Chrissy 0:00
Chris, welcome to The Dogs of our lives Podcast. I'm Chrissy Messick, your host and owner of the nature of animals. My dog training and behavior consulting business, get ready to hear journeys from challenging behaviors to heartwarming successes and everything in between. Our episodes will feature personal stories from clients, colleagues and professionals, all centered around our favorite animal companion, friends. Each episode, you'll gain insights and valuable tools from those that have walked the path that you are on with your dog. We'll discuss mindset shifts, growth, training, tips, lessons, learned and so much more. By the end of each episode, you'll feel inspired have a deeper understanding of your dog and walk away with actionable steps to improve both of your lives. Today, I'm talking with Dr Jennifer Fick, who is a veterinary orthopedic surgeon. She's also a client of mine that I've been working with for the last five years. I worked with her previous dog, Charlotte, and our current dog, Elsie. We discuss many things in the podcast today, but some highlights include pamanio sarcoma in dogs, which her previous dog, Charlotte had, and then tplo surgery and recovery, which she also did with Charlotte. We also talk about Proposition 129 in Colorado, which is super important. So hang on to the edge of your seat and follow along as we talk about the many things dogs.
Jennifer 1:24
Hello,
Chrissy 1:24
Oh, hello. Jennifer Fick, thanks for being on this interview with us today. I'm excited to talk with you about all things veterinarian and surgical, and you know everything related with that, as well as Charlotte and we actually got to know each other about five years ago because you were working with another trainer who moved out of town, and so she referred me to to you, and so I started working with you and Charlotte and Bard, you know, five years ago, many times since then, I was, I was going to say, every Day, but not every day, but so we've gotten to know each other very well. And you know, I'm grateful for the relationship that we have, and I'm grateful for, you know, being able to work with Charlotte and now your new puppy, Elsie. Oh, do you just want to tell everyone about a little bit about, you know, where you live, what you do, and I guess Elsie a little bit if you want.
Jennifer 2:21
Oh sure. So, yeah, we live in Boulder. I'm a mobile veterinary small animal surgeon. As a veterinarian, I specialized and became a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary surgeons. And so I only do surgery, and I'm actually being a mobile surgeon. I travel to a lot of different hospitals across the front range and do specialty surgeries for them. So I'm not going in and doing spays and neuters. Typically, I'm getting called in for a lot of orthopedics, some soft tissue stuff, if it's more complicated, you know, not something that a general practitioner has a lot of opportunity or experience with I may get called for that too. It's kind of a way for a veterinarian to maintain, you know, having the pets stay within their practice. They're the ones who know the pet best. Then the client only has to travel to one hospital. They don't have to go to a big referral center, and, you know, leave their dog or cat in a place that they're not familiar with, with people they're not familiar with their vet. Knows me. I know that vet, and that really helps us develop a good working relationship. And that way, if there's bumps along the way and issues during recovery, you know, I can really directly help guide any troubleshooting we need to do, and so I really, I do value that relationship that I've built with my referring veterinarians out in private practice I have worked in those large referral hospitals. There are aspects of that that I certainly miss. I miss all of the colleagues and the other specialists that you have on hand, where you can just walk down the hallway and say, Hey, do you mind listening to this patient? I hear heart murmur, and it's new. And you know, you've got a cardiologist right there. You know, the oncologist, where you're like, hey, you know, I think this dog might need chemo prior to surgery. What do you think? You know, those types of things where it was just easy walking down the hallway to have those kinds of collegial discussions. I do miss that. I miss the big, you know, the ivory tower type hospitals, but at the same time, I think I'm helping fill a niche where we can keep some of the costs down for clients as well. So not only do they have to, you know, they can stay with their regular veterinarian who they know and trust, but hopefully it helps keeps the keep the costs down a bit, because I know that that's kind of skyrocketed in the last really decade. That's why I like what I do. I also like that now I have my own business, and I'm not answering to corporate. Corporate was not my favorite for. A variety of reasons that we don't need to get into today. But yeah, so now that I work for myself, I am happier with that situation as well.
Chrissy 5:09
Yeah, that's I totally get that in your own business. I mean, there are pros and cons. Absolutely. Yeah, whatever you decide to do, and then tell us a little bit about Elsie. So,
Jennifer 5:21
yeah, Elsie is our seven month old Rough Collie puppy. She's a delight. She is just in so many ways, night and day, different from Charlotte. As you are aware. You know Charlotte, to give people a little bit of background, Charlotte was about a one year old female spade German Shepherd when we adopted her through Front Range German Shepherd rescue, which is a great organization, and I love supporting them. Charlotte had been through several homes by the time we got her, and so she honestly the foster mom thought that Charlotte was deaf because she didn't respond to anyone, didn't make eye contact, and yeah, she just didn't really think people were anything to pay attention to. And so right away, is where we realized we were kind of in over our heads with Charlotte, even though we had just lost another German Shepherd, Nicholas had passed, and I had gotten him through a rescue when I was living in Florida. But at any rate, yeah, when we took initially, Charlotte the Boulder Valley Humane Society for just some other little Canine Good Citizen classes, and she couldn't handle being in the room with all the other dogs, which is how we started end up working with another trainer and who eventually connected us with You. But yeah, Charlotte, so reactive to people and dogs and just yeah, she was a lot of work right from the beginning, in a different way than Elsie, who's a puppy and has a lot of energy, but she loves everyone and wants to meet everyone. And I think I've told you, like, I don't think this dog has hackles like her hair does not ever stand up, whereas Charlotte, you could be playing frisbee and she would get overstimulated and all of her hackles were up, she was just on edge all the time up until the end. So it's just very different, and just a reminder, too, of just some of the things that are very inherent in different breeds, just as far as temperament and that it's, you know, it's very good demonstration of the nature versus nurture. There is a lot that we can nurture, and it can be very difficult to remove the nature aspect of some of our challenges, right? Yeah, so, but yeah, I know Elsie is a sweetheart. She has a lot of energy, but, yeah, just sweet as can be. And as you know, I made the switch just right now from German shepherd to Collie, because I grew up with a Rough Collie, and she was the whole reason I went to vet school. And just adored that dog. And I've always wanted another Collie, and so the situation presented itself, and it was too good to pass up, even though it was pretty quickly after we lost Charlotte, and so our hearts are still healing from that loss, but Elsie helps.
Chrissy 8:15
Yeah, there's a lot of Charlotte and Elsie. Yeah, that's so cute. Yeah? The funny parts, yes, yeah, the funny parts. And then, you know, the thing you bring up about nature versus nurture, you're not going to take the nature out of a dog like you don't want to, you know, that's what they're born with and who they are. And so what we learn to do is work with that nature exactly, you know, give them an outlet for what they're bred for,
Jennifer 8:41
right? And shepherds are are bred to be fearful of new things. That's why they're good guard dogs.
