You're Gonna Get Peed On!: How Veterinarians Can Keep Their Dream Job from Becoming a Nightmare While Working Less and Earning More

By Michael Bugg

Thrive in your veterinary career, combat burnout, and realign your life with this expert guide!

Your patients may be adorable dogs and fluffy kittens, but even the cutest of job perks don't lessen the stress of your veterinary career.
Between the never-ending stream of appointments, constant decision-making, and empathy exhaustion, the reality of your once-dream job may feel more like a nightmare. The truth is, sustaining a career as a veterinarian is hard to do when you're stuck in survival mode.
You treat all your clients and their adorable furry creatures with love, compassion, and gratitude. Now, it's time to care for the most important patient—yourself.
In You're Gonna Get Peed On, Dr. Michael Bugg, DVM, shares smart solutions for the personal and financial struggles that no one warned you about in vet school. With this guide of practical advice and insights from veterinarians pulled from his popular podcast, The Veterinary Project Podcast, get ready to take back control from veterinary burnout and realign your life for ultimate joy and financial abundance—both inside and outside of the clinic.
You'll discover

• 2 animals that can boost your self-worth and free you from negative perfectionist thinking.
• How to foster burnout-busting resilience and develop the good habits needed for a sustainable veterinary career.
• Mindfulness for handling unexpected career trajectories and pivoting toward new business opportunities (veterinary or otherwise!).
• 7 core values to tame the Money Mindset Drain and achieve financial independence as a veterinarian.
• Passive income and real estate investing ideas—so you can experience more abundance with less hours at the clinic.

The pathway to improve your well-being and get out of veterinarian survival mode starts with your personal development and approach to finances. Read You're Gonna Get Peed On and rediscover the career, fulfillment, and abundance that you deserve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Veterinary Project Publishing
• Release date: Mar 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781738772322

Book preview

Preface

FIRST, LET ME just start by saying I love science. I believe the greatest skill being a veterinarian has taught me is the ability to think critically (for myself) and solve problems; it is a very intellectual pursuit. With regard to the care of our patients, I absolutely believe in the scientific process as new diagnostic and treatment procedures are developed.

But this book isn’t about that. It’s about the care of YOU! One interesting and unexpected development I encountered on my journey away from Miserable Mike (you’ll meet him shortly) was just how much of a transformation occurred once I allowed other areas of my body to have a say (and actually listened to them). Things like intuition and soulset—pieces of myself that were always there but that I chose to ignore.

There is both an art and a science to being a veterinarian. This book focusses much more on the art.

Of course, where the science is available, I am happy to share it (like the fascinating research surrounding mindfulness, for example), but this book does not read like a research paper and you won’t find double-blind peer-reviewed studies for every concept introduced here. Some will require a little courage and a leap of faith.

As I found out, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. Change requires a different approach. With that in mind, I’d like to invite and even challenge you a little as you work your way through this book:

Get out of your head. This is not a textbook that you need to study front to back, highlighters at the ready. The real value in this book comes from changing your context, not the specific content. There will be no pop quiz part way through to make sure you’ve memorized the Krebs cycle and are worthy to continue. Read to enjoy. The goal is that the concepts that resonate with you should land on some sort of emotional level.

Put the scalpel blade down. If you wanted, you could dissect every single concept and chapter and point out situations and scenarios where they don’t apply. There is a reason this book took me over two years to write. It’s because I’m one of you! (I’m looking at you, Chapter 4.) Again, this book is about big, overall concepts that will impact your life. Yes, there are direct tactical pieces that you can implement, but exceptions always exist. I understand that a quick and definite decision may not be the most appropriate in a complex medical situation. Again, art and science.

This book is purebred Bernedoodle that is also partwolf. And you have the only copy in existence. You will be reading this book through the filter of all of your past experiences and beliefs, and your colleagues will be doing the same. That means that every single person will experience this book differently. If you choose to re-read it a year from now, you’ll notice that different concepts resonate. It’s not that the content will have changed—it’s that you will have changed.

I hope we don’t agree on everything. If we do, then I probably haven’t written anything very interesting and certainly nothing outside your comfort zone. I also look forward to looking back on this book in 20 years and wondering what the hell I was thinking, because that is the journey of growth. We are supposed to refine or outright replace our thoughts and beliefs as we evolve. This is where art and science can actually meet.

