A Day in the Life…

By Cheyenne Thomas When people think about the work a veterinarian does, Dr. Jennifer Nemec said people often are influenced by what they see on TV. In TV shows, the audience are often shown images of veterinarians working with cute puppies and kittens and having minimal interactions with people. The reality is far different. It’s a career that requires difficult decisions to be made, for care and empathy to be given to both pet and owner, and oftentimes takes a vet on a journey from the beginning of a pet’s life to its very end.

Nemec is both the owner and the veterinarian at Badger Animal Clinic in Granton. Since 2017, she has owned and operated the small animal care part of the business, taking care of mostly dogs and cats at her practice. Her experience with veterinary care extends beyond her days at Granton, as she has been a veterinarian for 18 years and is also a member of the board of the Wisconsin Veterinary Medicine Associations, serving as the representative of northern Wisconsin in a 4-year term.

“We work on legislative efforts at the state level for vet medicine,” she said about her position on the board. “It’s nice to be able to represent our county in a state organization.”

Day-to-day operations As a veterinarian, Nemec said her duties change from day to day depending on what comes through the door, but generally, surgeries are completed in the morning hours and wellness checks and other appointments are done during the afternoons. On the weekends, she takes care of running the business.

“Typically I do surgical procedures in the morning, where I will remove masses, do dentistry, spays and neuters and the occasional urgent cases,” she said. “In the afternoons, I will do wellness checks and sick appointments. I’m also a business owner so I do management as well, ordering pharmaceutical drugs, managing staff and doing payroll.”

While there is some routine with the work she does, Nemec said that there are times when a pet emergency arises that takes priority. If she isn’t in surgery with another patient, she said she will take care of emergencies such as animals hit by cars, wound repairs and acute sicknesses.

“Dental work, pulling teeth, bladder stone removals, those are ones that are done on a more routine basis,” she said. “I will also do laceration repairs and porcupine quill removal. We get a lot of those out here. You have animals that are hit by cars and I see a lot of dogs that are sick with vomiting, diarrhea, urinating blood or sometimes collapse in dogs, where they just collapse. That’s related to heart problems.”

On average, Nemec said she sees about 12 patients per day and roughly 3,000 over the course of a year. Of the animals she sees and treats, about 70 percent are dogs while 30 percent are cats. Her patients also come from all over the county and beyond, with petownersfromGranton,Loyal,Greenwood, Neillsville, Colby, Abbotsford, Black River Falls and even Marshfield.

“It gets busy,” she said. “We pull from a lot of rural communities and more people bring in dogs than cats. Cats don’t travel as well and a lot of cats are indoor cats, so they don’t get exposed to as many things as dogs do.”

The team Nemec is not alone in providing veterinary care to her animal patients. With her are Anna Cepress, veterinary assistant, and April Schulz, certified veterinary technician. They both have important roles at Badger Animal Clinic, taking care of patients that do not require a full veterinarian.

“The technicians will do appointments, administer vaccines, booster shots and do nail trimmings,” she said. “These technicians are boarded by the state and have an associate’s degree. They can’t do surgery, can’t prescribe and can’t diagnose, but they do draw blood and run lab samples. I couldn’t do this without them, it’s a team approach.”

The certified veterinary technician is a position that is often overlooked and under appreciated, Nemec said. They have the equivalent education of a registered nurse and help take on a workload that can sometimes be dangerous.

“A lot of people think it’s just me, but I can’t do all of this by myself,” she said. “The technicians do so much and they don’t get credit. They take on a lot. Sometimes we’re dealing with 150-pound dogs. We’re on our feet a lot and we can get a bit beat up by the animals. There’s sometimes hissing and biting. I am lucky that I only got majorly bit once. There is a reason why we ask for people to bring in pets with a muzzle or a sedative. I do surgeries. If anything ever happens to my hands, if I get bit, I’m done. We have to use precautions. We understand, they may be an angel at home, but they may freak out when they get jabbed with a needle. It’s stressful for your pet and we know that they act differently here than they do at home.”

Trauma Being a veterinarian comes with its loads of challenges. Like doctors and nurses, Nemec said that a lot of times, veterinarians see more tragedies than joys in their line of work. For every little puppy and kitten that is born, for every simple wellness check and routine vaccine appointment, there’s cancer cases, animals being put down, accidents and severe sicknesses that an animal may not survive. Those cases and those patients are the ones that stick with a person.

“People don’t always think about the things we carry with us,” she said. “There is a very high suicide rate for veterinarians, and it’s happening a lot in the younger generations. They get what’s called ‘compassion fatigue,' and you see it happen in hospitals with doctors and nurses as well. There’s a lot of trauma from a lot of cases. I recently had a case where I lost a dog to blue-green algae toxicity. It had just gone swimming that day and drank some bad water. That was tough. The dog was only two. We see a lot of animals with cancer, they look fine one day, and the next day they struggle to get up and you end up finding a big mass in their abdomen and you have to give a prognosis of only a couple months. Some stories never go away. Something bad happens and you think about it a lot, what you could have done differently.”

In addition to trying to treat an animal that is sick or injured, Nemec said there’s also the pet owners themselves who have to be considered. So many owners are attached to their pets and she said it can be very difficult sometimes for an owner to accept a diagnosis.

“It’s hard for people to understand,” she said. “Sometimes there are unrealistic expectations of what we can do. We can’t save them all. I had to put down a dog once and found out later that that dog had been the pet of the family’s daughter who had died of leukemia and the dog was the last thing they had of her. Those stories make it harder. People have these emotional connections to their pets and it can be hard to let them go.”

When there is such a strong connection between pet and owner, Nemec said the veterinarian has to often support the owner through the process as well.

“It’s hard to lose a pet,” she said. “You have to try to be supportive of people in those cases. We have all been through the loss of a pet, of the joys of having a pet. When they get old and are dying, you have to decide if they even have the quality of life anymore. What an owner will decide is up to them, but you have to provide comfort to people and do end of life care. There’s a lot more compassion and communication that you need to do with the owners rather than just the animal.”

Costs Costs are something that has only gone up in recent years. As a business owner, Nemec said it has only gotten more and more difficult to keep up with expenses, for both herself as a business owner, and for her clients who see the rising costs as well.

“There is stress that comes with owning a business,” she said “Expenses went way up post-Covid. I do have to pay more to attract and train staff. Drugs don’t just appear on my shelf for free. When people think about the costs of veterinary care, they don’t think about the things that go into taking care of a pet. The equipment, the oxygen that you use when an animal is sedated, the x-rays are all digital now and you have to pay to store them. Syringes and other materials need to be disposed of as biohazards. There are costs behind the business.”

While the costs have gone up, Nemec said one thing that has gotten better has been the amount of options an owner can pursue for treatment. There is a vet clinic

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Fom left Anna Cepress, vet assistant, Dr. Jennifer Nemec, veterinarian and April Schulz, certified veterinarian technician, pose with a few of the animal residents of Badger Animal Clinic in Granton. The team works to provide care for dogs and cats at the small animal clinic.

CHEYENNE THOMAS/STAFF PHOTOS