Alarm. I set it for 6:30 but I was already half-awake because my girlfriend Sonya's cat, a 14-year-old tortie named Wanda, decided to sit on my chest at 6:15 and stare at me. Wanda has hyperthyroidism that I diagnosed two years ago. She's on methimazole. She's doing great. She's also 9 pounds of judgment sitting on my sternum every morning. Coffee. Scrubs. Out the door by 7.
Day in the Life of a Veterinarian: Three Real Days
Three veterinarians wrote down everything they did on one ordinary workday. A small-animal GP in Nashville who saw 8 appointments, performed 2 surgeries, and dealt with a dog that ate a sock, all before his lunch got cold. A large-animal vet in rural Montana who drove 140 miles, pregnancy-checked 60 head of cattle, and pulled a calf in the mud. An emergency vet in Philadelphia who worked Saturday night to Sunday morning, triaged 11 emergencies in 12 hours, and drove home at sunrise.
These characters are composites, built from dozens of real accounts, interviews, and community threads. The people aren't real. The experiences are.
Wyatt's Tuesday: Small-Animal GP in Nashville
Wyatt
Keeps a change of scrubs in his truck because at least once a week a patient expresses an opinion about the exam by emptying a bladder, an anal gland, or both. Today is not that day. Today is a Tuesday, which means surgeries in the morning, appointments in the afternoon, and the quiet illusion that veterinary medicine is predictable.
At the clinic. We're a 4-doctor practice in a strip mall off Nolensville Pike. The building doesn't look like much from outside but we've got two surgery suites, digital radiography, an IDEXX Catalyst for in-house bloodwork, and a dental station that Dr. Cal Webber, the practice owner, still calls "the new equipment" even though it's been here for six years. Cal is 62. He's been practicing since before digital x-rays existed. He once told me he used to develop radiographs in a darkroom with a red light and a timer. I can't imagine it. He can't imagine how fast our Catalyst runs a full chemistry panel. We meet in the middle.
Surgery prep. My tech Bridget has already set up the first case: a spay on a 7-month-old Lab mix named Clover. Bridget is the best surgical tech I've ever worked with and I tell her that about once a week. She places the IV catheter, draws up the pre-meds, and has the monitoring equipment ready before I've finished reviewing the pre-anesthetic bloodwork. Clover's labs are clean. We induce at 7:55.
Spay underway. Clover is under, intubated, on isoflurane. Bridget monitors the SurgiVet while I work. A routine spay on a young, healthy dog takes me about 25 minutes from first incision to last suture. It's one of those procedures that feels almost mechanical until you remember you're inside a living animal with your hands, tying off the ovarian pedicle, and if your ligature slips, this dog bleeds internally and could die on the table. The stakes of routine surgery are invisible until they aren't. Today they stay invisible. Clover's closed up by 8:32.
Second surgery: dental cleaning on a 9-year-old beagle named Hank. Dentals are the unglamorous backbone of small-animal practice. Most clients don't think about their dog's teeth until the breath gets bad, and by then there's usually tartar, gingivitis, and sometimes teeth that need to come out. Hank's pre-op x-rays show 3 teeth with significant root pathology. One upper premolar, two lower incisors. I call Hank's owner between cases. She authorizes the extractions. The sound of a dental drill in a dog's mouth is a high-pitched whine that sits right at the frequency where you feel it in your own teeth. You never get used to it. You just stop flinching.
Hank's done. Three extractions, full scaling, polishing. He'll eat soft food for a week and then be fine, probably better than he's felt in months. Bridget cleans the dental suite while I update Hank's chart in Cornerstone, our practice management software. Every procedure, every drug, every finding gets logged. I spend about 90 minutes a day on medical records. Nobody goes to vet school dreaming about Cornerstone entries, but here we are.
Deena, our receptionist, knocks on the surgery door. Walk-in emergency. A 3-year-old Golden Retriever named Captain ate a sock about four hours ago. The owner watched it happen. Captain looks comfortable, tail wagging, no signs of distress yet. But a sock in a Golden is a time bomb. If it passes, great. If it lodges in the pylorus or the intestine, we're looking at an obstruction and potentially emergency surgery. I take Captain to radiology.