My sole intention in sharing this book is to positively impact each and every reader, and, ultimately, the veterinary profession. I am honored and grateful that you have chosen to spend some of your time here.

Chapter One

Did I Climb the Wrong Mountain?

IREMEMBER IT LIKE it was yesterday.

I was fresh out of veterinarian school and on my way to the veterinarian clinic for the first time—but I wasn’t feeling how I thought I would. Aren’t I supposed to be excited? What’s wrong with me?

I had put in YEARS of hard work to get to this point, and yet here I was, staring at a looming red traffic light as a sinking feeling started to settle in my stomach. The route to the clinic only had three traffic lights on it, but on that day, they were all red. Time seemed to stretch out into excruciating eternity.

I neared the last red light and slowed to a stop. Looking around, I realized I was alone—the first and only vehicle traveling in my direction. Suddenly, my thoughts took a total grip on my mind, tumbling onto each other. A lump grew in my throat, stealing my breath. As my heart began to pound against my chest, I clutched the steering wheel with a white-knuckled grip.

And then it hit me: What the hell have I done?

It Began with Good Intentions

Fifteen years prior, I was awakened by the sound of excited commotion. I rolled over in my bed, glanced out my window at the still-dark sky, and checked my alarm clock: 4:00 a.m.

Despite every bone in my body asking me to stay in bed, exhilaration took over. I rushed out of bed, threw on a coat, and followed the sound of my parents’ chatter. Their voices led me outside of my house and into the cold, Saskatchewan night. Across the way, inside the barn, I spotted a dim light and heard the hoarse bellowing of a cow. Still half-asleep, I rubbed my eyes and thought, it’s happening! I wasn’t tired anymore.

I picked up my pace and ran toward the barn, my small feet crunching over the frozen white ground beneath me. Once I neared the barn doors, I was finally able to peer through a crack. Inside, I saw my parents and our local veterinarian, huddled together around a pregnant cow.

Having grown up on a cattle farm, I was used to the typical, scheduled visits from our vet, but this was different. And I wanted to be a part of it.

The door creaked as I opened it, initially startling my parents, but they met my interest with a smile. I walked into the barn just as the vet was firing up his clippers, ready to shave the cow’s side. He was homed in on his craft, seeming to me like a god masterfully navigating a tense situation. He didn’t notice me, but I was okay with that.

I watched from afar as the rest of the scene unfolded, with everyone gathered around the vet and the cow. With awe, I observed as he worked so symbiotically with a patient that couldn’t speak to him. Then, a mother gave birth to her baby.

That was the night I started to consider a future in veterinarian medicine.

Looking back on my childhood, it seems that my career path was almost inevitable. Pets were a staple in our household. You could find me playing with the animals on our farm from the second I stepped off the school bus until my parents forced me to come inside when nighttime came around. For me, this mostly meant my 4-H steers, my dog, and our farm full of 21 barn cats—wow, we had lots of cats!

I couldn’t help but be fascinated by animals. I’m sure you can relate.

When I was young, I would spend hours trying to get one step closer to a wild steer or attempting to gain the trust of a feral cat by feeding it, just so I could pet it. Given enough time, there wasn’t a critter on our farm that I couldn’t tame and eventually become friends with—and it’s easy to understand why! Few things match the special bond that can form between animals and humans. Pets can provide companionship, give us purpose, and become an important part of one’s family—but it goes even further than that. Some days I felt like my animals were the only ones that truly understood me.

As I got older, my interest in a veterinary career grew stronger, especially in the summer of 1995. That was the year my sister got into a serious car accident and suffered major head trauma. It led to permanent disability and an inability to continue her education, so from then onward, my parents focused on her care.

Up until that point, I hadn’t put in much effort to get good grades, while Jill was celebrated for her academic achievements. But after Jill’s devastating accident, I quickly became an honor roll student and even skipped a grade—from grade 6 to grade 8.

However, there was more happening under the surface of me just wanting to succeed in school. I was stepping into the role Jill used to play in our family and was getting praise for doing so. I really wanted to please everyone, and the more I did, the better I did in school.

