When you walk into the Intensive Care Unit of a "teaching" hospital, you expect to find a sanctuary of clinical vigilance. You expect to find practitioners whose pulses quicken at the sound of a patient in distress. Instead, at Massey’s Companion Animal Hospital, I found a scene that was as sociopathically detached as it was medically reckless.
I found my blind, senior dog, Harry, screaming in terror in a cold steel cage - a sensory nightmare for an animal who relied on sound and touch to navigate his world. And what did I find the "highly trained" ICU staff doing? I found them huddled together, deep in a jovial social conversation, and also with their collective fascination fixed
not on the suffering geriatric patient in their “care”, but on a newborn kitten.
It's time to ask the hard question about the culture of a veterinary teaching hospital that would place two staff that appear so uncompassionate towards animals that either they or their broader set of colleagues would dangerously sedate a distressed animal as opposed to administering human comfort, most especially when not in any degree of high activity whatsoever in the ICU ward - in fact the reverse.
The Path of Least Resistance: Convenience Over Compassion
In a healthy clinical culture, the response to a distressed, blind dog is a human hand and a soothing voice. It is the "human comfort" that costs nothing but a moment of empathy. But empathy requires effort. It requires moving away from the social gossip and the novelty of a kitten to attend to the "boring" work of a senior dog in crisis.
At Massey, the ICU staff apparently chose the path of least resistance:
A state of near-comatose drugged silence.
The invoice tells the story that their social chatter hides. Rather than receiving human comfort, Harry was, at some point after midnight (the brief time I was allowed with Harry in the ICU ward came to an end at around 12am) administered 200mg of
Gabapentin and a potentiating dose of
Prevomax on the morning of December 1st - drugs the staf already knew his compromised kidneys could not efficiently process.
To be clear: He wasn't sedated in order to
help
him; he was sedated him to
silence him. This is known as "convenience-medicating" - a lazy, dangerous practice that allows staff to continue their "staff tearoom" atmosphere without the inconvenience of a crying patient.
The Clinical Cost of Apathy
This isn't just a "customer service" failure; it's a clinical catastrophe. When staff are so engrossed in their own joviality that they ignore a screaming, blind patient, they miss the subtle cues of actual medical distress.
And a (very) young and very weak "overseeing" veterinarian whose "deer in the headlights" lack of courage to instruct her ICU staff to act in accordance with the requisite compassion and good ethics, compounds the lacking of the culture. Offering the owner empty and juvenile platitudes like "everyone here loves animals" - while the evidence to the contrary is screaming some six metres away from them four metres away - is an unforgivable indictment of the ICU and broader Companion Animal Hospital culture, as well as on that practitioner's lack of backbone and moral suitability for the job.
By choosing chemical restraint over clinical care, Massey ICU personnel created the very "neurological event" the ICU vet, "Steffi" used the following day to push Harry's death onto an astonished and completely misinformed owner.
Collectively, they transformed a recoverable, dehydrated dog into a "broken" pharmacological wreck, and then had the audacity to call it "mercy".
The culture at Massey's ICU isn't one of teaching or healing; it's a culture of contempt
(as well as merciless profiteering)
. . .
for the animals, for the owners who pay handsomely for their supposed "gold standard levels of care", and for the Veterinary Code of Conduct itself.
