What is Burnout? Mental Health UK says this ‘Burnout is a state of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. It can occur when you experience long-term stress and feel under constant pressure.’ What does it mean in real terms? I imagine it’s different for everyone. But essentially, it is similar to a state of depression, but related to work only.
Burnout is why I haven’t posted for a while. It is real. Mother has been struggling and we just don’t have the energy in our limited free time to write posts unfortunately. But Mother is working on prioritising herself more, so hopefully I’ll be able to post more stuff. I had a lovely holiday recently that I want to tell you all about soon.
For Mother burnout snuck up on her. Work this summer was typical. Busy, and more busy. Summer means being even more short staffed than usual as people take annual leave and we struggle to find locums to cover. It means more clients wanting to book appointment as they are on their annual leave and now have time to book the appointments they’ve been putting off. It means more screaming children in the waiting room. More seasonal issues such as insect bites/stings, and allergy flare ups. More random non-clients that need seeing as they’re holidaying in the area and aren’t near their usual vets but their dog has cut its paw on a walk and need urgent care. It means more heat stroke cases, more breathing issues. And it means melting in a small consult room every day because the air-conditioning unit broke and there are no windows. It means less lunch time walks for me because it’s too hot at that time of day so Mother has to get up earlier to walk me longer in the morning.
Last month was the ex-lap month. Over the three clinics we have, there was a period of 2-3 weeks where there were no less than twelve emergency exploratory laparotomies. For comparison, we usually only have one or two a month overall. These are usually emergencies that need doing the same day as presentation, and usually present early afternoon, after all our operations for the day are finished with and we’re fully booked with consults, resulting in us needing to rearrange appointments or one vet doing two vets worth of consults while the other one operates. These operations usually comprise of pyometras (womb infections- spay your dogs people!), foreign body ingestion (we had at least two socks, one rope toy, and one cat litter ingestion off the top of my head), or bleeding splenic or liver masses.
So it was a busy month. One day towards the end of this insane month, it was a bit cooler and Mother and I had gone on a short lunch time walk. On our return it was to find that Diana had finished her last operation but was feeling a bit light headed. Back into my kennel I went as Mother went to go about the rest of her day. However, within 5 minutes, Diana’s mild unwellness had progressed to full on collapse, and 999 were called. Mother and one of the nurses stayed with her checking her pulses and keeping her responsive and answering are the paramedics questions etc. Unfortunately, at the same time a recovering aggressive patient in the kennels became unwell, and was transferred to our prep area for oxygen delivery and administration of emergency drugs.
While Diana was taken to the hospital and signed off for several days, she was ultimately okay and back to work on reduced hours the next week. The inpatient unfortunately wasn’t so lucky. Unfortunately the dog was aggressive with staff and had needed sedation prior to coming into clinic in the first place. On recovery from anaesthetic he became aggressive again, limiting staffs ability to help him. He lunged at the oxygen mask as it was put near him, and tried to bite when staff went to administer emergency medications. He failed to respond to the medications and unfortunately deteriorated. After 15minutes of CPR, he was confirmed deceased.
Anaesthetic is not without risk. Every human has to sign a consent form prior to anaesthesia, and the human has to sign for their pets too. However, the risk is very low and with less than 1 in 1000 having a serious complication, you always assume that you won’t be that unlucky 1. Mother had to call this owner with the bad news only 10minutes after Diana had been taken out of the building by paramedics.
The team as a whole came together on this bad, bad day really well. They closed the clinic to the public for several hours to deal with these emergencies, and had the phones diverted to another clinic to help them cope. The remaining staff then had what is called an M&M meeting. It stands for morbidity and mortality. It was brought into the human medical field so that after a bad outcome they discuss what happened to go through it step by step to see if anything different could be done. The veterinary industry are following and have been known to do similar meetings too. It’s an objective way of going through cases or situations and making sure there wasn’t anything different that could have been done, and if something has been missed, learning from it. In this instance, nothing else could have been done unfortunately, it was just one of those things.