Chrissy 8:46
That's why they're so sensitive and, yeah, yeah. So it's a combination of nature and nurture. So exactly, can you just explain a little bit your professional path to get where you are? And you already talked about kind of why you decided to become a mobile vet, which I think is great, you know, you got to take care of your mental health, and at the same time thinking about the people. And it is like it's everything's so expensive nowadays. So, yeah, so you just want to briefly explain your kind of path to where you got to,
Jennifer 9:19
yeah. You know, it's funny, because I think when they look at stats on people who become veterinarians, I have heard that most people have an inkling that they're going to be a vet by the time they're seven years old. I had kind of forgotten that, you know, you kind of go through your education. And in college, I was a biology major, and I really liked ecology and evolution. And you know, I actually did. I had this diverging path where I could either have gone into a PhD program in ecology and evolution at the University of Utah, but I also got into vet school, and I was like, have to really decide here what is my calling. I really want to work with animals on. A daily basis, and I can probably make that happen with both of these paths. But in veterinary medicine, I'm working with animals who are used to being handled, and they like interacting with people, whereas if you end up in the wildlife side of things and doing research, and you know out in the field, as a biologist, a lot of those animals really don't want you anywhere near them, and I think that was ultimately what helped me make the final decision to go to vet school versus going into a biology field. So to circle back to the whole new you're going to be a vet by the time you're seven. Then some point after I was already in vet school, there was a luncheon for my piano teacher, who I took piano for years as kid, and she was turning 80, and so her family had hosted this luncheon, and I was invited because I was one of her long term students, and I sat down with her and was chatting with her, and she said, So did you ever fulfill your dream of being a veterinarian? And I thought, Huh. She knew I wanted to be a vet. I couldn't remember that. So it's just one of those things where it's like, oh, okay, yeah, I guess I must have talked about that as a kid. So anyway, there was just really never a question of I was going to work with animals. They were such an integral part of my life, I just can't imagine life without a daily interaction with animals. It's just, it's, I don't know, it's part of me. And so then, you know, got to vet school. Loved vet school. It was fantastic. And then after vet school, I went and did a small animal rotating internship so that I could go on to specialize in whatever I would want to do. And I did that at Michigan State. And first I started on emergency because I thought I really wanted to do that, and I realized being the doctor and being the student is very, very different having those tough conversations on emergency when these animals are actively trying to die, and you have to make these rapid decisions and get clients to make rapid decisions, And it's emotional, and there's financial aspects, and it's very draining. And I very quickly realized, wow, I don't think I want to do emergency. And then I got on surgery, and I started out on the orthopedic rotation. The surgeon in charge was Gretchen Flo and she is one of the early leaders in veterinary orthopedics and just this really tough woman, you know, I just remember working through the cases and figuring things out with, you know, we would take a broken bone and put it back together and look at the x rays, and I thought, wow, we fix stuff. These patients walk in, they're not doing well, and they walk out and they're doing great. I love this. It's like that really quick gratification, where you can see it on the X ray, you can see your patient doing better. And here was this woman, this pioneer in veterinary orthopedics, who was leading my orthopedic service. And I was like, Wow, maybe I can do this. And so that was the turning point. That's, I just fell in love with surgery. And that was, that, was it.
Chrissy 13:05
It's so funny that you say that, because I remember when I was at college, I went to Washington State University, and I was like, sitting there literally thinking, what do I want to do? Should I go to vet school? Because they have a really good vet program. They do. Yeah, they absolutely do. Or should I do sports medicine on my human side? Yeah? And I was like, I don't think I can do vet school, because I think emotionally, it would be too hard for me. So I chose the human sports medicine. And then, when I was working at the University of Washington, for some reason, someone's like, you know, you said many times that you're going to work with animals. When are you going to start doing? Yeah, so then I was like, I guess that's my next career. And so here I am working, you know, with behavior and training, and it's super emotional. So, you know, I'm learning how to deal with that. It's so funny that you you know that you said that most people, percentage wise, know, by the time they're seven, you know, wanting to work with animals. And then, yeah, you talked about mobile bed, just because, you know it's, it's your own business, the price point is better for the consumer, and then the animal is more comfortable because they're with the people they know. And then you develop good relationships with many veterinarians around the Boulder County, and it's funny because I think I have like, two or three people in my neighborhood that you did their dogs. TPL,
Jennifer 14:30
well, that's good. I hope they're all doing well, yes,
Chrissy 14:33
I see them walking by our backyard, and they're walking great,
Jennifer 14:37
beautiful.
Chrissy 14:38
Let's go back in time a little bit. Tell us about your childhood, growing up, and what did you learn about values, beliefs and how they shaped your thoughts, feelings and attitudes towards animals.
Jennifer 14:48
That's a hard question. I mean, the thing is, like we got our Collie tippy when I was three, so I really have no memory of not having a dog. And she passed after I graduated high school. So the summer I graduated high school is when we lost Tippie, so she lived to be 15, and so she was my world, like we didn't have cats. Both my brothers are allergic to cats, and my parents were kind of neither here nor there on cats. But, you know, we always had a dog, and I just loved her. She you know, I you get it, you know, the dogs give you unconditional love. So if you have a bad day, you can go to your dog. If you're having a good day, your dog is also happy. Everything revolves around the dog. And what I remember is the couple of times that she was sick, she was a very healthy dog overall. There was one time where she had a weird tumor that had developed inside her leg, and she had to have surgery. And the stress of that was really, really hard, because when you're a kid, you know the idea of losing your dog is just devastating, at least for me, but she did well with that, and it ended up being benign. Ultimately, the year that we lost her, she had had several bouts of pancreatitis. And ultimately, you know, I would hand feed her through it, and get her back on her feet and recovered, and so that, I think, even reinforced our bond. Because, you know, then I it was like, if I left town, she wouldn't eat, and so had to be home. And I remember all of my family members dogs. So what honestly, really influenced me with German Shepherds was my aunt and uncle, Trudy and Jim, had a dog named Heidi when I was growing up. There are pictures of me as a toddler with Heidi as a puppy. Heidi was the best German Shepherd. She my aunt Trudy is very good at training dogs, and that German Shepherd was perfect, like, great with kids and and people and just, yeah, amazing dog. I loved Heidi anytime I was in somebody else's house, I always gravitated towards their pets. That's who I wanted to spend time with. I don't know, I don't know any other way which, you know, it's always fun too, because as I go to different hospitals and interact with different patients and stuff, it's even just the eye contact you make with dogs as you come in the room, like, always trying to express to them, like, hey, just here to help you. Here to pet you, relax. It's good. And I do think that they can feel that from you and feed off of that. And they, I think there's a lot of communication that just happens with eye contact. You know, I think animals get and I'm just again, having grown up around dogs, and let me tell you, I've been attacked by some dogs, but I'm still not afraid of them, and so I even remember we had friends in the neighborhood. They did this a couple of times. They adopted adult German shepherds that were very questionable. And I remember one time entering my friend's backyard not knowing the dog was out, and it came rushing from the back of the yard. And fortunately, I had a snowsuit on, and I just kind of turned against the house, and the dog jumped up on me, and then they saw from the window and called it in and stuff. Still not afraid of German Shepherds probably should be, but, you know, but I also, like, I have a pretty good ability to read a dog when I enter the room, the ones that are hardest, and I think a lot of my veterinary colleagues would agree, the ones that are hardest are the ones that give you no warning. And it's true, they really don't like you'll be in there and talking, and they seem relaxed, and you will have already touched them a few times. They seem relaxed, and then the next second, they're going for you. And those are the ones that you just kind of wonder, like, Where was the trigger? Because I missed that. But for the most part, you know, I think doing this long enough, you read what they're doing, you read how relaxed they are, you read all those body cues and just being around it enough, you just know, yeah,
Chrissy 19:00
I think that's one thing you know, working in training and behavior consulting is learning how to read body language, and there's stuff that even happens before the dogs get in the clinic. How much training on behavior do you guys get in vet school? Would you say? Oof?
