Perks of the job

I always thought it would be a rewarding job. That was one of the reasons for doing it, after all.

I don’t mean financially – although, when I was training, I thought the money would be nice, because everyone knows vets do alright, don’t they?

After I qualified and calculated the hours I worked compared to what arrived in my pay packet, it was pretty demoralising to realise vets were among the worst paid professions I could have joined – a feeling made worse by everyone who found out I was a vet then going on to tell me, occasionally at length, exactly how massive my salary was because everyone knows vets do alright, don’t they?

Real reward

That, however, was not the reward I was thinking of when I decided I wanted a career in veterinary medicine. I thought how amazing it would be to help animals; to look at my patients and know I fixed them. To know I helped.

It seemed important to do a job that meant something good, that made the world a little better. I thought the good feeling from being a vet would silence that nagging conscience thing that intermittently reared its head and distracted me from playing games, which was something I’d much rather do.

That’s what I thought would happen, anyway. But it never quite seemed to work out that way.

Focusing on negatives

It may be a particular mindset of mine, but if it is, I suspect it’s shared by a great deal of you, too – it turns out it’s easier to punish yourself for your mistakes than to congratulate yourself on your victories.

Part of that is purely the nature of biology. If you quickly get a patient better – especially if it’s an acute surgical emergency – you might see that animal a couple more times for post-op checks, or once every few months for a check up, and it’s nice to see them better and have a grateful owner, but the warm feeling is hard to hang on to. For me, at least.

In contrast, when you’ve diagnosed a patient with a terminal disease, or haven’t managed to find a diagnosis at all, you’re going to see that animal again and again, maybe watching it get worse, until finally there’s only one thing you can do.

It’s a privilege to be able to end another animal’s suffering, but it’s difficult – even in the kindest of circumstances – to find performing euthanasia anything approaching rewarding.

Meeting expectations

This feeling is underlined by the clients’ behaviour, too – if you quickly spot and fix an Addisonian crisis, pericardial effusion, gastric dilatation-volvulus, or a myriad other life-threatening emergencies, your clients are often not quite as grateful as you might expect. I always put this down to the fact most people expect you to do your job and fix the problem, and often they don’t realise, or at least can’t accept, how serious things have become, so when you restore their companion to health despite the odds, it’s just what they were expecting you to do.

There are many exceptions, of course, but that seems to be the general rule, at least in my experience, and it seems backed up by this simple fact: the time you’re absolutely most likely to receive thank you cards, chocolates or bottles of wine from clients for your services is after you have euthanised their pet. They’re more grateful because the worst happened, and they didn’t expect it, and you were there to help and make things easier.

It’s all very human, natural and understandable, but the effect it always had on me was to make me dwell on these losses rather than celebrate the victories. It highlighted the failures and made them more important.

Nothing special

I, and probably many of you, have an amazing ability that may be ingrained in our national consciousness to feel that, when I’ve helped an animal, well, that’s something anyone could have done. But when I fail to help, the fault is mine alone – if anyone else had this case, they would have found a way to fix the problem. When I made mistakes, I knew, deep down, that they were mistakes that no other vet on the planet could possibly have made.

This is why I never found the job as rewarding as I thought it would be. I often wondered why it never felt so, and it’s taken me a while, but I finally realised how skewed and self-destructive that viewpoint was, and how unfair on myself.

It feels natural and right to beat yourself, and dwell on your mistakes, but it’s not helpful. Of course, mistakes are there to be learned from, but, as vets, we need to find a way to learn our lessons and move on.

Be kind

If you, like me, are struggling through practice, or in any other job that isn’t as rewarding as you thought it would be, I’d like to give you some advice: you are helping more than you think and are not as bad as you think you are. We all win, and we all lose, and however much you think you think you’re the only person in the world who could have made the mistakes you have, you’re wrong – we all do it.

The most important thing in the world, I think, is to be kind. Sometimes it’s hard, and sometimes it’s easier to be cruel, but being kind will make you happier. I’ve realised, belatedly, this applies just as much to yourself as it does to others – be kind to yourself, forgive yourself and celebrate your victories.

Realise the job is as rewarding as you will let it be.