Client communication, the ability to listen to clients and get them to understand you, is a vital skill for a vet. It doesn’t matter how clever or compassionate you are if you can’t get an animal’s owner to understand what’s going on and work with you to treat their animal.
Some people are just bad listeners. Some people just don’t have English as their first language, which can lead to interesting situations with charades or trying to find alternative words someone can understand (like asking a proper old lady whether her cat is still taking a shit each day because she doesn’t know the words for faeces or poop), but sometimes you get a genuine gem.
This client in particular was a little challenge to communicate with because of limited English, but we both tried to meet each other in the middle. And over the week or so we managed to get her little cat from ‘very very sick’ to ‘finally back to normal’.
She was extremely relieved to have her little cat well again, to the extent that she brought in a thank you card to the clinic, that she’d had her neighbor write because, again, English wasn’t her first language and she didn’t want to be wrong.
But it was her words that stuck with me. She spoke about how her cat was all better and would sleep on her pillow next to her head again, but she didn’t know the word for ‘purring’. She said,
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