Jennifer 19:17
I think, well, it's hard to know now. I mean, for me, that was more than 20 years ago. I feel like we had maybe three weeks, but I feel like now most vet schools get one week, and it's an intensive one week, so maybe that's how they do it. So I have a colleague who I know does a lot of the vet school training, Chris packle, goes to multiple vet schools. I know he comes out to CSU quite a bit, but it's like a week at a time. And so I think they get a pretty intensive week, but I think it is only a week really,
Chrissy 19:50
yeah, which is amazing to me because, like, I went to, you know, I got my certifications and training, and it's taken me like, three years. That's just because. Behavior and training, you know, and you guys get it all jammed into, like, one week or three weeks or whatever. And so that happens a lot, too, with dogs that I work with. And a lot of trainers see this, where it looks like the behavior comes from out of the blue, right? But there are very subtle signs that it can even be the way a dog looks at you. It could be the posture, the trigger stacking, that's not even related to being in the clinic. It's like something that happened before you got even in there. So, you know. So that makes it hard, well, and then
Jennifer 20:33
add the layer of like, you're trying to make a diagnosis, so you're doing an exam while you're trying to have the dog relaxed, and then you're talking to the pet owner, and so you're trying to explain something, and then all of a sudden the dog turns, and so, like, you just don't have a chance to right very well, yeah,
Chrissy 20:50
it's such a hard situation, yeah? So it sounds like basically that you just like it was part of you growing up, yeah? And being with dogs, it was just like something internally that you loved, and it was just part of you. And a huge part of working with dogs is your intention, like you said, you know, there's an intention that they can feel. So that's kind of fun, you know, just yeah,
Jennifer 21:14
having a dog and, you know, experiencing life with a dog is such a huge part of who I am, like when we lose a pet, like when I lost Charlotte this June. You know, the hole that creates is just almost insurmountable, right? And that's where my need to get another dog more quickly was it's harder, you know, for Bard, my husband, because he wanted more time to process, and he wanted more time to mourn Charlotte, and I get that, and I was so trying to honor that. And then the opportunity to get Elsie came up, and I was like, how do we pass this up? And he was like, oh gosh, we can't.
Chrissy 22:00
And it's so interesting, because the the mourning and the grieving process for Charlotte is much different for you than it is in barred, for sure. And so even the way you guys interact with Elsie right now is going to be different, because you both are going through a different grieving process, yes, so the engagement might be different. So, I mean, that's just a whole other topic that we could discuss with, yes, so would you be willing to share any personal or professional challenges in that how that has influenced your work with dogs and what you do?
Jennifer 22:31
I really, I struggle with this question. You know, a lot of the professional challenges relate more to clients, you know, because very early in your career, at least for me, but I think this happens to a lot of vets. You know, you get out of school and you're all pumped and and ready to see patients, and then it's totally different, having to process everything quickly. You know, you have this set amount of time to see a patient and make a diagnosis and communicate effectively with a client. And sometimes that lack of experience comes across as you don't know what you're doing, and clients can misinterpret that. And so then, if you if you are incorrect in your initial assessment, or, you know, something happens unexpectedly, that is a, you know, a complication that because you don't have those years of experience yet, you didn't think to talk about those kinds of things are what really can rattle you and erode your confidence and your happiness with your work. It's really hard right now in the veterinary profession, I think, trying to build our younger generation and not get them so worn down initially that they bail on being veterinarians. Honestly, I think the first 10 years are the roughest. You're still seeing new things all the time. You're still under the pressure of, you know, trying to communicate effectively with clients, and that comes with years of practice. The other thing that comes with that is listening to your clients. You can be right all day long in what you're recommending and what your diagnosis is, but if your client doesn't feel like you're listening to their concerns and what they're bringing forward to you, there's going to be such a huge disconnect. They're going to be angry at you. You're going to feel that anger, and nothing good is going to come of it. And so a lot of the professional challenges have just come with, I don't know age and wisdom and experience, but it's hard fought and hard won, getting to that place where you feel like, okay, I can talk to this person, and I can make them understand where we are now and how we got here. And yes, we've hit a bump in the road. We've hit a complication. This is why this can happen, and let's move forward from here. And yes, it sucks, but here we are, and let's move forward that having that level. Know of communication skills and confidence. It's not something that I had 20 years ago. It's something that I wish I could impart to the younger generation more quickly. But some of the pressures right now are even more challenging for them because of social media, right if I made a mistake or what was perceived as a mistake, even back in the day, it wasn't going to be splashed all over social media, and my name wouldn't be smeared and all this stuff. Whereas, you know, that's what happens now, it's like somebody goes on Facebook and they're like, never go to this terrible veterinarian who wanted to charge me X amount of dollars for this. And they were wrong, and they shouldn't have even wanted to run that test. And it's like if we knew what the test result was going to be at the time we ran it, then we wouldn't need to run the test. But people don't process things well, and they get on their computers and they get on social media, and they're bullies, and that has been a huge problem for the veterinary field to contend with. So I've kind of now jumped to talking about different issues. But to me, the professional challenges have always revolved around communication and people more than the animals themselves. Yeah,
Chrissy 26:13
I think coming from behavior and training as well. When I went through the Academy of dog trainers, there's a whole section on human counseling. There's a whole section on how to work with people. So if someone's going into working with animals, the animals are the easy part. They sure are. You are literally working with the humans, and so you have to learn how to communicate and work with them like you said. They need to be, felt, heard. Yeah, that's a huge thing. And then as far as the social media thing, yeah, same with behavior and training, oh, my God, it's it's like there's so much bad information out there. This is why I started this podcast. Because, you know, I wanted to get good information out there. I wanted to go deep and talk with colleagues and professionals and get the right information out there. So I'm getting fired up right now. Anyway, sorry, yeah, thank you. I mean, I feel like that's so important. Okay, so tell us about how the dogs that you've lived with or currently live with have influenced you. And then would you be willing to talk about Charlotte and your experience, you know, with her having the angio sarcoma,
Jennifer 27:24
