A tale about intuition

It took less than a minute. As soon as Avery made her way to the examination area of the vet clinic she was working in, she became fully aware of the nagging feeling in her stomach. Was she imagining it? Maybe her senses had detected something in the air──the scent of illness and alcohol or the piercing silence of the room. She could not tell; she found it impossible to pinpoint the trigger to her underlying uneasiness. Yet after quickly glancing at the cages, Avery felt with confidence that something was out of place. Still a mere volunteer, Avery’s sole task was to update the charts of the patients; some she could recognize from the day before, others like the puppy in Cage 12 were complete strangers. She picked up the chart and proceeded to inspect meticulously the annotations, but not much had been documented aside from the dog’s temperature and weight. She glanced at the puppy again; he was barely breathing and had ice packs surrounding his tiny frame, surely as an attempt to control his life-threatening fever. The lack of information in the medical record struck her as odd, but limited by the boundaries of her job, she proceeded to stare and ignore the nagging feeling in her stomach.    

A few hours had passed by, when Avery built up the courage to ask Elda, the vet technician, what she knew about the puppy in Cage 12.  “Elda, who is our new friend,” Avery asked timidly. “Owner dropped him off last night; seems like a case of food poisoning, nothing more. You keep an eye on him,” Elda answered, puzzled by Avery’s attentiveness on what she had deemed a simple case. Her superior’s indifference further disturbed Avery, who after reading the symptoms written in the record for what seemed the twentieth time, was confident the puppy was being severely misdiagnosed. At noon, she could not keep her thoughts to herself any longer; if her intuition was correct, then it was her moral and professional duty to speak. Volunteer or not, the life of those animals also relied on her judgement.

“Elda, can you explain to me why a lethargic, unvaccinated puppy came in more than 16 hours ago, with signs of vomiting, fever, bloody diarrhea, and he still has not been tested for Parvo? With all due respect, but why aren’t you more concerned? Shouldn’t, at least, this dog be in the isolation room?” Even though, Avery had only been working at the clinic for a few weeks, she enjoyed reading about high risk diseases such as Parvo in her spare time outside of the clinic. Although preventable with a simple and rather inexpensive vaccine, parvovirus was a highly contagious disease strong enough to produce a life-threatening illness, especially in puppies.

Despite her justifiable observation, Avery knew she had crossed the line as soon as she felt Elda’s icy stare. “Listen, smarty pants,” she growled as she took the chart from Avery’s hands, “as a volunteer, you are at the bottom of the food chain. Me? I am a professional. May this be the first and last time you dare question my judgement. The owner was clear, it’s just a case of food poisoning. Let it go.” Stubborn as she was, however, Avery fought back, guided by her newfound confidence. “And since when do we let owners determine the fate of our patients? Elda…” Avery began, but was cut off by the loud bang of the door. Three other dogs were being brought in with the same symptoms of the puppy in cage 12, but even more troubling was finding out that all four dogs belonged to the same owner. “Just a simple case of food poisoning?” Avery remarked sarcastically as she hurried to attend the new patients. “Elda, we need to do the test. If this is a Parvo outbreak, we are not just talking of one dog anymore, we are risking the wellbeing of the other animals as well. The clinic could face a lawsuit for malpractice if something tragic were to happen.” That got Elda’s attention. Despite her furiousness, her own intuition advised her to abandon pride; after all, the obnoxious volunteer had pointed out a crude reality: she also had a superior, the vet, who could easily fire her for her incompetence if Avery was right.

Five minutes; that is all it took for chaos to come barging through the doors, as both Avery and Elda ──still as stone── stared at the test in utter terror: Parvo positive. Now neither of them could deny that something was wrong; it wasn’t just intuition or the undertakings of a sixth sense; factual evidence had claimed its role in the play. The entire situation called for some serious damage control, there was no time to point fingers or to ponder about what ifs. As she prepared herself for the events following this awful discovery, Avery learned an amusing aspect about intuition. As we grow, we are taught to follow rules, to color within the lines of our existence, and to neglect intuition over logic and reason. Yet life’s chaotic moments teach us that intuition, not reason, is the force that inspires us to trust our senses. Intuition empowers us to take control of reality.

 Works Cited

Learn.Watch. "Should You Trust Your Intuition?". 2016, https://learn.watch/should-you-trust-your-intuition/.

"Parvo (Parvovirus) In Dogs". Webmd, 2017, http://pets.webmd.com/dogs/parvo-parvovirus-dogs#1.

Wordpress. 2016, http://darylchow.com/Daryl_Chow/Blog/wordpress/blog/2016/03/29/the-tension-of-opposites-clinical-intuition-vs-clinical-data-part-1-of-2/.

Wordpress. 2017, https://medivetuk.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/puppies.gif.