Gary Barg, Editor-in-Chief
I owe my veterinarian an apology (or rather, Junior's vet). This is the same family-run veterinarian clinic that I have been taking him to since he was a pup. How this relates to family caregiving is coming up.
Late week, I took Junior in to see his doctor and started to run through an actual list of things I thought needed to be checked out. The questions literally ranged from head to tail. As the vet was running around in response to my requests to check this and that, I realize now that it seemed like the scene out of the Lucy Show where she and Ethel were trying to keep up with a fast moving conveyor belt in a chocolate factory.
I didn’t notice at the time, but I was breaking one of the cardinal rules of fearless caregiving: treat the members of your pr
ofessional care team as equals. As I do with my own or my loved one’s doctor visits: before I make the appointment, I call and talk to the staff about my questions. This gives them the chance to see if they were best answered by the doctor, or at least to give him a heads up about what concerns I have before the appointment. If I had done so in this case, I could have pared down my requests to the most important points, so there would have been more time for conversation and consultation.
So the next time I go to any
medical professionals office, you dog-gone better bet that I will be more prepared. Hey, at least I tried to bring a funny pet saying into the article. It didn’t work, but I guess it wasn’t that much of a cat-astrophy. Gotta go, I was just told to stop horsing around.
junior tree
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