bring caffeine and tiger balm

main @matchacatmetal. vet assistant/vet receptionist. cat lady.

[4yuel]

[justadreamxx]

Veterinary medicine isn’t just caring for animals. It’s carrying the weight of sick patients, grieving families, financial limitations, medical decisions, emergencies, and sometimes the anger of frustrated clients. Burnout happens when you spend so much time caring for everyone else that there’s little left to care for yourself. Being blamed, yelled at, or verbally attacked when costs, outcomes, or policies don’t align with a client’s expectations can be exhausting.

People see us cuddling puppies and kittens. They don’t see us wrestling frightened, painful, or fractious animals that are trying to bite, scratch, kick, or escape. Every day requires physical strength, quick thinking, and constant awareness to keep both patients and staff safe. No one spends years learning, works long shifts, misses breaks, gets scratched, bitten, cried on, and carries the emotional weight of life-and-death decisions because they’re chasing money. We do it because we care about animals. Hearing ‘you’re only in it for the money’ cuts deeper than many people realize.

What wears many veterinary professionals down isn’t hard work—it’s being told their compassion isn’t real after they’ve spent all day proving otherwise.🐾❤️

BE KIND TO YOUR VET STAFF.

[talesfromtreatment]

I made a client cry today.

She was in because her cat is very very itchy and has lost a lot of weight. We did bloodwork, which she could barely afford... and we are by far the least expensive clinic in the area. We discussed flea control as I found flea dirt, but she couldn't afford that on top of the bloodwork.

So I went into our donated meds bin and found a nexgard sample, which i applied for her.

I turned around to make a quick note in the record about it and she started sniffling.

This poor woman is quite elderly and just lost her husband a couple weeks ago. The cat was his cat and he doted on it. She wants so badly to do right by his cat.

I hugged her for several minutes while she cried on me.

If you ask most vet techs, we will joke that we do this job because we don't want to deal with people. But it's also humbling to realize how many things that have happened in my life over the last few years that let me be at *this* clinic on *this* day and that i just happened to be the one available to get *this* appointment... where i was able to give her a small kindness in a harsh world, and a much needed moment of human connection.

So yeah. I made a client cry today, and I'm glad I did. She needed it a lot.

[talesfromtreatment]

re: cat weights-

A lot of the vets I've worked with have not brought up cat weights until they are very much obese because a lot of owners are like "my cat isn't fat he's big boned!" so they don't bother much beyond "Please don't let him/her gain more weight than this"

I did say "average" which is not the same as "all". These weights are from 10 years at a cat only hospital and nearly 10 years at a shelter.

Yes, being overweight is actually quite bad for cats resulting in early arthritis and significantly increasing their risks of diabetes.

13 pounds as a healthy weight is quite a large cat. 17 pounds, 90% chance the domestic cat is overweight. Outliers are not part of the average. Your cat is size georg adn will not be counted.

[talesfromtreatment]

And to show that an overweight cat can be overweight without being a full on sphere

Mallorn, before I put him on a diet. How many people would honestly be able to say this cat was actually overweight and needed to lose 4 pounds? Not many.

And to show how hard weight gain and loss can be to determine on a long haired cat

13 pounds Tumbleweed

~ 11 pound tumbleweed.

His initial weight gain was 30% of his ideal (10#). 11 pounds is a 15% total loss from 13 pounds, and 20% of his ideal weight.

Those are significant amounts. Imagine gaining 30% of your current body weight. Imagine losing 15% of your current body weight.

You can't tell just by looking.

There should be a waist when the hair is smoothed down. You should be able to feel ribs with barely any pressure with your hands flat against the sides.

[cruelfeline]

A few days ago, one of my colleagues saw a one year old kitty for sudden onset seizures. First thought was idiopathic epilepsy, but:

Turned out that someone in the family had brought lilies into the house and put them up high, thinking that the cat wouldn't get to them. Alas, even a lick of pollen from lilies causes fatal kidney damage in cats.

Said cat was not epileptic. Her kidneys were fried, so she lost her life at one year of age.

If you have cats in the house, that means no lilies, no matter how high up they are.

[magicman1972]

No lilies. Ever. Not even once. If someone gives you a bouquet with lilies, throw the lilies out before you ever bring those flowers into your house. Just breathing the pollen in the air can kill a cat.

If you have cats, please take this seriously. No lilies.

[pinkglitterstrap]

girl in vet med who’s gonna be ok

[hapalopus]

Whenever I feel like hope is lost, I google "tarantula saved from burning building" and read all the stories about firefighters rescuing one of the world's most hated animals because they're someone's pet and it doesn't matter if you're scared of spiders or think they're gross, their lives have worth and they deserve to live just as much as any other pet

[oediex]

"You're anthropomorphising animals."

Or maybe I'm zoomorphising humans. Maybe I don't think animals are like us - maybe I think we are like animals.

We fight for our lives as they do. We enjoy the sunshine or the softness of freshly fallen snow. We know friendship. We feel pain. We grief. We dream. We are curious creatures.

Maybe I just don't think we're special.

Or that we all are.

Yeah, I think that might be it.

