Thursday, September 24, 2009

No case for me?

Tonight I attended the first Pet Hospice meeting of the school year.

Pet Hospice is a cool organization that is totally run by vet students and advised by a couple of VTH clinicians and a person from the teaching hospital's communications institute.

You can join as a freshman, and go through 4 or 5 monthly training sessions during the fall, before you can be an official volunteer starting in January.

Veterinarians within a 30 minute radius of the VTH refer clients to Pet Hospice. The client's pet must be a dog or a cat that has been diagnosed with a terminal disease and is not expected to live longer than 3 months.

Pet Hospice sends out a team of two vet students to help the client with whatever they need - nursing care like medication, giving fluids, changing bandages; emotional support like talking to the owners and their kids; pain assessments; quality-of-life assessments; etc. It's really a cool organization.

I and many of my classmates went through all the training last fall and because active volunteers last January.

Since then, as far as I can tell, every other student in my class except one other girl has been on at least 1 case, and some of the sophomores have already been on 2 or 3 cases.

I have been on none! What's wrong with me?? (Ok, I was gone all summer, but so were some of the other sophs.)

So it probably seems weird to you that I would want to be assigned to go work with a grieving family and a dying animal, but we vet students are a bit weird so you don't have to get it. :-)

I'm thinking that I am going to get called for the next case... cross your fingers!

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