The x-ray stops me. There's a foreign body sitting right at the pylorus, the junction between the stomach and the small intestine. It's not fully obstructing yet, but it's not moving. My mouth gets that metallic taste it gets when a case tips from "probably fine" to "this could go sideways." I show the films to Captain's owner. I explain the options: we can try to induce vomiting since it's been under six hours, but because the sock is already at the pylorus, there's a real chance it won't come up and we'll have wasted time. Or we can go in endoscopically. Or we can go surgical. I recommend the endoscopic approach first. If I can grab it with the scope, we avoid cutting him open. If I can't, we go to surgery. The owner agrees. I call Cal to borrow his afternoon because Captain just became my priority.
Captain's under. Bridget and I are doing the endoscopy. The scope goes down the esophagus, through the stomach, and there it is: a gray ankle sock, bunched up right at the pyloric opening. I can see the fabric folds on the monitor. I work the grasping forceps through the scope channel, get a grip on the sock, and pull. It resists. I adjust. Pull again. It comes free. I withdraw the scope with the sock clamped in the forceps. The whole retrieval took about 12 minutes. Captain is going to wake up sore-throated and hungry. His owner is going to spend $1,400 on an endoscopy for a sock. And Captain will probably eat another sock within the year because Goldens do not learn from experience.
Lunch. I eat a turkey sandwich at my desk while Captain recovers and Bridget monitors all three post-op patients. Clover is awake and trying to lick her incision. Hank is groggy and drooling. Captain is blinking and confused about why his throat hurts. A normal Tuesday recovery room.
Afternoon appointments start. First up: a 6-month wellness check on a kitten named Pesto. Vaccines, weight check, a conversation with the owner about when to switch from kitten to adult food. Pesto weighs 5.8 pounds and tries to eat the otoscope tip. Then a 12-year-old dachshund with a skin mass that the owner noticed last week. I aspirate it with a fine needle and look at the slide under the microscope. Lipoma. Fatty tumor. Benign. The relief on the owner's face when I say "it's just a fatty lump" is one of the best parts of this job.
Fourth appointment of the afternoon. A cat named Marble who's been vomiting for three days. Owner says she's eating less, drinking more, and hiding under the bed. Marble is 11. I'm already running a differential in my head before I touch her: kidney disease, hyperthyroidism, diabetes, pancreatitis, foreign body, lymphoma. Bloodwork first. I pull blood and run it on the Catalyst. BUN is 68, creatinine is 4.2. Both significantly elevated. Marble's kidneys are failing. This is my 4th pyometra this month. Wait, no. This is my 4th CKD diagnosis this month, which is a different kind of heartbreak. I sit on the floor of the exam room with Marble's owner and explain chronic kidney disease in cats. What it means. What we can do. What we can't. She cries. I hand her the tissue box that every exam room has for exactly this reason.
Discharging Captain. His owner carries him to the car even though Captain can walk just fine. I hand over the sock in a specimen bag because the owner asked for it. She says she's going to frame it. I believe her. I tell her to keep socks off the floor. She says she has three kids. I say "buy a hamper with a lid." Bridget laughs. The owner laughs. Captain wags his tail. Nobody is going to buy a hamper with a lid.
Last appointment: a 4-year-old pit mix named Biscuit who's been licking his paws raw. Classic allergy presentation. I start him on Apoquel, recommend a limited-ingredient diet trial, and schedule a recheck in three weeks. Biscuit tries to kiss me during the exam. Pit bulls are, without exception, the most affectionate dogs in every practice I've ever worked in. I don't make the rules. I just report the data.
Clinic is closed but I'm still here. Medical records. Lab follow-ups. A call to Marble's owner with the urinalysis results that confirm the kidney diagnosis. I update treatment plans, write up the endoscopy report, and review tomorrow's surgery schedule. Cal pokes his head in, says "Go home, Wyatt." I say "Ten more minutes." He says "That's what I said in 1994 and I'm still here." He's not wrong.
Home. Sonya is on the couch editing a sync licensing contract for a songwriter. She asks how my day was. I tell her about the sock, the dental, the kidney cat, the pit bull who tried to kiss me. She listens to all of it and then says, "So, a normal Tuesday?" I sit down next to Wanda, who is purring on the armrest, and think about how to answer that. Nothing about today was normal. A dog ate a sock and I pulled it out of his stomach with a camera on a stick. A beagle had three teeth removed and will feel better for the first time in a year. A cat is dying slowly and her owner sat on my exam room floor and cried. But all of it was routine. Every single thing. That's the part of this job I still can't explain to anyone who doesn't do it. "Yeah," I say. "A normal Tuesday."