All the while, I was growing nearer and nearer to becoming a veterinarian, without ever stopping to consider why I wanted to become one in the first place. But after taking an aptitude test in grade 11 that suggested I become a vet, confirmation bias sealed my fate.

I continued excelling at school for validation on auto-pilot mode until I got into university. After receiving a bounty of encouragement from friends and family at the end of my second year, I decided to look into applying for veterinarian school. When I saw the application fee was only $50, I thought, What the hell, it’s not like I’ll actually get in!

To my surprise, I was admitted.

As I read the acceptance letter, I knew I was supposed to feel elated about my achievement, but for some reason, I didn’t. It was only as news of my acceptance spread through the grapevine, and I received overwhelmingly positive feedback that I thought, I guess I’m going to vet school! I know my experience may not be a common one or may only somewhat resonate with you, but my path was always heavily influenced by the validation of others.

Everyone Loves a Veterinarian

And that brings us back to that fateful day, staring into the red light.

Had I made a mistake? I was about to spend the next 30–40 years of my life making this exact same drive—maybe not on this same road or to this same clinic—every day of my life. Is this it? I thought.

I went back to the beginning. Back to that night in the barn. Back to that acceptance letter.

Because the route to becoming a vet is so defined and specific, I had focused all my energy on getting closer to the end goal and had never stopped to consider what becoming a vet really meant. Clearly, I hadn’t given enough thought to the rest of my life.

It was in that moment, staring at that red traffic light for what seemed like forever, that I realized I felt trapped. I had finished the schooling, done all the tests, and pinned a D.V.M. next to my name—I had done everything I was supposed to do, but I wasn’t happy.

I had climbed the mountain, but I wasn’t enjoying the view.

It was a paralyzing reality. But even more petrifying was the fact that I didn’t want to turn back. It had taken me six years of intense university study to climb this mountain. It was time for me to finally face a very hard truth in my life: I had become a veterinarian to satisfy everyone around me.

I’ve found that veterinarians can be split into two categories: those who have always had a deep-seated desire to become one, and those who find the profession later. Those in the first group would light up at the classic question, Did you always know that you wanted to be a veterinarian since you were a kid? whereas I would be left feeling a bit uneasy.

I loved animals and the idea of becoming a veterinarian was intellectually interesting, but it didn’t fire me up to my core. The one thing I knew with absolute certainty was that I wanted to be liked.

And everyone loves a veterinarian!

Something that contributed to this was the romanticization of our profession. You see it on the television, feel it, and hear it whenever you talk to someone who is not in the industry about it.

But the problem here is this: Frustration exists when there is a gap between expectation and reality. And the space between the two is what trips veterinarians up when they enter their careers. That gap tripped me up, anyway.

I had been so focused on something like the excitement of an early morning C-section that I never considered that our hometown vet probably slept for only two hours, did a full day of work, and went to more emergency calls that same night.

I only saw all the good things about the career, like the fact that veterinarians got to play with puppies and kittens. There were so many things I wasn’t aware of that happen beneath the surface.

After looking behind the curtain and realizing this issue was something people weren’t talking about, I wondered, How many others out there are like me? How many others are frustrated because they didn’t know about this?

These questions are precisely why I co-founded and co-host The Veterinary Project podcast, which aims to help veterinarians navigate their career,¹ and why I decided to write this book. With 10 years of clinical veterinary experience under my belt, I now know so much more about the profession and lifestyle that I didn’t know before. My goal is to share some of this knowledge—not so that you feel the need to leave the profession, but so you can make the most out of both it and your life. I don’t want to scare you off or for you to come to resent it; the truth is, even though working in veterinary medicine is hard and frustrating at times, it can also offer some of the greatest rewards known to humankind.

I simply want you to go into the rest of your life and career with intention, be better able to manage your frustrations as they arise, and be equipped with the wide range of skills necessary in this profession. I hope the experience I share in this book will help you to do just that.

At the same time, your journey is about more than simply your career. What we’ve come to know as soft skills are essential in veterinary medicine, but this label makes them seem inadequate compared to hard skills. I now refer to them as transferable skills because they are so important for your career as a vet,