[great-and-small]

I cried with my tech after euthanizing her amazingly sweet geriatric rat but on the drive home underneath the ache of grief I realized I felt such gratitude. To be in a line of work where every single day I get to bear witness to the astounding human capacity for love. How could I ever doubt it when the depth of such emotion is demonstrated to me nearly every day? We’re such remarkable animals with the way we meaningfully bond with so many other species and the way we love things so hard. Not just dogs and cats but rats and birds, songs, stories, languages, food, each other; is there anything more human?

Tonight I will be toasting to celebrate the life of one very very beloved rat. How lucky I am to do the work I do and how lucky I am to be human!

[amongthefur]

Quite frankly, it's embarrassing the amount of times I see veterinary staff answer client questions by typing the question directly into google and using the AI overview. You can't make fun of clients for using the internet to diagnose their pet when you are doing literally the same thing. We gotta get some training on reliable sources going again.

[orcinus-veterinarius]

Learning anything about marine mammal training will make you re-evaluate so much of your relationship with your own pets. There is so much force involved in the way we handle domestic animals. Most of it isn’t even intentional, it just stems from impatience. I’m guilty of it myself!

But with the exception of certain veterinary settings where the animal’s health is the immediate priority, why is it so important to us that animals do exactly what we want exactly when we want it? Why do we have to invent all these tools and contraptions to force them to behave?

When a whale swam away from a session, that was that. The trainer just waited for them to decide to come back. If they flat out refused to participate in behaviors, they still got their allotment of fish. Nothing bad happened. Not even when 20-30 people were assembled for a procedure, and the whale chose not to enter the medical pool. No big deal. Their choice and comfort were prioritized over human convenience.

It’s almost shocking to return to domestic animal medicine afterwards and watch owners use shock collars and chokers and whips to control their animals. It’s no wonder that positive reinforcement was pioneered by marine mammal trainers. When you literally can’t force an animal to do what you want, it changes your entire perspective.

I want to see that mindset extended to our domestic animals.

[hollowboobtheory]

ancient greek vet trying to neuter a hydra but alas...

[petiteclover]

JANE GOODALL

apr. 3. 1934 - oct. 1. 2025

[amongthefur]

It is unhinged that some people's takeaway from how many veterinary workers are struggling is that we have too many weak people in vet med. It is not an employees fault that their coworkers are bullies or downright nasty. And while we are all responsible for our own behavior, the work environment in clinics perpetuates these issues. There are many people that only behave if rules are enforced. Yes, even in a field that is supposedly dedicated to helping animals. You are more likely to be changed by your envirnoment than to change it singlehandedly.

We should all be trying to make our workplaces better, but there is only so much that can be done without collective action. We also need to examine how the structure and culture of vet med in general encourages shitty behavior and burnout. Together we can make a better world, but we don't get there by blaming people for struggling when they are handed more than they can take. Likewise, we can't minimize our own impact and behaviors that are harmful.

[friendraichu]

NBC News: Outbreaks of rabies rising across the U.S., CDC surveillance suggests

'They would never have known:' New warnings about rabies outbreaks as cases rise in the U.S.

The CDC's rabies team says it's tracking 15 different likely outbreaks from New York to Oregon.

"As rabies seems to be spreading more in wildlife, veterinarians are especially worried about vaccine hesitancy spreading among pet owners, a dangerous trend that could lead to more dogs — and their owners — becoming infected. A 2023 study published in the journal Vaccine found in a nationally representative sample of Americans that nearly 40% believed canine vaccines were unsafe and 37% believed that vaccines could lead their dogs to develop cognitive issues, such as autism."

jesus christ are people stupid about vaccines. you think your dog can get autism??? so you'd rather risk it dying from rabies?????

[amongthefur]

The problem with talking genuinely about vet med and it's problems is that people in the industry often aren't willing to see the extent of those problems. It's hard to trust the opinions of staff members about clinic culture or medical quality when over and over again people say they found a unicorn clinic then go on to describe medicine that hasn't been updated in 30 years. Or horrific bullying that seems normal to them because they've been around it for so long. Or extremely unprofessional behavior. Or doctors that treat everyone on the team like they're stupid but they don't realize it because they've never been a respected member of the medical team before (or they have an over-inflated sense of doctor's importance). Or their workplace is breaking 7 different employment laws and they don't know or don't care to do anything about it. Or they witnessed genuine malpractice or patient abuse but refuse to report it.

It's frustrating to try and push back against the negativity in this field when there's so many clinics and yet almost none of them meet the bare minimum standards for quality and culture. What are we even doing..

[unkindcorvid]

What I wish you knew about veterinary medicine:

We're in a suicide crisis.

We have a high rate of professional burnout.

I can't speak for veterinary school, but vet techs learn anatomy, diseases, anesthesiology, surgical assisting, pharmacology, emergency medicine, husbandry, radiology, diagnostic testing, parasitology, nutrition, preventative medicine, and behavior for cats and dogs. Then we do it all again for large animals and exotics.

Nearly all of us experience compassion fatigue at least once.

Please be kind to veterinary staff. We're not in it for the money. We love your animals and want the best for them.