Nothing about today was normal. But all of it was routine. That's the part of this job I still can't explain to anyone who doesn't do it.
Wyatt
Esperanza's Thursday: Large-Animal Practice in Rural Montana
Esperanza
Drives a beat-up Ford F-250 with 187,000 miles on it and roughly $40,000 of veterinary equipment in the bed. The truck smells like cattle antiseptic and hay. Her husband Felix says the truck smells like "money and poor decisions." She says it smells like Tuesday. It's actually Thursday.
Phone rings. It's still dark. I know who it is before I look because only one person calls before 6 AM on a Thursday, and that person is Buck Stillwater. Buck runs 400 head of cattle on 6,000 acres north of Roundup. He's 64, built like a fencepost, and speaks in sentences that rarely exceed five words. Today's sentence: "Got a heifer. Trouble calving." I tell him I'm on my way. Felix rolls over and says "Buck?" I say "Buck." He says "Drive safe." He's already back asleep. He manages a feed store in town and he's been married to a large-animal vet long enough that a pre-dawn phone call doesn't even register as unusual.
On the road. The truck's heater takes about 10 minutes to get warm and it's 28 degrees outside. Montana in early April is winter pretending to be spring. The sun isn't up yet. I'm driving north on 87 with my headlights cutting through fog and the road mostly empty. Buck's place is 45 minutes from my house. I've made this drive enough times that I don't need GPS, but I run through the calving scenarios in my head anyway. First-calf heifer, which means she's never delivered before. Could be a malpresentation, could be a big calf, could be a small pelvis, could be all three. I have calving chains, a calf jack, OB lube, and oxytocin in the truck. If it's a C-section, I have a surgical kit and lidocaine. You learn to carry an operating room in your truck bed when the nearest clinic is 70 miles away.
Buck's place. He meets me at the barn. The heifer is in a calving pen, standing, clearly in labor, clearly struggling. She's been pushing for two hours with no progress. I pull on a shoulder-length OB sleeve, lube up, and do a vaginal exam. The calf is alive. I can feel it moving. But it's coming backward, hind feet first, which is a breech presentation and it means this calf isn't coming out without help. I tell Buck. He nods. He's seen this before. We move the heifer into the squeeze chute.
I attach the calving chains to the calf's hind legs above the fetlocks. This is the part that looks brutal to anyone who's never seen it, but the chains distribute pressure evenly and they're the safest way to get traction on a calf. Buck operates the calf jack, a mechanical device that braces against the cow's pelvis and provides steady pulling force. I guide from inside, making sure the hips rotate correctly as the calf comes through the pelvis. The heifer bellows. The smell of amniotic fluid and manure and cold morning air fills the barn. I feel the calf's hips clear the pelvic rim. "Pull steady," I say. Buck pulls. The calf slides out, wet and steaming in the cold air. A 90-pound bull calf. He's not breathing.
I clear the mucus from his nostrils, stick a piece of straw in his nostril to stimulate a sneeze reflex, and rub his rib cage hard with a towel. Three seconds. Five seconds. Then a cough, a gasp, and the sound of a calf's first breath, which is a wet, rattling inhale that sounds like it shouldn't work but does. He blinks. His legs start moving. The heifer turns around and starts licking him. Buck says "Good." That's it. That's Buck's version of a standing ovation. I wash my arms in a bucket of warm water, strip the OB sleeve, and make a note in my truck log. Mother and calf both stable. I'll check back in two days.
Back on the road. My practice partner, Dr. Chet Nilsen, texts me that the Ramsey ranch called about their pregnancy check. That's my next stop. Chet is 51, a large-animal specialist who grew up on a ranch in eastern Montana. He's a cowboy who happens to have a doctorate. He rides his own horses on weekends and can rope a calf faster than most of the ranchers we serve. He handles the north territory, I handle the south and west. Between us, we cover about 4,000 square miles. Our practice has two vets, one receptionist, and a part-time tech. That's it.
