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Meeting Expectations

Katherine Dobbs, RVT, CVPM, PHR

The only way for us to meet expectations is to either live up to what our clients already expect, or educate them on what to expect. While I don’t usually talk about my family of origin, a situation arose with my father that I feel could teach us a lesson about expectations.

Eighteen months ago, he was diagnosed with what human medicine calls a “Triple A”, an abdominal aortic aneurysm. The wall of his aorta had thinned and stretched, basically, until there was an accumulation of blood the size of a softball. I guess the very first lesson we can learn is, if there’s something sticking up out of your abdomen when you lay on your back, that eventually you notice is pulsing, you should get immediate medical attention!

Fortunately my father did, even though one doctor had already failed to show concern when it was a much smaller “lump.” You may be able to guess what can happen with these Triple A’s; they stretch until they burst, and a person can die of blood loss in less than a minute or two. Amazingly, my father lived until the surgery, which was postponed a bit because it was the Christmas holiday season (far be it to interrupt the tree trimming at the house of the vascular surgeon!).

It was a very tough surgery, but my dad survived. The main lesson comes afterwards, as he struggled to literally get back on his feet after an incredibly delicate and invasive abdominal surgery.

Not long after the surgery, my dad noticed another lump forming along the incision line. If I recall correctly, at first the medical community thought it was reaction to suture, no big deal. As it became larger and larger, however, my dad was diagnosed with an abdominal incisional hernia. Turns out, it’s pretty common in older people (he was in his early 70s) for the abdominal layers to not close sufficiently.

This may have been a rather mundane and common occurrence in medicine, but no one had warned my father of this possibility. Meanwhile, my father, who had never been that fond of the medical profession, became even less convinced that doctors do more good than harm. He feels this way despite the fact that, in all honesty, they saved his life.

Every day, in the work we do, we ask that people trust us to provide the best medical care to their beloved pets. It may be as simple as asking a family to trust our recommendation to vaccinate, or as complex as educating a pet owner on the touchy surgery needed to save the pet’s life. While we may be looking for them to approve the injection or sign the estimate for the surgery, we must go beyond that.

We must give them realistic expectations of what to expect next. It may be a slight fever and sore injection spot, or it might be a revelation that leads to euthanasia under anesthesia. You can learn to meet these expectations. Each time that you answer a follow-up question from a client, or have to back up to explain what happened, that interaction provides knowledge to your arsenal of proactive communication. The same question could come from the next client; the same unfortunate outcome could happen to the next animal.

In our line of work, it is true that we can save lives but still lose clients, if we fail to meet their expectations.

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Meeting Expectations

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