finally feeling stupid....

Throughout fourth year all my classmates would complain that they felt stupid--they didn't know anything, were constantly corrected by doctors, etc etc. My view on fourth year was that I wasn't supposed to know everything--in fact, it's expected that I knew barely anything. That's what fourth year is about--learning--if I knew everything I wouldn't still be in school. So I went though fourth year happy when i remembered something, and shrugged it off when i didn't.

When i started my job here, I had the same mindset because we didn't learn very much exotic animal medicine in school. And even though I've only been working a few months, I still feel like i should know more and it frustrates me. My boss asked me one day, "You look frustrated?" and i replied, "I get frustrated when I don't know everything, so I'll probably be frustrated for the next few years." She laughed and I realized the statement was completely true. Oh well. It will come.

But along the way will come the crazy clients. Exotic medicine is definitely full of a higher percentage of "special" clients (takes one to know one, right?) which is fine--I can handle the client who tells me I'm unhealthy being a vegetarian (don't even ask me how we got on that line of conversation--and then she wouldn't authorize treatment, oi) or the chinchilla owner who explains in a loud, fast 5 minute monologue that he doesn't believe in paying hospital bills so he doesn't (then move to canada...i didn't say it out loud) but he pays all of his vet bills, but i cannot handle the belligerent client....had my first one last week. In retrospect I probably should have walked out of the room earlier after being yelled at, told i was speaking disrespectfully (i think i had said two sentences before he started ranting) etc. In the end, he yelled at every employee in the clinic and was fired . Yes, we fire clients...apparently, economics says we should fire 10% of our clients to increase our productivity (we don't).

Later that week, another client was screaming at my boss over the phone that she was going to picket our clinic because we killed her rabbit (we didn't).

It comes in cycles...maybe every third full moon?....soon, hopefully, the cycle will end and I can get back to learning medicine instead of trying to predict and head-off unstable people.