Ramsey ranch. Pregnancy checking 60 head of cattle. This means I stand behind each cow in a squeeze chute, insert my arm rectally, and palpate the uterus to determine if she's pregnant and, if so, how far along. I can also use the portable ultrasound for confirmation and to check for twins. The work is physical. My arm is inside a cow up to my shoulder, feeling for the difference between a 60-day fetus the size of a mouse and a 120-day fetus the size of a kitten. After 10 years I can tell the difference in seconds. The first time I did this in vet school, it took me two minutes per cow and my arm was shaking by cow number 10. Now I average about 45 seconds. But 60 cows at 45 seconds each is still 45 minutes of continuous rectal palpation, and my shoulder will remind me of that tonight.
Done with the preg check. Of 60 cows, 52 are confirmed pregnant, 6 are open, and 2 are questionable early pregnancies that I'll recheck in three weeks. I go over the results with Tom Ramsey, the ranch manager, on the tailgate of my truck. The 6 open cows represent a financial problem: each one costs money to feed and isn't producing a calf. Tom will decide whether to re-breed them or cull them from the herd. That's his call, not mine, but the data I give him drives the decision. A vet in this kind of practice isn't just a doctor. You're an agricultural consultant whose opinions affect the economic survival of family ranches.
Lunch in the truck. A thermos of coffee and a ham sandwich that Felix made at 5 AM and that I forgot about until now. I eat it parked on the shoulder of a county road with the engine running for heat. I can see the Crazy Mountains to the west. I return three phone calls: one from a horse owner about a lameness that sounds like an abscess, one from Chet about a scheduling conflict next week, and one from a 4-H kid who wants to know if her steer's cough needs treatment. It does. I'll stop by tomorrow.
Driving to the Kendrick place. Their mare cut her leg on a fence and needs sutures. The Kendrick ranch is 35 miles from the Ramsey ranch, which means another 40 minutes in the truck. This is the part of large-animal practice that nobody factors into the math: I spend 3 to 4 hours a day driving. My truck is my office, my pharmacy, my surgical suite, and my commute. The odometer turned 187,000 last week. Felix said we should throw it a party. I said the truck doesn't want a party. It wants new shocks.
The mare's laceration is about 6 inches long on her left hind cannon bone. It's clean, no tendon involvement, no joint capsule penetration. I sedate her with detomidine, block the area with lidocaine, flush the wound with saline, and suture it in a simple interrupted pattern. Sixteen stitches. Tetanus booster. Banamine for inflammation. Antibiotics for five days. I show the owner how to clean and re-wrap the bandage daily. Horses are terrible patients because they're 1,200 pounds and can kill you by accident without even knowing you're there. This mare is calm. I'm grateful.
Phone rings again. It's Buck. Different problem this time. He's got another heifer in labor, and this one's been down for an hour. I'm 50 minutes from his place. I tell him I'm coming. I turn the truck around. Today's round trip is going to hit 140 miles easy. I eat a granola bar and drive.
Back at Buck's. This heifer is on the ground in the pasture, not in the barn. She's exhausted. I exam her in the mud, on my knees, in a field that's half-frozen and half-thawed into a slurry that soaks through my coveralls immediately. The calf is in a normal presentation this time, front feet and nose first, but it's big and the heifer is small. I attach chains and pull with Buck's help. No calf jack this time because we can't get her into the chute. It's just me, Buck, and the mud and the sound of this heifer groaning. My shoulders burn. The calf comes. Another bull, maybe 85 pounds. He breathes on his own this time, almost immediately. The heifer is too tired to stand right away, so I give her calcium and dextrose IV to help her recover. She'll be up in an hour. Buck and I are both covered in mud and amniotic fluid. He says "Appreciate it." His second standing ovation of the day.
Back in the truck. I smell like a combination of things I won't describe. My coveralls are ruined. My arms ache from my shoulders to my fingertips. I've driven 140 miles today, pregnancy-checked 60 cows, pulled two calves, and sutured a horse. My truck has hay on the dashboard, an OB sleeve draped over the passenger seat, and a half-eaten granola bar in the cupholder. I call the clinic to check in with Chet. He says the horse abscess owner is coming in tomorrow, and there's a ranch dog with a suspected ACL tear on Friday. I add it to my list. The sun is low and the Yellowstone River is silver out the window.
