As is the case in many parts of the country, vets in New York City are very much seeing an increase in the amount of new patients presenting to their hospitals. With each new patient, whether a puppy purchased from a breeder upstate, a rescue from the south, or a longtime pet of someone who just moved into the city, each one usually arrives with a manilla envelope with hundreds of papers that contain every documentable vaccine, blood test, or procedure that was performed. While this can be a somewhat daunting task for the older patients, I am grateful to have wonderful teammates on whom I can rely to go through relevant paperwork, enter it into our electronic medical record, and ask me any questions to clarify ambiguity.
Recently, while hurriedly sifting through some papers, my eyes flashed across the top of one paper and caught the name of one of my best friends from vet school. I did a double-take, and sure enough, the dog that was wagging her tail waiting for me to examine her was a mutual patient of ours. After going outside to speak to her owner (since that is the protocol in our hospital now as we do not allow clients in the hospital), I told her that we had a friend in common. Sure enough, the owner had recently moved to New York City from Massachusetts. It really made my day to make that connection, and I hope that there will be some more of these happy occurrences in the future!