sure. I mean, every animal we live with is different, and so, you know, I learn from them all the time. Probably the easiest kind of example of that is not with one of my dogs, but with my cat, banucci, who was my very first pet all on my own when I was vet student, and I adopted him from the blood donor program at the University of Minnesota. And I got him because he was feisty and fun, you know, like the ward nurses, where he was living in a cage in the hospital until I adopted him, and so the ward nurses would have to, like, put things in his water dish for him to play with, because he was just, he was crazy. And so I was like, great. He is the greatest cat. So I took him home. He's my very first cat. He was a behavior problem, like he would bite me and attack me, and it was this whole thing. I had to work with the behaviorist, RK Anderson, who I think he has passed by now. He was one of the pioneers back in Minnesota as far as behavior goes. He developed the gentle leader, if you heard of that. But anyway, he worked with me, with bannucci. And I mean, it was a long haul with all the positive reinforcement and having banucci on a leash in my apartment, because he would just attack me and bite me. It was the kind of thing where, honestly, he had to ultimately sleep in a crate, because he would, at night, sit on my back and bite my head. Like this cat was beyond all cats. He became one of our little case reports in my behavior class in vet school, because we went through all of the stuff that I had to do with him, yeah, I remember, actually, I had a roommate, and she said she thought I was in she said this in all seriousness too. She was like, I really think you're in an abusive relationship with your cat. Yeah. I was like, Huh? And that just made me cry. Honestly, it was so frustrating at the time, but eventually benucci became, like, my soulmate cat, like we got it down, and that's why, you know, like, I have things named after benucci, because he was the best cat in the world. He was my soulmate. He became wonderful. But those first couple years were really, really hard, but he also inviting me all the time. He taught me a lot about reading cats and reading their behavior cues, because they're different from dogs. And again, I had only lived with dogs. I was pretty good at dog behavior cues, but cats were a whole other ball game. Um, and you know, I have seen a lot of people in the veterinary field, both technicians and assistants and veterinarians, who are kind of afraid of cats. Benuchi really helped me not be afraid, even in cats that are really giving you every every reason to want to run from them. They're swatting, they're hissing. And, you know, I could just very calmly read him. I learned so much living with animals and watching their behavior and seeing the cues and having animals with different personalities, and there's different body cues and different breeds. Quite frankly, you know, you start to look at like, well, what is, what does the boxer do that's different from what the shepherd's going to do, that's different from what the Border Collie is going to do. They're all a little bit different in what they show you. You know, getting familiar with that and getting used to that is huge, yeah, having a variety of pets that I've lived with and very educational,
Chrissy 30:56
yeah? And I love that you're, you know, willing and open to learn from them. So eventually, did vanucci have any medical issues or nutrition issues that you think contributed to his behavior? Because one thing that I'm working with animals is I always look beyond the behavior and deeper.
Jennifer 31:13
Blood work was perfect. Everything was perfect, like he had been screened also for being part of the blood donor program. Like everything was perfect. He was just, I don't know if he was part feral when they got him, or what. It took a while. And quite frankly, what got us to the turning point was when I left Minnesota and moved to Michigan for my internship, and he came with me, and it was almost like this thing clicked, where he was like, Oh, I'm your cat. Because then, you know, like I was the constant, right? We had a whole new environment, new house, different roommate, that kind of calmed him down.
Chrissy 31:49
Yeah, that's huge, too, the environmental factors and consistency, that's huge. I've talked to so many people that their dogs had hermangiosarcoma, or you just hear stories, and from your perspective, do you just want to kind of talk about leading up to a little bit, if it's, you know, if it's not too hard for you?
Jennifer 32:06
Yeah, no, I can kind of be in the medical mode. You always learn about hemangiosarcoma in school, and we know there are certain breeds that we see it in, more commonly, German Shepherds certainly being the kind of the classic example of dogs who get hemangiosarcoma. Hemangiosarcoma, of course, is a cancer of blood vessels, and so it typically pops up first, either in the spleen, the liver or the heart. And so sometimes there is 100% no warning if it is just in the heart first, because it being a cancer of blood vessels, those blood vessels tend to rupture and bleed, and then that bleeding can be profuse and very rapid. And so if it happens in the heart, it will bleed, usually it's on the right atrium, and then it will rupture, bleed into the pericardial sac, and then that sac that covers the heart will compress the heart and basically, ultimately prevent the heart from filling. And so that'll be a very, very quick death, you know, most of the time. But then when it's in the spleen or the liver, sometimes we'll see a little bit of waxing and waning when they ultimately get brought in, it's usually either the plants are seeing some weakness or maybe there is an acute collapse. Again, it depends on how rapidly the tumor ruptures and bleeds, how quickly that bleeding continues versus sometimes the body is able to seal it off a little bit, so it'll bleed a bit. There's this lace, like network of lymphatics in the abdomen called the omentum, and that can sometimes form a patch, and that's a temporary fix, but sometimes then gives us more time. It's usually a very aggressive cancer. It's not very responsive to chemotherapy. That chemotherapy, depending on who you talk to, I've talked to a colleague who says she really regrets giving her dog that chemotherapy for hermangiosarc And so it was something that I was not really wanting to pursue for Charlotte, especially because being a veterinarian's dog, she had to be different Charlotte. So basically, really hadn't noticed anything recent. So probably six months before her hemangiosarcoma diagnosis. She had had a couple of what to me seemed like little focal seizure episodes. And this honestly may or may not be related, but I mention it because she had full body workup at the time. So she had had what I thought were focal seizures. I took her into a colleague I trust, down at Alameda east, the neurologist there, she said, you know, this really seems more like, almost like a vestibular or an ischemic event, ischemic meaning, you know, loss of blood flow. It's almost like a stroke. We did a full workup. So we did chest X rays, abdominal ultrasound, blood work, and then ultimately, a brain MRI, and we didn't find anything. And we even did a spinal tap and didn't. Find anything. And so we thought, okay, well, maybe idiopathic. We'll keep an eye on it. We could put her on some anti seizure meds. That didn't seem to go well, so I stopped that after two days, and then for about six months, she did fine. There was nothing. I mean, maybe she had one more of those episodes where she would just kind of look really dazed and out of it and want to fall over, and then she'd snap right out of it and be like crazy. Charlotte and then June 1, I ran a half marathon. I hadn't been home the night before because it was, you know, 4am get on the bus in Golden so I stayed at a hotel. Bard came and met me at the end of the race, and he said, Hey, Charlotte wouldn't eat this morning. I think she misses mom. And I thought, yeah, you know, there's been a lot of stress. We just finished the remodel of the first floor of our house. Okay, so maybe she's just stressed. And then I got home and she was out in the yard, barred, and she didn't get up to greet me, and that was not Charlotte. And so I eventually came