Home. Boots by the door. They're caked with mud and things that used to be inside a cow. Felix is at the stove. He made chili. He doesn't even look up when I come in because this is just Thursday, and Thursday looks like this from October through April. I shower for 15 minutes, longer than usual, because there's mud in places mud should not be. I eat two bowls of chili. Felix asks how many calves. I say two. He asks if they made it. I say yes. He says "Good day then." And it was. It was a good day. My shoulders will disagree in the morning, but right now, sitting at this kitchen table with chili and my husband and the furnace kicking on, it was a good day.
My truck is my office, my pharmacy, my surgical suite, and my commute. The odometer turned 187,000 last week.
Esperanza
Gemma's Saturday Night: Emergency Veterinary Hospital in Philadelphia
Gemma
Works the Saturday 6 PM to Sunday 6 AM shift. Her roommate June is an ICU nurse at Temple. They compare 3 AM stories over coffee on Sunday mornings. The stories are different in species and identical in everything else: the adrenaline, the math, the families crying in the lobby, the specific exhaustion that comes from keeping something alive through the night.
Alarm. The apartment is quiet. June is out, probably at the gym before her Sunday day shift. I eat leftover pad thai standing in the kitchen and drink a large coffee, the first of what will be many. Getting ready for a 12-hour overnight is its own ritual: scrubs, sneakers with insoles, hair tied back, stethoscope in my bag, granola bars in my pocket. I've been doing the Saturday overnight for eight months. My body still hasn't fully adjusted to sleeping until 2 PM on Sundays. I'm not sure it ever will.
Driving to the hospital. It's a 24-hour facility in West Philadelphia, one of the biggest emergency animal hospitals in the region. On a Saturday night we run two doctors, four technicians, and a receptionist from 6 PM to 6 AM. My senior tech tonight is Roz, who has been an ER tech for 9 years and who teaches me more on any given shift than vet school managed in four years. Roz has the kind of calm that only comes from having seen everything twice. I trust her instincts more than I trust my own, and I'm not embarrassed to say that because it keeps patients alive.
Shift handoff from the day team. Three patients in the treatment area from earlier: a post-surgical cat recovering from a urinary obstruction unblock, a dog on IV fluids for pancreatitis, and a parrot with a wing fracture that the exotics specialist will see Monday. The day doctor tells me it's been quiet. That word is forbidden in this building. Roz shoots her a look. The day doctor grins and walks out. Tevin, our overnight receptionist, is already at the front desk. He's 24 and unflappable. At 2 AM when a distraught owner is screaming and crying simultaneously, Tevin's voice is the same steady register it was at 6 PM. That skill is worth more than any credential on my wall.
First emergency of the night. A 5-year-old mixed breed named Pepper, hit by a car 30 minutes ago. The owners are a young couple, both crying. Pepper is on a stretcher, conscious but not moving her hind legs. I do my primary survey: airway clear, breathing labored but stable, heart rate 160, gums pale pink. She's in shock. Roz has an IV catheter in her cephalic vein within 90 seconds. We start a crystalloid bolus. I do a focused abdominal ultrasound looking for free fluid, which would indicate internal bleeding. There's a small amount in the abdomen. Not enough to panic. Enough to watch. I take radiographs. Pelvic fracture, left ilium and ischium. No spinal displacement. The fact that she still has deep pain sensation in her hind feet means her spinal cord is likely intact. I exhale for the first time in ten minutes.
I talk to Pepper's owners. Pelvic fractures in dogs often heal with strict rest and pain management unless they're severely displaced. Pepper's fracture will need a surgical consult in the morning, but she's stable and her neurological signs are encouraging. The owners ask if she'll walk again. I say the odds are very good but I want the surgeon to confirm. They ask if they can sit with her. I say yes. They sit on the floor next to Pepper's kennel and don't move for four hours. This is the thing about emergency medicine that no one tells you in school: half the job is managing the animal, and the other half is managing the grief and fear of the people who love the animal. Those two halves are equally demanding.