With Diana now off the rest of the week, a lot of appointments had to be called to be rearranged and now there was the added stress of clients complaining to deal with. We soon opened the doors to clients to finish off the last couple hours of consults, presenting a front to the clients that all was fine. When the day was finally over, it left behind a different team than the day had started with. All emotionally broken and tired, and just done.
The following few days Mother soldiered on as the lone vet at the clinic, dealing with two lots of vets work while the bosses tried and failed to get a locum to help with the load. Mother came down with muscle and joint aches and headaches and was suddenly worried she’d contracted Covid-19 again. Her covid tests were out of date, and if she did test positive the clinic would be down all vets and the clients would be horrid. But two days later she was fine again, and it was all put down to stress and exhaustion.
The next week it all came to a head. Diana was back thankfully, just reduced hours. On the Monday Mother made an error with her left and rights with a patient. Small mistake, wouldn’t make much difference? The patient was in clinic and something on the left side to be checked. Mother checked the right side. And didn’t realised for several days. It came to her on a drive home from work suddenly, and she felt sick. After barely any sleep the next day she went to the boss and told her her concerns about which side was checked, but the patient hadn’t had its recheck yet so we weren’t sure. It was a week later on Mothers day off that she got the call. She had indeed done the wrong side, and the client wasn’t happy. It was genuine human error. But that doesn’t make Mother feel any better, and unfortunately the client wasn’t particularly understanding.
Mother prides herself on being a good vet, always thorough, always double checking. To have made this type of error after ten years in clinic was so disappointing and so unlike her. In the end, Mother became concerned that she made this error because the week before had been so vile and stressful, and was likely a sign of burnout being imminent.
We only have one life and one body. So why do we kill ourselves for a job? A job where half the clients really don’t appreciate us, and some of them are plain vile when they want to be. The boss does the best she can, but we are a corporate clinic and they don’t care that we are exhausted, they just look at the final figures and tell us we can’t afford more staff, or we can’t close our books to help ease the stress. But all that stress leads us to making mistakes because we are so mentally exhausted. And in this case we were lucky because it was a small mistake, but what’s stopping us from making big mistakes, mistakes that could cost lives, because we’re so overworked. And if our brain isn’t the problem its our bodies. Mother’s knee is almost fully recovered but since the stressful week of doom her sciatica has been playing up. Constantly having to pick dogs up, or wrestle large dogs, or get up and down off the floor for ten years has an effect. And Mother isn’t the only one. The other day, there was only one member of staff in the clinic who didn’t have a bad back, so Mother couldn’t ask other people to pick animals up because there was no one else to help.
Since the week of doom Mother has decided that she needs to look after herself better. She never wants to make another mistake like that again, and she definitely doesn’t want to work herself to the point of becoming ill at work. As it is, work feels like a chore, a profession she loved before is slowly becoming just a job to be done. It gets harder and harder to force herself to smile in front of clients.
To top it off she experienced her first ever migraine a few days ago, and has only started to feel normal again today. And of course, she worked through the migraine because she didn’t want to let the team deal with clients being rude because they’d have to cancel or rearrange appointments again.
Today Mother printed a flexi-request form because she wants to reduce her working hours. Which means hopefully we’ll be at work less and on walks more, so this is a plan I fully approve of. Hopefully, this will help Mother be healthier both physically and mentally.
But the moral of the story is- Be Kind! You have no idea what’s going on behind closed doors. And look after yourself, because no one else will.
Thanks for reading- it was mostly a rant from Mother to be honest.
I’m going to write a fun post about my holiday to the beach next time with lots of fun photos!
Cedric xxx
P.S. If you’ve ever been in a similar situation with work burnout feel free to comment below x
I am not sure ticking the heart was the right thing to do, but I love the fact that you have the guts to tell it as it is and understand you have a remedy of sorts in your own hands. You will be a better vet for it. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️🐰