up on the deck and I got her to eat some canned food, and she just was not seeming like her happy self. And so I started palpating her abdomen, because that's what I do. Always feeling hyper splenic tumor, which she wasn't allowed to get, as I told her, and I could feel this nodule under her skin that had not been there earlier in the week. You know, it was just under her skin. So I really, at that point, was not thinking hemangiosarcoma, but I got her in on Monday morning, right away to one of my hospitals that I do surgery for. They were able to line up on a radiologist to come in and do an ultrasound. We did the blood work while we were waiting on the radiologist to get there, and she was anemic and low platelet count. Started shaving her for the ultrasound, and noticed all this bruising on her abdomen, and I thought, Oh, crap. First of all, and her spleen and liver looked good. The spleen, he said, Honestly, looked more like it was something more infiltrative, like a lymphoma. But all through like, where I could feel the nodule, and then she developed, had developed all these other nodules, and then he was seeing these. They were basically blood filled nodules all throughout the muscle of her abdominal wall and in the subcutaneous tissue. So we got a sample of one. But I was like, Oh crap, it's angiosarcoma. So we got home and was trying to process it, and told Bard, like, I don't think we're gonna have a dog in a week. He was like, Well, what do we do? What do we do? And, like, I had to switch back to veterinarian mode. Like, oh my gosh. Like, I actually, I need to help my husband process this. I need to process this, and we should probably get somebody else to weigh in on this, because it shouldn't just be me at this point, being the veterinarian and the pet owner is a really, it becomes very complicated, like, your brain doesn't quite process things as well. I got her an appointment with an oncologist for Thursday, and in the meantime, like I started her on some steroid. I talked to another friend, veterinarian colleague, who was like, gosh, I've seen lymphoma do this. And I thought, if it's lymphoma, we have a fighting chance. And so went and talked to the oncologist, and she was like, Guys, I think it's really hemantio sarcoma. I'm so sorry. You know, I can't entirely say it's not lymphoma. And I said, Can we give her something in case it's lymphoma? So we did an else bar test, so that's basically a chemo injection that if it had been lymphoma, it only works against lymphoma, I guess, is the way to state that. And then we monitored her, and I just tried to give her the best weekend possible. I you know, I was measuring the one main nodule that I had felt. First, I was measuring it to see if it was shrinking. And I was like, gosh, is she getting better? Is she getting worse? And there was all these ups and downs all weekend. In order to give her, like, full lymphoma treatment, they wanted to do a full body CT and biopsy. And I was like, I just don't want to put her through that, if she's not gonna have more than a few days. Like, I didn't want to do it. But by Monday, I was like, Well, gosh, maybe she's a little better. Maybe we should do it. If it's lymphoma, we gotta fight and then I left the house and she was fine in the hallway and barred her to thump and he went back and she had passed. So I have to think that, of course, it was hemangiosarcoma, despite all of our wishful thinking for lymphoma, which sounds like a crazy thing to be hoping for lymphoma, but it's more treatable, and I have to think it was also in her heart, and that she had one of those very quick bleeds, or she had an arrhythmia secondary to all of it. But either way, it got her heart, and she went very quickly, and she didn't let me say goodbye because I wasn't home.
Jennifer 39:40
She did that. She did that. Yeah,
Jennifer 39:43
so we had her a week after her diagnosis. So those things, you know, and it's hard, because I've had many clients over the years where I've either gone in and done the splenectomy, trying to buy them more time, and still, even with that and with chemotherapy, they only. Last a couple weeks, and I've had plenty of these clients too, where it's like, it's only a six year old dog, and, you know, I've done a tplo, and then eight weeks later, they come up with hemangiosarcoma, hemo abdomen and pass, and it's just like, Gosh, I wish for all of these patients, we had a crystal ball and I could tell you exactly you know how much time we have, because, you know, we always kind of guess. I've always had shepherds that have lived to be at least 10. I never talked about Tyler. He was our other family shepherd that we got after to be, um, yeah, they've always lived longer, and so at eight and a half, I did not expect to lose Charlotte. I've always told my pets, they're not allowed to get cancer. They have to die of something else, more old age ish related. Yeah, she defied
Chrissy 40:48
me. She didn't listen to you at all. No, she didn't.
Jennifer 40:51
It was not fair, although I will say like, I really feel like she was hanging on, and the night before, when I really sensed that she was maybe struggling a little. I said, you know, Charlotte, I'll be okay.
Chrissy 41:03
Yeah, yeah. It's still hard. Like, I mean, I still cry sometimes too, yeah. But from my perspective, me working with Charlotte, you know, I did day training twice a week with her, just to get her out and into the world and just help her with life skills and feeling comfortable and safe. The things I noticed is that she would get tired so much easier. She would want to take a lot more breaks. She would pant a lot more, yeah, and the other thing was the sudden swelling in her back legs. Yeah,
Jennifer 41:36
that happened that was two weeks before the diagnosis, and then that got better, yeah, on antibiotics. And so I was hopeful, and her X rays had looked fine. At first I was worried about a bone tumor. She got better on antibiotics. And so I thought, oh, okay, so that was a spider bite, because I've dealt with those before, but yeah, then it came back. Yeah,
Chrissy 41:58
didn't seem to be painful. She just had a chubby legs.
Jennifer 42:01
Yeah, you know, yeah. When the radiologist was doing her ultrasound, and I mentioned that that had happened, he really took a good look at the blood vessels of the, you know, we were looking for a clot, looking for tumor that would have been occluding the blood flow to either the back legs, and couldn't find anything. And so that's the thing, too. I think sometimes with these hemangiosarcomas is they can kind of wax and wane depending on if they're bleeding and not bleeding, and all that kind of stuff.
Chrissy 42:28
Yeah. And this happened with one of our boxers, Bill, you know, yeah, that's what he had. But it was on his spleen, like all this. He was fine, and then all sudden, the next morning, he wouldn't move. Yeah, went and got an ultrasound, and like, he's got his spleen, rap, you know, tumor ruptured. So we had two more days with him, and then we said goodbye. And one of my other clients, who is a German Shepherd, she never really got a diagnosis, because it happened so quickly. He woke up in the morning. He was didn't want to go for a walk. He was panting, and he threw up, and then thump, and he was gone. That's what it sounds like as well. So it's, it's rough, man, it's just sudden. It can be sudden, so, well,
Jennifer 43:11
we just never get enough time. Yeah, that's true with people too. Like people die unexpectedly and accidents happen, and you know, you're just never guaranteed anything in this life, and it's just a reminder of that. But again, with our pets, you know, we want them to live longer. They're such an important part of our lives, and so when they leave us, when we're not thinking that it's even remotely a possibility, it's just, it's very jarring. Yeah,
Chrissy 43:39
a lot of the surgeries that you do is the tplo surgery. So can you tell us a little, just a little more about it? You know what to look for, what the surgery entails, behavioral and physical symptoms, and then just care afterwards?
