To me, caring for your own pets is an essential requirement for success as a veterinarian. Calling on my experience as a pet owner deepens my understanding of the animals I care for, and strengthens my connection with my clients. I can truly empathize when an owner shares their frustration with enticing a reluctant cat to eat, I’ve been there too. I understand how hard it can be to administer medications twice, or even three times a day. And, embarrassingly, I’ve also tried but failed to clip my perfectly healthy and entirely intolerant cat’s claws.

Being a veterinarian means that you don’t have to look too far to find an animal in need of a home. Whether it’s a stray picked up by a technician on the way to work or animals whose owners can no longer care for them, the opportunity to adopt a dog, cat, or sometimes parrot, chicken or rabbit, crops up regularly in most veterinary hospitals. It’s a perk of the job, or, if you ask my husband, a hazard.

Over the last seventeen years of my career I’ve adopted three dogs and seven cats with four cats and two dogs coming from my work place, and the others coming from the local shelter. Maybe you can see, then, why my husband considers my constant exposure to homeless animals a problem.

Of course, I thoroughly indulge and pamper my pets. Dog and cat toys are scattered all over the floor, and the cupboard is stuffed with collars and leashes. I’ll even admit that Stanley, our small and thinly-haired dog, wears s

weaters when it’s cold— maybe excessive given that we live in San Diego. But, like many of the veterinarians I know, when my pets get sick I fall apart—and I have an example.

One recent morning, I took the dogs, Stanley and Stella, out to the yard to do their morning business. Both dogs prefer to poop in the most inconvenient places. Generally, they’ll squat under a bush or behind some garden furniture, and this particular morning Stella chose a spot between the fence and a leafy dense bush that’s turning brown. Business attended to, we returned to the house.

After I closed the front door, I realized that something was wrong with Stella. She was standing a few feet from me with her head down and her ears pointing to the sides like a disappointed Yoda. I called her name and her typically exuberant tail wag muted to a light flicker.

My internal medicine brain was instantly on. I watched her intently for a moment and a list of possibilities ran through my mind.

Was she in pain? It looked like it, but where was she painful? Had she injured herself coming up the last steps to the house?

Could she have a congenital problem? She’s so young, maybe she was born with an abnormality that is only now coming to light.

I imagined the worst scenarios—avascular necrosis of her femoral head making her hip painful, atlantoaxial instability giving her neck pain. An intussusception blocking her intestinal tract. All conditions that would need extensive diagnostics and treatment, possibly evensurgery. I knew that these problems were unlikely, but I was irrational, and panicked. While I worried, she’d turned her head to lie close to her right side, her ear pulled back and flat.

I took a deep breath and reorganized the list of dire diseases I’d conjured. It looked like her ear was bothering her.

Although experience told me it was probably pointless, I tried peering into her ear, which looked, unsurprisingly, normal. Then, I gently massaged the side of her head, but she cried and looked at me accusingly. Not an orthopedic crisis after all then, just a foxtail, or other plant material trapped in her ear canal, causing intense irritation.

I took her to the hospital, gave her sedation, and asked a colleague to look down her ear—I’m far too faint of heart to perform any procedure on my own animals. The offending plant material was swiftly removed by a long thin pair of forceps and a steady hand. Outside of Stella’s body, the small brittle brown branch looked inoffensive, a tiny cause of my major worry. Once she’d been sedated, I couldn’t resist taking X-rays of her back end to relieve my concern over a possible hip problem, of which, I reminded myself, she’d never shown a sign. They were normal.

After the crisis was resolved my colleague and I laughed at the list of terrible diseases I’d diagnosed at home. With Stella sleeping off her sedation in my arms, my concerns seemed wildly out of proportion. But, I knew that the next time one of my pets showed any signs of disease all rational thoughts would leave my mind and I would be reduced to a frantic mess again.