Even as you were dying, you were perfect. The way you politely paced in the middle of the night to see if one of us might be sleeping lightly enough to hear you. The prednisone made you drink more and pee more. If the gentle pacing didn’t work, you would…

I recently read this tweet from a stand up comedian I follow: ‘ “Your dog is ready, now we will take an hour to bring her out to you” all vets ‘ And it upset me in the way that Twitter is designed to. It got under my skin and…

During COVID, veterinary hospitals have had to close to the public. The human public, that is. Curbside medicine, where the pet comes in for treatment, but the owner remains outside, and telemedicine have become the new normal in my daily practice. Bringing pet owners into the hospital to sit in…

So a crazy thing happened recently. After a year of doing amateur stand up around Toronto, I actually made some money doing stand up! I am not talking about free drink tickets or the odd $10, I am talking about an amount of money that you would sit back and…

I was working at a booth at some sort of animal expo for my employer years ago. I was the only veterinarian there, so even though my specialty is cancer surgery, I was fielding all sorts of animal questions. A couple came up to me very deliberately and asked, “What…

Veterinarians are killing themselves. That is a fact. There are a lot of theories about why. It’s complicated. But one thing we know about this difficult profession is that clients can be exceptionally hard on veterinarians. …

In my Second City comedy class I was old enough to be everyone’s mother. Except that I’m not a mother. I’m barren, which is one of my favourite openers. My classmates were lovely and they embraced me and it was much better than the Improv class I took, where I…

Emotional blackmail is the new term being used to characterize the pressure that clients put on veterinarians to care for their pets, to feel guilty about charging, and for making money. It has catapulted our profession into a crisis of burnout, compassion fatigue and suicide. Veterinarians are currently the profession…

Looking back, it is not at all surprising that I got Shingles. At the time, I couldn’t believe it was happening, because I was only 44 years old. Up until this point, I didn’t really know what Shingles was. I thought it was just an inconvenient little rash that old…