Jennifer 43:54
Sure. So the tplo stands for tibial plateau leveling osteotomy, and it's a surgery that treats instability in the knee secondary to cranial cruciate ligament injury. So the cranial cruciate ligament in the dog is the same as the anterior cruciate ligament that we have, that you and I have. It's named differently, because dogs stand on four legs, so anything towards the head is cranial towards the tail, is caudal. People stand upright, so we are anterior and posterior, but it's basically the ACL that we're talking about. The tricky thing with dogs, there's a couple tricky things. One is it's not just usually one acute athletic injury. It's not like people, we go skiing, we fall, we twist our leg and we blow our cruciate in dogs, that can happen, but more commonly, it's a degenerative disease where that ligament is slowly fraying and breaking down through mechanisms that we don't fully understand. You know, in some dogs, I think we've certainly linked that there's some autoimmune stuff going on. I think boxer. Are kind of classic for this, where they have a lot of inflammation. Quite frankly, we just see it so commonly. It is the most common orthopedic disease in dogs, and we don't fully understand why we see it so frequently. So then part of the issue you can't just go in and successfully replace the ligament in a dog, because that same degenerative process takes out whatever we put in its place, so that next ligament, or artificial ligament, also breaks down or doesn't hold and so there's still people actively working on that out in, you know, the research world, mostly in universities, nobody has come up with the golden ticket of this is the magic way to replace a cruciate ligament in a dog. Tplo procedure came about. There was a veterinarian named Barclay Slocum. And I feel like it was back in the mid 80s that he developed this, but he recognized that the top of a tibia, so the tibial plateau in a dog has kind of a downward slope to it, whereas, again, the difference from people, we have a pretty flat top of our tibia. And so with that downward slope, what happens when you lose the function of the cruciate ligament is now the femur kind of slides down that slope, and the tibia slides forward, so it's thrusting forward towards the head. So we call that cranial tibial thrust. You could also call it cranial drawer, if you're holding the knee and you're able to move the tibia forward relative to the femur. His thought was that part of the reason that any of these suture or replacements fail is because the forces working in the knee, and the dog with this downward slope to the top of the tibia is makes it too much for any prosthetic to handle, and so his idea was to flatten the top of the tibia in a dog so that it can't slip around and the femur is not sliding off the back. We make a semi circle cut in the top of the tibia and rotate that section of bone in place to get it to almost flat. We're typically aiming for about five degrees, technically, because that has been shown to eliminate the cranial tibial thrust, but also not cause a caudal tibial thrust. And then we plate the bone in that new position, so plate and screws holds it in place while it's healing. Once that bone is healed in the new position, the plate and screws don't actually need to be there, but as long as they're not causing any discomfort, dog didn't get an infection from usually from licking or anything like that, then the plate and screws can stay if they cause a problem, if they're causing discomfort, plate and screws can come out, and we're not undoing the procedure, because the bone is already healed. So typically, full healing takes about three months, and it's a gradual increase in activity along the way. Typically, the first six weeks is when I tell clients, this is the most critical time for bone healing. This is where if your dog is too active, we can see something go wrong. We used to have a lot more problems with plates not holding up and screws breaking or bending. There's been a lot of advances over the years. Right now we have locking plate technology, where the screws the threads lock into threads in the plate, and it creates a much stronger construct. We have, certainly multiple sizes of plates, because there's a large variety of differences in dog bone sizes and body sizes, and so we are able to plate more appropriately than like when I was first starting out, back in the early 2000s learning the tplo procedure, where we basically had a couple of sizes of plates. And I was like, Oh my gosh, how can I put this little plate on this great dane? And so, you know, a lot of advances along the way. It's still the gold standard for cruciate instability in dogs, tplo has really stood the test of time in terms of giving us the most reliable recovery. There's veterinarians who really strongly believe in physical therapy for all cruciates, and I would definitely disagree with them on the really unstable knees, and especially the ones that have meniscal injuries, because those dogs remain painful. And yeah, you can get them to use the leg, and you can get a lot of scar tissue to build up, but scar tissue is a precursor to arthritis, and so you're gonna have decreased range of motion long term. And so it was not something I would ever consider for my own dog. But some people really like going that route instead, and that is their prerogative.
Chrissy 49:18
So instead of surgery, they'll, they'll try to do just, you know, like, therapy, okay, got it, yeah, and that was one of my questions. Like, some of the behavior symptoms that you see are just gait and stuff like bunny hopping and all these kind of thing. Are these dogs in pain when they're,
Jennifer 49:35
yeah, any dog who's limping, I consider limping to be pain, because a dog isn't going to fake it, you know, if they're holding the leg up, something's bugging them. Now, there's a tricky thing here too, because sometimes the really tiny dogs, they're so fast on three legs, that getting them to recover from an injury, sometimes it takes them longer to use a leg, because. So fast on three and they can just zip around. It's like you have to force them to walk slowly, to use the leg again, because it's more work trying to rehab those muscles. So in general, a limping dog has some degree of discomfort. Using words like pain and suffering, I try to steer clear of that, right? It seems more judgmental to say things that way, but a dog who is limping and not using the leg is exhibiting some form of discomfort, for sure, and so we want to address that bunny hopping isn't kind of the classic for a cruciate ligament injury. Usually, when people describe bunny hopping, I'm looking more at like a hip issue, it's more, you know, toe tapping or holding a leg up altogether where you're seeing that they're favoring something for a knee or something further down. There's different gaits that you see with different injuries, for sure, but then a lot of times, too, you just have to get some hands on and figure out what's going on, right?
