Kristin is a General Practitioner in the Veterinary field at Healing Hands Animal Hospital in Salisbury, Maryland. She has had an affinity for animals since her youth; Kristin says that this love, coupled with her love of science is what inspired her to become a veterinarian. The medical field of veterinary science is very competitive as there as only twenty eight veterinary schools in the United States. According to her, the work is very strenuous, whether it be examining animals or interacting with customers due to the business aspect of the practice. However, the tough road to becoming a veterinarian is worth is the reward of helping animals stay healthy.
Transcript
>> My name is Dr. Kristin Cody [phonetic] and I'm a veterinarian. On a daily basis I have animal patients that come in. I tend to work 10 to 12 hour days and see appointments every half hour which can consist of wellness visits, which is basically just routine physical examine, doing routine blood work vaccines. And then there's also people that bring in their sick patients for treatment and diagnostics. And we have animals that come in that have been hit by a car or they're just sick and they're lethargic and they're laying around or they're vomiting, and the owners don't know why. A lot of skin cases where they're very itchy or have skin infections or they're itching at their ears. So basically we just have to do a physical exam, offer different testing options and then different treatment options. We also do surgery, too. About one day a week I do surgery which is usually spaying or neutering or removing masses, that sort of thing. Dentistry, dentistry is big, too. We'll have dogs and cats that have horrible teeth, so that's one of the things we try to educate clients that come in, just preventative medicine in keeping up with brushing their animal's teeth which a lot of people haven't heard of. Just giving them like flea preventative, heart worm preventative and just doing all that preventative work to make our jobs easier and the animals that we see healthier. The travel that we do is usually first CE work which is continuing education. So about once a year we try to go to different conferences that are sometimes out of state. They have some that are out of country. Some of them are local so that would be the travel. Large animals veterinarians do a lot of travel day to day. They pretty much spend the whole day in the truck and go to different farms so they travel more on a day-to-day basis.
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