Five Greeting Card Sentiments I Wish Were Made for Veterinarians

Blog Post |  October 1, 2022

By Naomi Hoyer

I am a big sender and giver of greeting cards. I love standing in the aisle, looking through dozens, picking out the perfect sentiment to share. I have given cards for happy and sad occasions, for losses and celebrations, for new beginnings and painful endings. In one of my fantasy alternate careers, I will be a greeting card creator, imagining the combination of the perfect landscape, with exactly the right emotion. I have now been a veterinarian for 20 years. There have been so many times in my life that I needed a card to send to a fellow veterinary professional: classmates, co-workers, client support staff, technicians and now students, and so many times that the greeting card aisle has failed me. In the spirit of solving my own problems, I’ve come up with five greeting card sentiments that I wish they made for veterinarians!


One: Life is Hard, Don’t Make it Harder

In my role as an assistant professor at CSU, I have the privilege of teaching a variety of different learners. I teach the basics of oral disease and practical skills to veterinary students, I teach specialty-level dentistry to residents and I help general practitioners refine the dental skills they use in practice every day. I love providing that one piece of advice that takes people from tolerating dentistry to loving it. I find deep satisfaction when students ask, “how does a person become a veterinary dentist,” because I know that our amazing team in the Dentistry and Oral Surgery Department has kindled a life-long love of dentistry in another student.

In the veterinary profession, many of us are overthinkers. I had a circuitous route to veterinary dentistry. I remember well the nights of lying awake after working on a hard case wondering if I had made the right call, or tossing and turning wondering if my foreign body surgery was dehiscing at that moment. I wracked my brain after farm calls gone bad, and had to give up coffee for several months because I worked myself into an ulcer after a beloved patient suddenly died. And so now that I only perform one kind of surgery, my mantra is that I want to help people find the easy way. Let me be clear that the easy way does not mean that dentistry is easy and doesn’t require practice, for many people it requires many hours of continuing education before they develop true proficiency. I mean easy in the sense that I want to connect people with the resources that will help them get better without struggling through it alone.


Two: Just in Case, Have a Backup Career

Some days as a veterinarian are hard. Really, really hard. Clients can be unkind and awful, I once had a client threaten to expose what he saw as my incompetency to every news station in California (where I worked for my first four years out of school). Patients can refuse to respond to treatments. All veterinarians make errors, and those haunt me. And yet I still absolutely love going to work every day. Part of the reason that I have been able to maintain my love for this profession is that I have done wildly different things. I have deep respect for colleagues who have landed in a job that brings them satisfaction for their entire career, and I am not that person. Even now as a university professor, I tell people that I have at least three jobs. I lecture and teach labs, I run a busy small animal service, I travel to zoos and I travel and teach, all are satisfying in different ways.

But even at a job I love, there are days when I fantasize about an alternate career, and I encourage everyone to keep something tucked away in your back pocket that can be a source of mental reprieve on those days when coming to work seems a burden too big to bear. My backup career is to work at knitting bookstore. For me, knitting is meditative. I love the feeling of the fiber and the satisfaction of creating something beautiful out of a ball of yarn. I’m regularly clicking away with my needles during every meeting or CE lecture that I attend.

I can’t imagine that I will ever really get a chance to work at a knitting bookstore, I love my career too much, and there is too much dentistry that still needs to be taught, but knowing that I could do something else feels like a back door escape. I think that too many times, as veterinarians, people feel trapped. And maybe leaving veterinary medicine isn’t right for you (it certainly hasn’t been for me, yet), but knowing that you could, may be the freedom that you need. If you wake up each day and the burden of showing up to work is too great, make a new plan!


Three: Find your Superpower(s)

Most people who go to veterinary school have at least a smidgen of a deep-seated type A person lurking inside them. How else did you finish all the prerequisites with good grades while working and volunteering. Or for those coming to veterinary medicine as a second career, who did all those things while working full or part-time jobs and raising children. It’s truly mind boggling when you sit down for a minute and consider just how you got here. Kudos to you.  And even so, one of the hardest things for me to realize was that there are parts of veterinary medicine that are not areas where I excel. I do not love the kinds of cases that bring internal medicine people joy. I don’t relish discussing bloodwork or the nuances of electrolyte imbalances. I once had to feign excitement during an entire conversation about the intricacies of liver metabolites. My superpower is oral surgery. It took me a while to come to that realization (hence the 10 years of practice before my residency), but my quality of life has increased exponentially since making that discovery.