Chrissy 50:59
The other thing post surgery, you hear a lot about dogs where the other leg goes. You know what I mean? First of all, yeah, is it just comp compensatory issues? Or is that just like genetically predisposed? Or what are ways that people can maybe try and prevent that, or all
Jennifer 51:19
of the above. So statistically speaking, at least 50% some of the newer studies say 60% of dogs who blow the cruciate ligament in one knee are going to do it on the other side within a year. For the most part, that seems to be just because they have the same genetics affecting both knees. Again, this is a degenerative process. We've got same things probably going on in one knee just a little bit ahead of the other knee. You know, people are like, Oh my gosh, my tplo and this knee caused my dog to blow the cruciate in the other side. Well, no, that's, that's a very strange way to draw that conclusion. Both knees are pretty symmetrical and have the same genetics going on. So it's very likely that it was already starting to brew on the other side at the time that the first side blew. Does it help if we can get your dog using the first side, you know, the first side that they injured sooner rather than later? Yeah, because yes, they are putting more pressure on the quote, unquote good leg the entire time that they're favoring the affected leg. And so that may not help, but it doesn't cause the cruciate to blow. It's one of those things where helping people understand that, yeah, it's a disease. And so because it's not like your dog went skiing and fell, it's not like having to put more weight on the other side is a cause of the cruciate to blow. Your dog can walk very well on three legs. There's a lot of three legged dogs out there, but if your dog already has the predilection to develop a cruciate ligament injury, then there's probably, honestly no good way to prevent it, because, again, we don't fully understand the disease process that is causing the degeneration of the ligament, right? All we can do is treat the injured leg as we see it, and hope that we get that leg back in use soon, and then see what happens on the other side. But quite frankly, a lot of these dogs, even at the time of the initial diagnosis, have some evidence. At least on X ray is already brewing on the other side. We see some inflammation there, even if it's not grossly unstable. Yeah,
Chrissy 53:25
it's interesting to think about it as a disease, you know, because you just think you know, orthopedic issues, you don't think really about as diseases. So, yeah, you know. So it's interesting. But So Charlotte, our little friend, also you did a tplo surgery on her, and one of the big things that post op we wanted to do was to keep her brain happy and give her a lot of mental stimulation so she wasn't going out of her mind bored, and So she wasn't driving you guys crazy. Right squirrel moment. So in honor of Charlotte, I created a free mini course called Charlotte's expert brain games, mental enrichment for tplo recovery. And this is a great resource that you can use to help you and your dog recover from surgery, so that you both aren't going crazy. And you can find the link in the show notes, but that is a huge important part of post op recovery is keeping the brain active, because mental stimulation can be just as tiring as physical activity. So if they're not able to go on their walks and that kind of stuff, they're going to need some sort of activity, and brain games are a huge thing to keep them happy. Yeah. Would you be willing to talk about the mental health issues of veterinarians. I know there's, there's a high suicide rate in this profession. Can you talk about what you think contributes to that?
Jennifer 54:50
Yeah, sure. You know, I think mental health is a continuum, and there's certainly a lot of factors at play. I think the record. Mission of the kind of widespread problem within the veterinary field, really, kind of first came into the more public consciousness and awareness when Sophia Yin, back in 2014 took her own life, and she was a very well beloved member of the veterinary community, a pioneer of positive reinforcement training in dogs. And think people realized, well, wow, if someone who is as accomplished and well loved as Sophia could be suffering and take her own life like we have a problem. And I think the numbers too, just people started realizing it is a larger number than the kind of general population. Part of it is the stresses and strains. Veterinarians in general are very driven. We're very empathetic. Our love for animals often supersedes our even willingness to take good care of ourselves, right? We will often put our own wellness and physical and emotional well being on the line to do, to go above and beyond, to help a patient and a client over time, that kind of taps the well dry. I think, you know, there's a lot of veterinarians dealing with compassion fatigue and burnout, but other things too. You know, there's a lot of financial stress and strain, the cost of going through the veterinary education and all the student loans weighs heavily on our younger generation of vets. I already mentioned, kind of the pressures of social media and the bullying. Bullying is a big part of it. That's honestly what ultimately, I think was the problem for Sophia yen as she was being bullied, we just didn't have the resources back then of what's available now to try to help with that. But yeah, so in general, people do need to be a little bit more kind, particularly on social media. The problem is too you know, when we lose a patient, or we have a procedure that doesn't go well or develops complications, veterinarians, again, we tend to be very hard on ourselves already, and we're perfectionists a lot of the times. And so if we're not giving ourselves compassion, and then we're getting piled on from somebody else complaining or creating a spectacle on social media, that's what's really draining and hard to deal with. And it just gets to the point where I think some people are like, I'm not staying in this profession. Everybody is sucking the joy out of it. Then you get people who just, you know, they don't see a way out, because they have all these loans to pay, and so they can't quit their job. And so I think that's a big part of it. There is an organization called Not one more vet that offers support and resources, and there's some very good people who moderate that Facebook page. It's a closed group that way you can go there for support among colleagues. It's a bigger problem than I can even delve into here. You know, again, it's a continuum for mental health, right? Like we all can get through or go through some dark times, and sometimes it's hard for people to see that there's a way out that doesn't involve ending it. Yeah,
Chrissy 58:12
I think you know, if you have a problem with a veterinarian you're working with, go straight to them, ask, them what's going on. Why this? Why that? Instead of going on social media and complaining, yeah, yeah, communication is key, yeah, and just just asking directly, I feel like a lot of people have lost that skill.
Jennifer 58:35
Any complaint that you make and your tone like it, that's something that the veterinarian has to take in to certain degree, and over time, like, you know, if veterinarian sees 20 clients in a day, and half of them are complaining about this and whining about this, and then it's like, wow, that was really draining. So be the nice person.
Chrissy 58:56
Yeah, 20. I mean, that's a lot. I mean, I, you know, my max is three clients a day, because that's all I can and so like 20 clients a day. That's, I don't even know how you do it, but, well, I'm
Jennifer 59:09
not, because I'm not doing that many surgeries a day. But you know, my colleagues out there in private practice, right? You're seeing a lot.
Chrissy 59:16
Is there anything that you would like to discuss or that's weighing on your mind right now with our audience, yes.
