There’s been some stress at my place lately, most of it taking place in the waiting room or on the telephone when clients let our receptionists know exactly how they feel about our prescription policy.

No, our policy has not changed. We still require bloodwork yearly to renew heartworm medication scripts, every six months for most of our chronic medication cases and even more frequently for...

No, it's not a foray into a bad joke. It's my life at the moment.

I'm on my signifiicant others' tenth-year vet school reuniuon cruise to Belize and Cozumel. It's the first time I've been out of the country in twelve years...and I'm loving every minute--except for the hours I've spent worrying about how I'd ever manage to post my blog entries.

Shortly after embarking, I was informed that...

Hot on the heels of a post on what my neck suffers when I work is another physical issue I’ve been grappling with recently: To Lasik or not.

I’m a 400 girl in each eye (as of my last visit 6 months ago). Astigmatism, too. Prematurely ready for bifocals, even. With a prescription that changes yearly, my need for new eyeglasses is staggering. It’s a revolving door of frames for me. (And

Wednesday’s case was a bad one from the get-go. A 4:30 call from the specialty hospital across the street asked if we would take on a client with $32 to spend and a pup on its last legs.

Bring it on. Why not?

In part, I confess, I did so because we have an excellent relationship with the hospital across the street. My significant other works there. They provide care for my own pets at cost....

Fistulated cows serve both as supremely useful research/learning tool in veterinary medicine and PETA magnet. These are cows whose rumens (the largest of the four chambers in the bovine stomach) have been surgically attached to the body wall and made accessible to those curious about what lies beneath.  

Here's an up-close-and-personal pic:

By way of compensation, these cows get treated to a...

As if cancer isn’t bad enough, chemotherapy decisions are grueling in pet medicine. I guess that’s inevitable. After clobbering the client with the C-bomb, it makes sense they’d shut down all rational faculties and hear the buzzing in their heads overwhelm my well-rehearsed  discussion of treatment options.

Gentle though we vets may think ourselves as we launch into the statistics and the...

“She’s a beaut! But is the cargo space big enough for a dead Mastiff? Alright-y then. Wrap her up, she’s mine!”

Coarse though it sounds, that’s the reality of selecting a car for some veterinarians. Gas mileage, crash test results and comfort? Like everyone else, that’s where we start. But just ask Gina over at PetConnection . She knows there’s a whole lot more to take into consideration when...

OK, so I’m not a total newbie. I’ve had Poppy for a full year now and this goat is doing great—but she’s a Nubian-cross, not a full-blooded Nubian. This new girl’s all Nubie and ready to breed once she tops the ninety-pound mark.

Though goats are truly pets for me (in fact, I’ll probably never breed Poppy) I’ve always wanted to raise a milking herd. Tulip is my first foray into the milking biz...

Hot on the heels of my malpractice insurance fiasco comes this timely post. Here I detail the top ten mistakes seen in vet practice (yeah, we vets do stupid stuff sometimes):

1-Forgetting to take out the IV catheter when pets go home: This is common (three or four times a year for us), though not so much since we started including CATH OUT! checkboxes on our patient’s cage cards.

For the...

No, I’ve never been considered the most organized human being, a fact which drives most of those close to me a little crazy. Though I’ve improved on this tremendously in recent years, my occasional lapses can be somewhat problematic.

Take today’s mammoth power outage in South Florida. While everyone else in Miami figured something big was amiss, I was home for lunch kicking myself for...