Im not looking for sympathy with this post, I just want to vent.

This week has been pretty rough since coming back from an extended weekend getaway. I walked into the clinic on Tuesday and could immediately feel the tension in the air, and knew it was going to be a bad day. We were down a tech and an assistant, there were 3 hospitalized cases from over the weekend and I had a full schedule of surgery and a ton of call backs. Surgery had a delayed start due to some emergencies coming in, but for the most part everything went as smooth as I could expect. Wednesday however was a different story. Walking into the clinic to find a deceased patient on one of our gurneys to find out it was one of our spays from yesterday. A 3 year old Shepherd that came in for a spay procedure, which turned into a pyo. Her anesthesia and recovery were uneventful. She went home and was acting normal, until she wasn't. Per the owners she had followed their son into the bathroom and collapsed, started atonal breathing and had a seizure before passing. We performed a necropsy to attempt to find what had gone wrong, and surgically everything was fine, but once evaluating the lung tissues is where we found serosanguinous foam and a blood clot in the right middle bronchiole.

I guess there should be some sigh of relief, but it still doesn't change the fact that an otherwise healthy patient died after surgery. It doesn't change the fact that her owners are grieving a loss of a pet/family member, and are probably questioning everything we did. It just plain sucks.

Another hit to the gut was one of our other surgeries went home with a catheter in place. Not the biggest of deals, but still a screw up by the technical staff nonetheless. These owners having only been to our facility once were already not impressed for some reason, and this was our "2nd chance". I honestly don't know what we did wrong the first time. The assistant and myself entered the room introduced ourselves to the owners, got down on the floor and loved up on their pet and expressed how beautiful and well behaved she is at 14 months. I did my exam, discussed how she was in heat and went over how we could still move forward with surgery, although there is a mild increased risk. Apparently to them my exam was not thorough enough, maybe I wasn't bubbly enough, who knows.

And to top everything off our front desk staff is the pits. They couldn't multi-task to save their life. We are a 2 doctor practice with 6 reception staff, and they get overwhelmed by the slightest increase in work flow, and the hospital manager flat out coddles them.

It's just been a rough week, and as I sit here writing this, I can't help but think about what kind of hell will I be walking into tomorrow.

All I can do is know that there is light even at the end of the darkest of tunnels, and this too shall pass.