It’s past my bed time. A whole nine minutes past, to be exact. My husband is in the other room snoring, sounding like a bear in heat. For the record, I consider myself very lucky to not know what a bear in heat actually sounds like.

Some week nights whether it’s once, twice or more, I think about tomorrows work day. What surgeries I’ll be a part of, what cases myself and the DVM (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, i.e a vet, not to be confused with DMV, Department of Motor Vehicles) I am assigned to will see. One of my main jobs as a vet tech is to run anesthesia for my DVM while they are performing surgery. Yes, vets are great and amazing, but they cannot do it all – Enter, vet techs. I usually catch myself thinking about tomorrows patients.

“Are any of our patients poor surgical candidates?” Sure, I may know the answer to this based off of what we already know about the patient. But what about the stuff we don’t know? What if my “healthy” patient from three weeks ago has since developed a disease process and is not yet showing clinical signs? Depending on what could be going on, my patient may be at high risk for anesthetic death. Heck, even the unexpected could happen and while all my patients are clinically “healthy”, someone still may die. Yes, the DVM has to do the surgery, but I have to keep the patient alive during surgery. I am the one that makes sure they come out of anesthesia a-okay. One of my instructors once called anesthesia “controlled death” in a lecture and that really hit home for me.

I’m yet to lose a patient under anesthesia. That is with the exception of one guinea pig with a lump that we tried to remove that was bigger than him – this was a Hail Mary for an 8 year old girl. Other than the guinea pig, I have not yet lost one. I think this leads to the low level anxiety that I sometimes feel towards anesthetic cases. Fear of the inevitable, so to speak. I will end up losing my first patient one day… not a matter of if, a matter of when. One of my attending vets says that “a little bit of fear is always a good thing”. Yeah well, tell that to my 25 year old wrinkles and graying (ie. maybe two hairs every month) hair.

Because of writing this post, I’ll probably fall asleep tonight thinking things like: “How can I prepare for tomorrow?” ” What can I do to make things go smooth?” “What if something goes wrong, what will be my plan of attack?”. I like to clean to de-stress and take my mind off of work. I’m going to start doing yoga again soon to help find some peace from my mind in the evenings. I’m starting to find these worried/anxious thoughts are more limited to the morning of surgery, with the night before thoughts creeping in a lot less frequently.

To keep myself humble as I progress in my career, I always remind myself that these animals belong to clients. This animal is someones pet, their whole world, their “fur baby” as one may call it. I always keep it at the back of my mind that no matter how anxious I may be for the pet’s surgery, guaranteed their owner will be a lot more worried than I am. I owe it to my clients to put on my big girl panties, swallow the fear of the inevitable, and get the job done. Everyone is counting on me – whether they know it or not.