See if you can remember way back to mid-March of 2020. The coronavirus crisis had reached its tipping point, and the word "pandemic" had just slipped into common usage. I don't even think most of us were calling it COVID-19 yet. In fact, it was the very first week of whiplash, when everything changed from in-house care to curbside, and everyone was scrambling to adjust to upended operations. It was a barely controlled chaos at that point.
Enter Ms. Showbreeder, equal parts self-important, overbearing, and stingy—a total time suck of a client who hadn't been fired only because her mental illness had garnered my sympathy. During a nasty bout of hemorrhagic enterocolitis-slash-pancreatitis in her ancient, tiny dog, for which she'd declined both hospitalization and specialist referral the day before, the creature finally succumbed. He was almost DOA, truth be told, but we had brought him back long enough to get accused of killing him.
Six months later, the case ended up in front of our state's veterinary board—the first I'd ever had to deal with in 25 years of practice. I wasn't worried about the outcome on the basis of negligence. I had covered my butt well enough for that. But I knew my record-keeping had not been up to typical standards during that week. From my point of view, the record was sparse. Not that there had been much to write up. He had been with us less than 15 minutes before he died. The six or seven specific treatments the dog received were in the records ... but not much more.
