Lost my first anesthetic patient...feeling useless as a tech.

I don't know why my comment, which was posted 11 hrs ago as the 3rd or 4th comment in this thread, has disappeared. So here it is:

I think you need to accept being second-guessed and learn to deal with it. Everyone at every vet clinic should have someone double checking their work, no matter how senior they are. My dog died because a registered vet tech didn't connect the oxygen tube during his anesthesia, so I may lack a certain amount of sympathy at this point. If someone had been second-guessing her work, my best buddy would not have been so severely brain damaged that I had to have put him down.

In summary, if you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.

And to anyone who would like to differentiate between "second-guessing" and "triple checking", let me assure you that as a client I couldn't care less what language you use. It's semantics and meaningless. If second guessing means mistakes are caught, I support it and I would hope anyone in any profession would learn from it, especially when your job directly effects life and death.

You aren't given keys to the kingdom without earning them. A year out of school? Sorry -- this is dues paying time.

/r/VetTech Thread