Second emergency. A 6-year-old male cat named Ringo, blocked. Urinary obstruction. He's been straining in the litter box all day and his owner finally brought him in when he started vomiting. I palpate his bladder and it's hard as a baseball and the size of a grapefruit. This is life-threatening if we don't relieve it. Potassium builds up when a cat can't urinate, and elevated potassium stops the heart. I run an I-STAT: potassium is 7.8. Normal is under 5.5. We need to move. Roz already has the unblocking tray set up before I finish looking at the bloodwork. I sedate Ringo, pass a urinary catheter to relieve the obstruction, and we start IV fluids to flush his system. The urine that drains is bloody and thick with crystals. His bladder deflates. His heart rate, which was dangerously slow from the potassium, starts to normalize within 20 minutes. Ringo will spend the night with us on fluids and a catheter. He'll probably be OK. "Probably" is the most honest word in emergency medicine.
Two more cases back to back. A dog with a lacerated paw pad from stepping on glass. Five sutures, a bandage, and antibiotics. Then a cat with an abscess on her cheek from a fight. I lance it, flush it, and send her home with pain meds. Neither case is dramatic. Both require focus, both require local anesthesia and wound care, and both involve owners who are scared because it's Saturday night and they're at the animal ER and everything feels more serious at night. They're not wrong. It does feel more serious at night. The fluorescent lights make everything look a little more clinical, a little more urgent. Shadows are sharper. The beeping of monitors is louder when the rest of the world is quiet.
Chocolate case. A 70-pound chocolate Lab named Bruno ate approximately 24 ounces of dark chocolate two hours ago. His owner found the empty bag and the wrapper. Dark chocolate has the highest theobromine concentration of any chocolate type, and 24 ounces in a 70-pound dog is a potentially lethal dose. Theobromine is the compound in chocolate that's toxic to dogs. It causes vomiting, diarrhea, hyperactivity, seizures, and cardiac arrhythmias at high doses. I induce vomiting with apomorphine. Bruno vomits enthusiastically. A lot of chocolate comes back up, but I can't know how much he's already absorbed. I give activated charcoal to bind whatever's left in his GI tract, start IV fluids, and put him on continuous ECG monitoring. His heart rate is already elevated at 140. We'll be watching Bruno all night.
Seven emergencies so far. I check on all my patients. Pepper is sleeping, her owners finally went home after I promised to call if anything changed. Ringo's potassium is down to 5.9 on recheck. Bruno's heart rate is 130 and holding, no arrhythmias yet. The post-surgical cat from earlier is eating, which is a good sign. I drink my third coffee. Roz asks if I've eaten. I have not. She produces a bag of pretzels from a drawer and puts them on my keyboard. "Eat," she says. It's not a suggestion.
A lull. This is the window between midnight and 3 AM when things either stay quiet or explode. I use it to write medical records for every case so far. Records in the ER are different from GP records. Everything is time-stamped to the minute. Every drug, every dose, every vital sign, every decision. If a case goes to litigation, which happens more often in emergency medicine than you'd think, the medical record is the only thing that matters. I write thorough records not because I enjoy it but because 2 AM Gemma owes it to future Gemma who might be explaining these decisions to a board or a lawyer.
Bruno starts tremoring. Mild muscle tremors, which is a theobromine effect. His heart rate bumped to 155. No arrhythmia on the ECG but we're getting closer to the clinical effects I was worried about. I give a dose of methocarbamol for the tremors and adjust his fluid rate. Roz and I sit with him for 20 minutes until the tremors subside. His heart rate comes back to 135. He's going to be a long night. I'm running the theobromine dose calculation in my head for the third time. At his body weight and the estimated amount ingested, he's in the moderate to severe toxicity range. The next six hours will tell us which side of that range he falls on.
The ER is quiet except for the monitors. The fluorescent lights hum at a frequency you only hear at 3 AM, when every other sound in the building has stopped. I do a round. Pepper is stable. Ringo is urinating through his catheter, which is exactly what we want. Bruno is sleeping, heart rate 128, down from the spike. The other patients are settled. Tevin is reading a paperback at the front desk. Roz is restocking the crash cart. I sit in the treatment area and feel the exhaustion hit, the specific kind that arrives at 3 AM and sits on your chest like a weight. Not sleepy. Heavy. Your body knows what time it is even when your brain is still working. I eat a granola bar and keep going.
