Tech Time: Sam Newton, RVT, shares ER experiences, tourniquet tips, and professional growth mindset

Happy Veterinary Technician Week! To celebrate and honor all of the hardworking veterinary technicians out there, this new episode of Vet Watch with host Christopher Lee, DVM, MPH, DACVPM, is focusing on technicians for Tech Time. Join Lee and Samantha Newton, RVT, as they talk about her next career move, how far veterinary medicine has come, better technician utilization, and more on this episode of Vet Watch.

Partial transcript

Christopher Lee, DVM, MPH, DACVPM: So what do you love most about doing because you are overnight shift almost exclusively. What makes you love overnight more than day?

Samantha Newton, RVT: It is exclusive. I am not a day walker. When the sun comes up, I am ready to go to sleep.

Lee: Right back into your coffin.

Newton:Yep, right back. Just right back into my coffin.

Lee: Just pull the lid.

Newton: I like the pace of overnight. It's the time where no other vets are open. They can't get into their primary. They've waited to get into their primary. It's where a lot of your more intense emergencies happen. So you're, you know, attacked by dogs, bit by coyotes, hit by cars. For some reason, Huskies love to seizure at like 3 o'clock in the morning. They just wait until about 3-4 o'clock in the morning to have cluster seizures. I don't, I don't know what it is, but that's usually when we see a lot of our patients coming in with seizures, particularly Huskies. I don't, I don't understand what the correlation is there, but it happens

Lee: Now on the human side, it is, it is interesting. My My dad was a neurosurgeon, and they had done a study that when people, even though they seizure like an individual seizure patient, even though they may seizure at what appears to be random apart times of the day, if you actually take all the specific times, it actually only ended up in about 20 minutes for that individual

Newton: Oh, wow.

Lee: Now the problem was, is that could be at 3:16am, but when you added it up, so there is, you know, I've never read or seen anything like that for the veterinary side, but it would be, you know, potentially a scenario where dogs and potentially breeds, where there are windows of time that are very specific for them to seizure.

Newton: That's really cool. I think that would be an awesome like thing to research on some type of, you know, veterinary neurospecialist, if that's not already out there, that would be a really interesting case scenario to look at, because it's, it's the weirdest thing. It's like you have no seizure patients, no seizure patients. And it's like, you know, 2-4 o'clock in the morning, and it's like, you have a seizure patient, we have a patient seizure, and we have another patient seizure, and we're just like, what happened? Is it something in the water did? Are we, you know, something in the moon cycle. Are we just having seizures today? Like, what on earth is going on?

But I do. I like the intense, like, those days where it's just emergency after emergency after and true emergencies, you know, not the I've waited 3 weeks and my dog has had an ear infection, and now it has head tilts, and eye twitching or just why is my dog walking in circles? And then you go up to get a history, and they're like, oh, by the way, you know, they've had an ear infection for 3 weeks. And you're just like, cool. Well, now I know what the head tilt is from type of situation.

But you know, the the true emergencies where, you know, are hit by car babies or things like that. It just, I like the pace of overnight, I feel, and this is just my opinion ,that overnight, we practice a lot of stabilization medicine where I just try to keep my patient alive, and I try to get them as stable as possible. And I love day shift, because I love them as my counterpart, the ying to our Yang. You know, where we stabilize. We practice the down the heart, the, I guess, down and dirty, if you will. You know, stabilization to where they come in. We keep them alive. We get them set up for day shift. And then our beautiful day shift nurses come in love them, bright eyed bushy tailed, cheery, 'good morning', and they get to practice this healing medicine to now I've kept them alive. I'm passing the torch fix them, or at least get them to a point to where they can get to specialty, you know, neurology, cardiology, anything like that.

I'm not patient. I try to have patience with my patients, but being able to do the stabilization and not having the patients with your DKA patients and your sliding scales and things like that. I love day shift because they nurture and have that healing medicine to where we're just like, fix it, get them stabilized. We love them, but I have 3 other patients that are now doing some weird things over here that need to get fixed so