layout: true background-image: url(../../images/slide_background.jpg) background-size: cover class: middle --- # When Something Goes Wrong ### Long Quotes --- ### Quote 1 --- ### “When it goes great, you’re on top of the world and when it doesn’t, the reality bites and you lick your wounds a little bit. But I know that when I stand back and think about it logically, is there anything I would have done different, anything I could have done, or could the farmer have done anything different? *(cont. ...)* --- ### ... And even if the answer is yes, all I can do is say “I’ll have to learn from it” and unfortunately that might be at the expense of the animal but I think that is something that experience has taught me.” --- ### Quote 2 --- ### “… it would be a case of speaking with someone with more experience in the practice, talking about what I’d done and if they’d do the same or something better and then seeing if there was something I could have done to address it - actually, I should have given this cow and injection of X, then phoning the farmer back up and asking how the cow is, and offering to go back to the farm and do it *(cont. ...)* --- ### – acknowledging that I could go back and do something more. And if there was something that I’d felt was the best at the time but realised later I had made a mistake, it would then be a case of getting back on the farm fairly quickly, not being scared to go back and not leave it hanging over me as a farm I couldn’t go back to because I had an issue”. --- ### Quote 3 --- ### “I’ve had a couple of disasters in my time and you feel awful and it’s difficult. Luckily, it occurred to me later on in my career. Not as a new graduate which would probably be quite a confidence wrecking thing, but at that stage I was quite experienced. I made a mistake and killed the cow and the calf. *(cont. ...)* --- ### And that was one where I was lucky that the farmer was upset but forgiving. I bent over backwards for a little while to make things right but maybe that was me trying to make myself feel better but at the time driving back (away from the farm), I probably wanted to get back home, go to sleep and try and forget about it.” --- ### Quote 4 --- ## “If I’ve done my best and the farmers done his best, you can’t do anything more and you have to accept that sometimes, not matter how good you are, no matter how experienced you are, things do not work out the way you want them. And at the end of the day, if you start out with a live calf, it just has to kick its back legs, break its navel cord inside the cow and its dead in two minutes so the chances of something going wrong are pretty high in the situations in which we’re working,*(cont. ...)* --- ###so you have to accept -yes, sometimes the outcomes isn’t going to be what you hoped for – you have to accept that, shake your head and say, I know I’m not perfect, I know that everything isn’t going to go right every time and you have to accept that sometimes it’s going to be not the right outcome but if you can look yourself in the mirror *(cont ...)* --- ### and say, well, I did everything that I could have in that situation then you’ve not right to feel down, feel depressed or that it’s your fault. --- ### Quote 5 --- ## “Try and talk it through with them (vets who are worried they have made a mistake) and work out what did or didn’t go well. Come up with some positives – there will be some, and a lot of the time you didn’t do a lot wrong - it was communication, or perception that went wrong. And try and work out so you can learn from it and ensure that history doesn’t repeat. *(cont. ...)* --- ### And try and reassure, discuss how you’ve all been there probably - gallows humour. Tell a story of how you’ve probably done far worse and you’ve come out the other side. And just also try and reassure that a) it’s OK to care – we all care and we wouldn’t be getting up at 3.00 o’clock in the morning to try and help these people if we didn’t care and *(cont. ...)* --- ### b) that feeling will pass eventually although it doesn’t feel like that at the moment because it’s all encompassing when it happens. But we’ve all been there, we’ve all felt it and we’ve come out the other side. You can’t make it go away but try and rationalise it a bit, and not normalise it, but acknowledge that it’s a genuine feeling. But it will pass.”