The phone at the front desk rings and Tevin's voice shifts, which means it's bad. A 4-month-old puppy is seizing at home. The owners are 15 minutes away. Roz and I prep: diazepam drawn up, IV catheter supplies ready, oxygen, fluid pump primed. When they arrive, the puppy, a French Bulldog named Olive, is actively seizing in the owner's arms. Roz takes her. I give diazepam IV through the catheter Roz places in under a minute. The seizure stops. Olive is post-ictal, disoriented, paddling her legs. Her temperature is 105.2 from the prolonged muscle activity. We start cooling measures. I run bloodwork. Glucose is low at 42. I give a dextrose bolus. In a puppy this age, the differential for seizures includes hypoglycemia, a liver shunt, toxin ingestion, infection, or congenital epilepsy. I need more data. But right now, at 4:45 AM, I just need her to stop seizing and start stabilizing. She does.
Olive is stable, temperature down to 102.8, no more seizures. Her glucose is holding after the dextrose. I talk to her owners, a young woman and her mother, both in pajamas, both terrified. I explain what happened and what we're testing for. I tell them we'll need a bile acids test and possibly an MRI to rule out a liver shunt. They nod. The mother asks "Is she going to be OK?" I say "She's stable right now, and that's the most important thing." I say that because it's true, and because at 5:20 AM, after 11 emergencies and 12 hours of fluorescent light and monitor beeps, the most honest thing I can offer is what I know right now, not what I hope.
The day team starts arriving. I hand off: Pepper, stable, surgical consult in the morning. Ringo, catheter patent, potassium normalized, recheck in four hours. Bruno, tremors resolved, heart rate stable, continue monitoring and fluids for another 12 hours. Olive, post-seizure, glucose-dependent, needs bile acids and further workup. Four other cases discharged during the night. Eleven emergencies total. I pull off my stethoscope and it leaves a red mark on my neck that will take an hour to fade.
Walking to my car. The sun is coming up over West Philadelphia and the sky is that pale orange-pink that only exists at 6 AM and that I only see on Sunday mornings after a Saturday overnight. The air is cold and clean and doesn't smell like antiseptic. I sit in my car for two minutes before starting it. Not because I'm too tired to drive. Because the silence is the first I've heard in 12 hours and I want to hold it for a second.
Home. June is awake, already in her scrubs, making coffee. She hands me a mug without asking. She looks at my face and says "How many?" I say "Eleven." She nods. She doesn't ask what kind or how bad or if I'm OK, because she already knows all of those answers from the number and from the way I'm standing. She's heading to the ICU in an hour. She'll see human versions of everything I saw tonight. We drink coffee in the kitchen while the sun fills the apartment. I'll shower and sleep until 2 PM. I'll wake up and check my phone for updates on Olive and Bruno. I'll eat something and exist as a person for a few hours. And next Saturday I'll do it again, because this is the job, and the job doesn't stop at night, and someone has to be the one who's there when the phone rings at 4:30 AM about a seizing puppy. Tonight it was me. Next week it'll be me again. That's not a complaint. It's just the math.
Someone has to be the one who's there when the phone rings at 4:30 AM. Tonight it was me. That's not a complaint. It's just the math.
Gemma
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a typical day look like for a veterinarian?
It depends entirely on the practice type. Small-animal general practitioners see 8 to 25 appointments per day, perform surgeries in the morning, handle walk-in emergencies, and spend evenings on medical records. Large-animal vets in rural areas may drive over a hundred miles in a day, performing pregnancy checks on cattle herds, responding to calving emergencies, and working outdoors in all weather. Emergency veterinarians work 10 to 12 hour shifts, often overnight, triaging cases that range from toxin ingestions to trauma. Across all settings, the work combines clinical medicine, surgery, client communication, and emotional resilience.
How many hours do veterinarians work per day?
Most veterinarians work 9 to 12 hours per day, though actual hours vary significantly by setting. Small-animal GP vets typically work 9 to 10 hour days, four or five days per week, with actual departure times often running 30 to 60 minutes past the scheduled close. Large-animal vets in rural areas work irregular hours driven by emergencies and seasonal demands like calving season, with some days stretching to 14 hours including drive time. Emergency vets commonly work 10 to 12 hour shifts, including overnights, weekends, and holidays.