Vet Story Time: Colleagues & Fear
Sometimes a veterinarian has a client who is suicidal.
They don’t really ever tell you this directly, but it happens. While our main duty of care is to our animal patients, we can’t discount the need to be there for our clients in a professional setting. You have to look out for them when you can, and in light of those atrocious, guilt-tripping posts going viral about being in the room for euthanasia, I wanted to share this story with you.
No cute pictures or gifs on this one. I’m serious.
As a veterinarian you don’t remember every euthanasia you perform. You hold the recent ones in your heart and mind for a while, but you certainly lose count as the years go by. These moments were intense for the pet owners, but you have to let them wash over you or you end up going mad with the grief and pain. But some you always remember.
My very second euthanasia was a little terrier called Roxie. And Roxie had congestive heart failure.
You can manage congestive heart failure for a while, and we’d been doing so, bu tit’s only managed, not cured. There’s no new heart transplant waiting for that dog, only a controlled death when the time comes.
Roxie’s owner was never… well, there was always something odd about him in those months of her treatment. Something intense that I couldn’t quite explain. A little odd for sure, but I was working in a new town far from home, where everybody seemed a little odd, in their own way. I was a newly graduated veterinarian and pretty green, everything was on the brink of overwhelming all the time and I probably missed warning signs.
But the day finally came when Roxie needed to be put to sleep. She was suffering, and not breathing all that well. And honestly, even with the best medicine available at the time, we’d run out of ways to make her comfortable. She couldn’t have a new heart, all we could offer was a smooth, peaceful death.
We always gave people the option: they could chose to stay for the euthanasia if they wanted to, for as much as they wanted to, or we could take the pet out the back.
He’d already made up his mind.
He chose not to stay with her, to let us take her out the back.
But he sobbed and wailed and assured the little dog, earnestly, that he would “See her soon. I’ll see you soon.”
And it wasn’t until I had already carried her, gasping, out to the back when those words dawned on me.
He wasn’t burying her at home. She wasn’t to be cremated. He hadn’t wanted to see her peaceful body after she passed.
So when exactly was he going to see her again, ‘soon’?
I didn’t know what to do. I was a new vet, still green and wet behind the ears, and vet school hadn’t prepared me very well for what to do if you think your client is going to kill themselves.
So I told the practice manager, because that’s what a new vet does when they’re stuck. I was scared. This little dog needed death, but she was quite possibly the only thing keeping this human alive, and he was not prepared for her death. Or rather, he was potentially prepared in a very wrong way.
I am eternally grateful that the practice manager went and talked to him. Talked about the dog’s life, talked him into cremation instead so he had to wait at least two weeks for her ashes to be returned, talked about making a space for them at home. Talked him into having someone else pick him up from the clinic.
Quite probably talked him into living.
I often regret that I can’t do more for people’s pain. But on my mind right now is the thought, what if he saw those guilt tripping posts. Those awful, mean-spirited, judgemental, cruel digs at someone’s personal grief.
Would he be able to stand it now, all those years removed?
What if someone else in a similar mindset reads them, with the grief still fresh?
I hope with all my heart that those posts don’t cause someone to come to harm, but I am afraid.
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