In this blog I hope to give you a glimpse behind the preverbal curtain at my time with Pol Veterinary Service. I can’t and won’t talk about the Doctors, it is neither my place to talk about them, nor are those stories mine to tell. Instead, I can write about what my job was like, and what I did at the clinic; and, believe me, it was fast paced, loud, and hectic. Hopefully, this will be an entertaining story about a crazy busy clinic and the people who mostly stayed just to the side of the camera’s screen, but kept the clinic together. This blog isn’t about a specific day, or a specific event, but rather just a general description of a typical day. Enjoy!
7:45 a.m. The clinic opens at 8 o’clock, so I would try to arrive about ten to fifteen minutes early so I could unlock the side door and let the camera crew in. Once the side door was open, five or so guys would run around the clinic turning on their big show lights and setting up any still cameras they wanted for that day. I would have about ten minutes to get the computers up and running, the surgery patient information together, and open the front door for the flood of patients to begin pouring into the front office/lobby. On an average day there was three people working the front office where people would check in, check out, and receive their take home medications.
8:00 a.m. I have just unlocked and opened the front door to the clinic, and four to six owners with their animals in tow would pour into the little lobby because they all dutifully did as instructed and showed up at 8 a.m. sharp for surgery drop off. There are only two computers in the front office to check people in, and I step to the first computer (I tried to claim the computer on the left with a sticky note, but no one respected it). As I step to the computer, at least three clients come towards me. I have to quickly figure out which one was first, or which one seems the most in a hurry, and get that patient checked in for surgery. If the patient I pick just so happens to be deemed the most interesting case by the film crew, everything slows down. Microphones are produced and placed on me and the client, two different cameramen take their places, one behind me looking at the client and one behind the client looking at me. When everyone is ready, the check in begins.
Within minutes I have to figure out which patient I’m checking in, determine if that patient is due for vaccines, decide if the patient will get a chemistry panel (a blood test) to check their liver and kidneys, amongst other things, to determine if the patient is a good candidate for surgery or if the doctor needed to treat an underlying problem. After the patient is checked in and the vaccines and chemistry panel is decided, I take the patient from the owner and back to the surgery/prep room. I help with the blood draw and any other diagnostics the doctor orders, and start the blood test (all the while a guy with a camera and possibly someone else with a boom mic follow me through an already tight building). Once the patient is in the kennel and the blood test is running, I head back to the front to do it all over again with the next surgery patient. Also, there are one or two other people checking in surgeries, so, I’m not just working around the film crew, but my coworkers who are just as busy as I am.
8:45 a.m. All the surgeries are checked in and, on some days, I’m the one that goes back to the surgery room to help shave, prep, and generally work with the doctors in surgery, but on a normal day I’m in the front filing the charts from the previous day and pulling charts for tomorrows surgeries and general appointments. Sometimes even this monotonous task is filmed. My coworkers and I have about fifteen to thirty minutes to get whatever charts from yesterday put away, and pull any charts we will need for tomorrow. Hopefully today’s charts were pulled yesterday. Around 9-9:15 a.m. the first of the general appointments start to roll in.
9:15 a.m. Once the first client walks in for their scheduled appointment, the seal is broken and it sometimes feels like the levees break. The clients, from that point on, do not stop coming; wave after wave crash upon that front desk. On a typical day the clinic will have two or three doctors seeing appointments from 9 a.m. to 11 or 12, and the schedule will be quadruple booked with an appointment every fifteen minutes. That comes out to be somewhere between 32 and 48 patients coming in for an appointment in the morning. If we have three doctors, each doctor will need to see 10 to 16 patients.
Check-ins have to be quick. I have to get a patient checked in, weighed, get a brief history from the owners, and get the patient into an exam room for a doctor as fast as possible. Because, once that check in is done, another client will be ready to check out. On top of checking patients in and out at a breakneck pace, I was also expected to restrain patients, clean rooms between appointments, fill prescriptions, run blood work, fecal floats, and run urinalyses in the lab, and work in radiology. Anything a doctor needed, that was my job, and one doctor or another almost always needed something. I was doing all of this with a six person camera crew filming everything they could. A dog needed to go to radiology, the film crew followed; a growling dog needed to be restrained, the film crew was there. The film crew really was great at staying out of the way as much as possible, but there was only so much room in that clinic.
12:00 p.m. One of the good things about the clinic’s pace is that time goes by quickly. Before you knew it, 9:00 a.m. had become 12:00p.m., the flood of clients turned into a trickle, and it was time for lunch. The doctors would shove some food into their faces and hit the road for farm calls. The doctors would average three farm calls in an afternoon, but sometimes the count was much higher. Every once in a while I would go with Emily on her farm calls, but usually I stayed at the clinic. The farm call time gave the office staff time to clean up from the whirlwind that was the morning. We would unpack and stock all of the medical supplies that had been delivered (sometimes we would get three separate shipment drop-offs), restock the exam rooms, file away the 30+ charts from the morning, and, most importantly to me, eat some lunch. The doctors’ farm call time went from noon to 3:00 p.m., at 3 o’clock general small animal appointments started back up.
3:00 p.m. General appointments begin. These appointments were generally a mirror image of the morning appointments with the added bonus that not all doctors would get back from farm calls by 3 o’clock. On really bad days no doctor was back by three, and then the patients would pile up in the waiting room. With the return of the doctors, the camera crew would return, and the clinic became cramped again. It was not unheard of for a client to show up at his appointment time, and have to wait an hour before a doctor could see his pet. The afternoons quickly became a blur of checking in and checking out patients, along with working in the lab, and radiology, and pharmacy. The clinic officially closes at 5:00 p.m., but that’s not really the truth. The doctors were almost never done seeing appointments by 5:00, if Emily left the clinic by 6p.m. she was doing well. On top of this, the clinic didn’t close until 6p.m. on Monday and Friday. So, the staff wouldn’t leave until around 7p.m.
I’ve gotten a couple of questions asking me how it was working at Pol Vet Clinic, and this post sums up typical day pretty well. Working at Pol Vet was frantic, it was nerve raking at times. Sometimes, I felt like a had too many balls in the air and that kept me from spinning my plates. It was also claustrophobic at times, the clinic is small, and it was hard at times fitting the office staff, with the camera crew, and the clients into that building. But, it was also fun. I loved being with the people I worked with. I enjoyed being a part of something that helped a lot of people in the community. The guys on the film crew became some of my best friends in Michigan. I don’t miss the chaos that Pol Vet brought into my family, but I do miss the people (both clients and coworkers) there.
I hope you enjoyed this post, and, as always, thanks for reading!!
