“Dana.” (Pause.) “Dana!” (Ears send signal to brain that familiar sound was detected.) “DANA!” (Name recognition finally occurs.) Realizing I may have missed someone calling my name somewhere around 2 to 27 times, I scanned the crowd, begging my often-faulty internal facial recognition software to work its magic. As it ground through the paces, I caught sight of the woman waving at me. (Match!) Enthusiastically greeting me was none other than the very first veterinarian I had worked for as an assistant in high school. We hugged and laughed and spent a moment chatting and catching up; remarking on how much things had changed. I was a conference organizer for the event she was attending, running from meeting to event, and she was happily relaxed and easing into her well-desired retirement. I left with that “it’s a small world” feeling we often get.
And maybe veterinary medicine really is a small world—or, more accurately, a small town. Roughly speaking, there are a little over 120,000 veterinarians and 200,000 veterinary nurses and other support staff in the United States, and as many as 1.8 million veterinarians globally. That’s compared to over 1 million physicians and over 3 million registered nurses in the United States,, and over 9 million human doctors worldwide. Our veterinary populations match the size of Topeka, Kansas; Richmond, Virginia; and Phoenix, Arizona, respectively. So, was it really a coincidence that I ran into my first mentor or was it actually inevitable?
The veterinary community shares many other commonalities with a small town. We are more likely to have overlap in how we value animals, education, and career goals and aspirations. We are known to band together in a crisis to support our fellow inhabitants. We have neighborhoods (Surgeon Circle, Internist Avenue, and General Practitioner Park) where the inhabitants have niche qualities and experiences that make them even more closely knit. We use the same lingo and have the same slang (“I have a GSD with signs of PTE after being presented to the ER for HBC”).
Like many inhabitants from similar settings, I see ways we can use these shared professional attributes to make our small town the best possible.
First, you never know who will leave and reenter your professional life at any given time. You may leave “Emergency Room Road” and head into a new area of practice or industry only to run back into a beloved colleague—similar to how I ran into my first veterinary mentor at a conference. You’ll also run into people with whom you didn’t have great relationships, from jobs you quit or got fired from to colleagues you cut out of your professional life for any number of reasons. While some bridges do need to be burned (and you need that glorious feeling of tossing the match over your shoulder as you walk away), always remember to save that for when you truly need it. You just never know where you’ll see someone from our small town again or with whom you’ll need to forge a new working relationship.
If you were ever the new kid in class, you know that coming into a small, tight-knit group is intimidating. You may not look like everyone else; you may have different experiences, culture, level of knowledge, or skin color; and it may be really difficult to find your neighborhood in our small town. We all need to do more to be the veterinary welcome wagon. Small towns that thrive are diverse, welcoming, friendly, and accommodating. Small towns that fade into existence, aren’t. We want our population to grow, we need new ideas, new solutions, and new colleagues. We’ll always have bad eggs—no place nor profession is exempt from that—but if we look out for others, as our empathetic tendencies push us to do anyway, we can drown out the negativity. Be the one that eats lunch with the new kid today or invite someone to scrub into your surgery.
Lastly don’t fall prey to the gossip that poisons many small communities. Seek out the truth, avoid rash judgments, and communicate frankly and kindly with your colleagues. What an owner said another veterinarian said about you has always suffered from a bad case of the “telephone game” and rarely contains more than a kernel of truth. We share so much as colleagues and we all would appreciate a bit more of the benefit of the doubt. When we assume the worst, we are giving the bad apples in our profession the strength of being the loudest voice in our heads. When you assume others have the same good intentions you do, you will benefit from a positive mental outlook and, more than not, find it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Veterinary medicine can be an idyllic place if we allow ourselves to embrace small-town, friendly, welcoming, and engaging moments like hugging your first veterinary mentor, giving a professional “tour” to a new grad through mentorship, and calling your colleague across town to straighten out communication glitches–and laugh about the bad food at the local CE event!