I Dunno….
My special old boy, about two years after he injured himself.
Many years ago, I had a very special dog in my life, and late one night, he jumped for a frisbee, landed, and dropped to the ground screaming in pain. I took him in to the emergency vet. We took rads, and she sent me home to follow up in the morning with my regular vet. I looked in horror at the rads and at what looked like a cauliflower growing out of my old dog’s hip and asked “is this cancer?” The emergency vet didn’t think so, so I went home to care for my boy. All night long, he lay by my side of the bed, intermittently crying.
In the morning I called the vet and we went in. The vet looked at the rads and hemmed, and hawed, and hemmed and hawed. For two hours. During the entire time, the vet did not look anything up, or suggest talking to a colleague or getting another opinion; he just hemmed and hawed. The longer this went on, the more upset I became until finally I blurted out “Dr.? Is this bone cancer?”
“Yes, I think so” he said to me. “But let’s make sure.” The vet then outlined a procedure to drill a core of bone out of his leg, and send that for histology, and then we would have an answer. I asked the vet how long results would take. He did not know. Again, the vet was vague in his answers. Maybe a day or two. Or a week. He wasn’t sure, but he also did not reach out to ask. I know a little bit about cancer, and in particular about bone cancer, and I know that bone cancer is one that often needs very aggressive treatment, very quickly as it can progress quickly. I asked if we should send the radiographs out to a radiologist before doing anything as aggressive as taking a bone sample.
“Sure” said the vet. We should have an opinion within two days. I left with my precious old dog in tow, heavy of heart, knowing that I would be very unlikely to do the kind of radical treatment that would be necessary if it was indeed bone cancer. If it were cancer, the only way to save my dog’s life would be to amputate the leg, and then remove about half of his pelvis. That was one thing that the vet was clear on.
After two days, the rads did not come back and I was really upset, and my dog was still in a lot of pain. I called the vet and asked for more pain relief, and was given the run around. The vet was unable to speak to me. The rads had arrived the day before but no one had called me. I called back a few hours later. I really wanted to know what was going on. At five in the afternoon, I called again and was told that the vet had left for the day. Without calling me back. I was a train wreck. That night, I decided to move vets.
I called a veterinary colleague whose clinic was a little farther away and he said he could be happy to help and if I could leave RIGHT away, he would see me that morning. When we arrived, this vet looked at the rads and said “hmmm…that is interesting….hmmm. Just a minute.” He left the room, and returned about five minutes later, grinning, with two text books in hand. “I thought so,” he said. He then showed us the diagrams and pictures in his text book on radiology and then compared them to a paragraph in his text book on oncology. He then compared the radiograph of my dog’s hip to the images in the book and said “If this is bone cancer, then it should have changed since this radiograph was taken four days ago. Let’s take another x-ray, and see if there are any changes.”
John and I went for a coffee, and our boy went for another x-ray. And low and behold, there were no changes. The second vet also took several more angles of images, and was able to discover that part of why my dog was so painful was that he had broken off a spike of bone that had overgrown, and it was interfering with his hip moving normally. It was no wonder he was in so much pain. Our special friend did not have cancer, and went on to live two more years, with a lot of pain medication to deal with the original bone chip floating (and likely more broken chips later) around his joint.
So what does this have to do with being a professional dog trainer? One of the hardest things to learn to do is to deal with those moments gracefully and thoughtfully when you are not sure. As a dog trainer and behaviour consultant, dealing with the questions I don’t know the answer to immediately is one of the tasks I had to learn. When I am faced with a question I don’t know the answer to, I try and take a page from the second vet.
The first thing I do is to take a breath and say to my client “I don’t know.” It takes courage to be the expert who does not know, but doing it often has helped me to get better at it. There are lots of ways to say, “I don’t know”. You can say it straight up like that, or you can get creative. “Interesting question. I wonder if I can find that in my library” is a way I have often dealt with the issue. “Wow. I don’t get a lot of questions I can’t answer right away; can you give me a bit of time to think about it?” also works. Practice being curious and addressing the fact that you don’t always have an answer, and you will get better at dealing with the lack of information at your fingertips.
Working with a dog I often had to think hard about. He was such a good boy, even when we could not figure out how to progress!
Once both my client and I are aware that we are in uncharted territory we need to make a plan to find out. I have a very large library of books related to dogs, behaviour and training so often a trip to my library is a good starting point, but these days, I will usually use my cell phone and look it up. I might also share with my client that I can ask a colleague or post to an online list of colleagues (members of the Crucible have access to a vast library of experiences when they post on our forums!). Sometimes I ask my clients to gather more data on their observations if the information I don’t have concerns what action to take next. There are lots of ways to make plans for the next step when I am unsure how to answer a question. Again, practicing often really helps.
Finally, whatever the plan is that we make, I make sure to follow up. No one likes to be left guessing. Had my vet called me the afternoon the radiographs arrived instead of going home, and then not replying to my phone calls, he would not have lost me as a client. Being compassionate includes being aware of the fact that our clients and students want to know. We need good boundaries of course, but if you have a client who is asking you for information that will inform the safety of their dogs and their families, then a quick phone call or email before you go home at the end of the days is going to go a long way to helping to creating loyal, devoted clients.
