you to another clinic, it is likely because you and your pet will get a better standard of care there. “Now my old vet would come in at 3 am to take care of fluffy’s hangnail as an emergency and wouldn’t charge a dime!” That mentality along with one of the highest debt to income ratios and worst burnout of any profession has caused veterinary medicine to have the highest rate of suicide. So listen Linda, we love you and your pet, but we also love not going clinically insane.
Most importantly please remember your vet, and the staff are human. We make mistakes, we run late to appointments because are worried we’ll forget to explain something. The assistant holding your chihuahua whose main goal in life is to bite everything makes less than a fast-food worker. The secretary that missed your call may have been helping bring in a hit by a car dog. If we make a recommendation, it’s because we care about your pet.