Everyone has a different superpower, and it’s ok that your superpower may change throughout your career. Not all our superpowers will be the same, thank goodness, but everyone has at least one. And it isn’t necessarily related to your career. Your superpower may be the ability to multi-task, or handle stress without having it take a toll on your body, or survive on 4 hours of sleep a night, or cook amazing food, the possibilities are endless. Make sure to spend time finding it and cultivating it.


Four: Give the Energy you Want to Receive

It may surprise people who know me professionally to learn that I consider myself deeply introverted. When I heard the term introverted extrovert for the first time it was like I was reading a description of myself. I love social interactions, but they take a toll and I need time to recover after they are complete. A people-y week will often find me using the weekend to recover with my family on a hike, or watching a movie rather than meeting up with more people. I’m a little bit like a cat with limited kitty minutes. I won’t bite or scratch (most days), but I’m not above retreating under a bed and hiding. I am extremely loyal and tend to hold on to good friends for years, especially the ones who really understand that my time is super limited at this stage of my life. It’s important to me to work with people who I enjoy, and I work hard to create a positive work culture in the Dentistry and Oral Surgery Service. This was a lesson that I learned the hard way.

Before my kids were born, when working at a private practice, I developed a reputation for being hard to work with, particularly for the technicians. If we’re ever together, ask me sometime about the Great Towel Folding Incident of 2008. At one point, I became aware that new tech hires were being warned that I was a difficult, and it hurt my heart. Then my daughter was born, and my world turned upside down. When my daughter was a baby, I realized, in a way that I have never before that the energy you give people, will often be the energy that you get back from people. When returning from maternity leave, I decided that I wanted to be a person who people were excited to work with, not dreaded. I made an effort to change the energy that I brought to my workplace, and I’m conscious of that effort even now. I cultivated patience and let go of my need to be right. Instead of reacting to anger, I tried (not always successfully, I’m not Ghandi) to imagine the challenges the other person in an interaction might be facing before responding. As I got calmer, my enjoyment of my job got higher and I think I got a whole lot more pleasant to be around. And I work to create and maintain relationships with other people who are doing that work. It’s work that I still do to this day.


Five: Life is Short, Make your Own Joy.

I wish that we could do away with the myth of a work-life balance. To me, balance implies one of those little scales that you put tiny weights on in high school science class to understand relative density of objects. In my experience, balance is a lot more like juggling a whole lot of sharp objects, that may or may not be on fire.

Let me give you an example. I serve on a number of committees as a part of my job and working at a university work is occasionally a great example of one of my favorite phrases, “could this meeting have been an email”? On a recent day, while performing surgery, I attended a required confidential meeting, using headphones attached to my computer which was sitting on a mayo stand. Balance? I don’t think so. Crazy over-commitment? Quite possibly. I was embarrassingly late in my career before I realized that there is not a way to do it all. If I’m performing at my best at work, I probably don’t have enough to bring home to my family. If I’m performing my best in both those places, I probably am not spending enough time recharging my own batteries. “No,” is a complete sentence. Even when it’s something I’m really interested in, but feeling stretched, the answer may be no for now, and then I’ll revisit it later.

When I say no to things, every no is giving me the chance to say yes to things that actually bring me joy. And there are so many things that bring me joy: hiking, paddleboarding, exploring new outdoor places, eating good food, drinking delicious beer, talking with friends, travelling, watching movies with my family, napping, the list goes on. Your list will be different than mine, but make sure that you fight for it. It is not anyone’s job to take care of you but yourself. You have both the privilege and the burden of making time for the things that bring you joy. Now let’s get these gift cards in a box, so that you can go out and do it!


Naomi Hoyer is an Assistant Professor of Dentistry and Oral Surgery at the Veterinary Teaching Hospital at Colorado State University. She graduated from Colorado State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in 2002. She worked in general practice for 10 years before starting her dental residency in private practice. She became an AVDC Diplomate in 2017. She left private practice in 2018 to pursue her passion for dentistry education. She hopes to share her love of dentistry with as many students and practitioners as possible. Her professional interests include management of periodontal disease and developmental maxillofacial disease.


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