Jennifer 59:23
So in Colorado, one of the ballot initiatives is called Proposition 129 that is asking the general public whether or not there should be created a mid level practitioner within veterinary medicine. So it's interesting, because the vast majority of veterinarians and the industry does not see a need for a mid level practitioner, nor do we want it. And because they couldn't get this through the legislature, and because not a lot of veterinarians are on board with this idea, they decided to make a ballot initiative and have people vote on it. I think it's really misleading. So they're calling it a VPA, so the veterinary professional associate VPA, I think is misleading, because when people think of a PA and the human side of things, you know, a lot of us see a PA instead of a doctor, due to availability, the PAs have a very good level of training. They have their own accountability. They have licensing, and they don't have to work directly under a doctor being supervised by a doctor. The way this has been proposed in veterinary medicine for this mid level practitioner is they would be under the direct supervision of a veterinarian, and it would be that veterinarian's license on the line the veterinarian is countable, and yet, now they're saying that this person who has become a VPA, this mid level practitioner, who would have gone through just online training and one internship, and so that would be the only hands on stuff, everything else would be online, that this person would be able to do diagnostics, administer treatment and prescribe medications. And then, of course, most concerning to me is do what they call simple or basic surgeries. The problem is, you know, when I initially heard that, I thought, well, maybe, yeah, lacerations or something, you know, something in the emergency setting where they could sew up a laceration. But that's not what they're talking about. They're talking about having these VPAs do spays and neuters, which are not simple procedures, right? Like, just because something is common does not make it simple. So a spay is an abdominal procedure. You have to find the correct organs and only tie off those vessels, and there are a lot of complications that even seasoned veterinarians can run into. People coming out straight out of vet school, after four years of rigorous training and multiple internships and and externships, still don't feel comfortable doing spays and neuters for quite a period of time, until they've been in practice a while, and so to think that a minimally trained VPA could come off of an predominantly online training and be capable of operating on people's pets without there being catastrophic errors, is pretty alarming to me, and I know a lot of the vets that I've talked to are also very alarmed At it being their liability on the line. You know, I think one argument I've heard from veterinarians is, well, then don't hire these people into your practice. The problem is, there are so many corporate owned practices out there that they may not have a say. Basically, you know, the corporation may look at the bottom line and say, I can pay this VPA half of what I would pay another veterinarian, and I can ask them to do a lot of the tasks of the veterinarian, and it'll fall on the other veterinarian in the practice. It'll fall on their shoulders to supervise and make sure everything's going okay. And that's not fair. That's asking a lot of people. And yet, if you're working for a corporation, you're not the one in control. What I really see is that this at least a couple of the people who I know personally were involved in the initial stages of the planning of having this idea of a VPA and having this happen up at CSU. They're in corporate medicine. They have not been in clinical practice for decades, and they don't really know what feet on the ground, what it looks like in these veterinary hospitals? You know, I think when people see, yeah, mid level practitioner, it'll help keep costs down. And, you know, everybody's worried about costs in veterinary medicine, sure, but do you really think that the corporations are going to pass on the cost savings to the client? No, they're going to pass it on to their shareholders. They're going to want to pay people less and then take more profit and pass it on to the shareholders. So you're going to have the quality of service go down, and yet the cost to the consumer will remain the same. And so I really, I think a lot of vets, including myself, are really worried that this is going to devalue what we offer. It's going to devalue our level of education. Because, again, clients won't necessarily understand the difference between a VPA and a veterinarian if it's presented as, oh, this person is capable of all of these things. And so I think a lot of us are really concerned about patient safety and public trust. Veterinarians, we, for long, long time, have really been held up as trustworthy within the public eye, and I want to maintain that. And I think if we start compromising patient safety, that that's not going to hold Yeah. I
Chrissy 1:04:31
mean, I think it all goes in line with our health care of the humans, you know, the health care of our animals too. So like the corporate aspect of the people making decisions, not being in the trenches, you know, legally wise, the veterinarian who's legally responsible for this VPA, and then the fallout, if there's a major complication that, you know, the VPA cannot handle, then the animal suffers and the human suffers. I was just, you know, reading. Something about veterinarian who works at the Humane Society, and she she's also a hard No, and she's done 1000s of quote, unquote, simple surgeries that have turned out to be super complicated because of all these other underlying issues. Those are a lot of the main concerns, which I can see,
Jennifer 1:05:18
yeah, yeah. And this idea too, that it will somehow resolve the backlog. Well, they're really, honestly with spays and neuters, at least out in private practice and general practice. There isn't a backlog, per se, because there a lot of rescues already get the spay and neuter done before these animals get adopted. There are a lot of low cost spay neuter clinics. It's not like there's this spare or in every veterinary hospital where they could have somebody just cranking out spays and neuters all day. If only we had enough people, if only we had this extra person, because you need all the support staff as well. Right where we do have a shortage is veterinary technicians. You know, there are not enough vet techs coming out of school and staying in the field, because it's a tough field to work in. We definitely have a shortage of support staff in that respect. Recently, they went through the process of making sure that our veterinary technicians are licensed and accountable, and then we've also expanded their scope of practice, and really ironed out what we can expect a vet tech to be trained to do and what they cannot do. And that's a really important thing to distinguish. And I just worry, because I know in some cases, on the human side, with the physician's assistant, there is so much gray area between what we can expect someone to do and not to do that. It really needs to be ironed out ahead of time so that there's a full understanding of what level of education confers, you know, what types of responsibilities and abilities? Yep.
Chrissy 1:06:53
And so what you're saying is a hard No.
Jennifer 1:06:57
I'm definitely saying a hard No, hard now I have one more point on that. Again, people talk about there being a veterinarian shortage. The AVMA has conducted extensive studies that shows that there's really not a veterinarian shortage, and we are working towards the ever expanding population and an expanding population of our pets. And there are, I believe, about six new vet schools opening in the coming years, and so there is a plan to expand our workforce. However, what's really the problem right now is a maldistribution of veterinarians, rather than a shortage. So yeah, rural areas are underserved. Hands down, absolutely adding a VPA is not going to fix that, because the VPA has to work under a vet anyway. It's not like you can send these mid level practitioners out to the rural areas to fill a void on their own. No. So this is where I just have a lot of concerns about how this is being presented to the public. And I think people will look at it at face value and think, oh, that sounds like a good idea, and maybe some cost savings where it really, I think, is not going to help. Thank you
Chrissy 1:08:03
for sharing that and explaining that. Because even I'm like, I don't even understand what this is, what this is like, it's confusing, trying to figure it all out, because it's so subtle and complex. So yeah, thank you for sharing that, Jenny, if people would like to get a hold of you and ask you some questions or contact you about anything. What is the name of your business and your website where they can reach you?
Jennifer 1:08:27
Sure the name of the business is sunitas Valley veterinary surgery. So that's sVv s dot vet in general. I don't have an office, so I work with general practitioners out in different hospitals, and so it's not like people can make an appointment directly with me. You really need to be a client of one of the hospitals that I serve. Or occasionally, if you ask your vet if they're willing to bring me in for either a consult or a surgery, we can arrange that as well, but that does need to be through your vet. Okay,
Chrissy 1:09:00
perfect. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I We talked about a boatload of information, so I really appreciate it, and hopefully people learn some really good information. I appreciate you.
Jennifer 1:09:14
Well. I appreciate you, and thanks for the opportunity. This was fun. Well,
Chrissy 1:09:18
there you go. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you got some insights that you can put into action today. If you want to get in touch with Jamie, please go ahead and do that. I know she would be happy to talk with you. Dogs truly are special beings and can change lives if we're open to what they have to teach us, this not only impacts you and your dog, but can also make a positive impact on the world. If you're finding value in this podcast, the best way to support us is by leaving a review up to five stars and sharing it with your family, friends and fellow dog lovers around the world. Lastly, I'd love to connect with you. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook at the nature of animals and visit my website at www. Dot theanimalnature.com. Until next time be curious, show compassion and have courage. You.
