Top stupid vet tricks: Pet health care confessions from the front lines

Hot on the heels of my malpractice insurance fiasco comes this timely post. Here I detail the top ten mistakes seen in vet practice (yeah, we vets do stupid stuff sometimes):

1-Forgetting to take out the IV catheter when pets go home: This is common (three or four times a year for us), though not so much since we started including CATH OUT! checkboxes on our patient’s cage cards.

For the record, I know firsthand this happens in human medicine, too. I remember distinctly after bringing my 85 year-old great aunt home from the hospital that I’d had to remove the IV the hospital left in. The most memorable bit of this story is that before I extracted it, she’d been calling her doctor claiming they’d left her “VCR” in. I got a kick out of that one.

2-Leaving the thermometer in: Yes, really. Though I’ve never been known to do this, almost everyone has at least one story about broken thermometers in backsides, clients threatening to sue over mercury poisoning, surprise thermometer-laden stools and other decidedly un-funny rectal temp occurrences. Other than a slew of broken digital thermometers lost to racehorse hooves during my stint in school at Penn’s New Bolton Center (you try taking the rectal temp of a spoiled, 1,200 pound two year-old) I have no great stories for you on this front.

3-Close-cropping toenails: OK, so this one’s boring, but the bloodbath that can result from an overtrimmed claw means possible head trauma for our squeamish, faint-prone clients. Such a tiny transgression is not without its ripple-effect.

4-Cutting the patient while removing bandages: Again, one disaster I’ve never managed but which one bifocal-sporting colleague admits to frequently stressing over—especially when it comes to cats (even when using bandage scissors!). Tissue glue works wonders for this, by the way—as does honesty. No client wants to be surprised by evidence of your accidental slice before you tell them about it.

5-Too-tight bandages: Now, this is an understandable one. In many cases, we’re stuck bandaging swollen spots. We sometimes make it a tad tighter in places with the judicious understanding that the swelling will subside over the next 24 hours. But not all estimates work out. And then there’s the vagary of limb movement and bandage sliding and chewing to consider.

6-Mis-labeling the meds: Wow, now that’s a killer—potentially, anyway. Though we typically train everyone in our hospitals to learn how to check standard drug dosages, it still happens.