I Was Born for Large Animal Veterinary Medicine By Sarah Shade, CVT
Performing dental float and flushing out a horse’s mouth.
My name is Sarah Shade. I live in a small town in Pennsylvania called Montandon. I love being in the outdoors, hunting, fishing, and having a good time. I found the passion for working with animals when I was very young. I had a cat that ran away and came back pregnant. We kept her and allowed her to have her babies in our home. This was a great experience for me. As I got older, I started working on a dairy farm and discovered an even greater passion for large animals. The day I learned this was when I was able to save a calf’s life. The mother was having a hard time giving birth and I helped her by pulling the calf out. The calf was stuck for so long she was not breathing. My boss told me to go grab a bucket of hot water and put it on her. The theory behind this is to shock her body with the hot water. After about 3 buckets, she was breathing. She lived to be a great cow and have babies of her own. My dream was to become a veterinarian, but I took a different route. I decided to become a veterinary technician instead. This was a difficult decision, but I did not have the money to go to veterinary school. I started working at Sunbury Animal Hospital, which is a large and small animal practice, in September 2015. I started as a kennel attendant and worked my way up to Certified Veterinary Technician. I received my bovine artificial insemination certification in February 2018. I graduated from YTI Career Institute in October 2020, and then I passed my VTNE in March 2021.
A Typical Day in LA (and I Don’t Mean California)
Veterinarian performs joint injection while Sarah restrains the equine patient.
22 | Keystone Veterinarian
My morning starts at Sunbury Animal Hospital by checking the voicemail and email to see if anyone is looking to schedule an appointment, has questions, or is calling with an update on a patient we have been monitoring. Sunbury is a large and small animal practice so there is a setting on our phone to speak with the Large Animal (LA) department specifically, but we recommend if they have an emergency to select the emergency option. This will get them help faster because there is not always someone in LA monitoring the phone. I then help the veterinarian get their truck ready for the day. This includes getting any equipment they may need (portable x-ray and/ or ultrasound), along with medications that are not typically kept in the truck (small animal medications) and vaccines. I also print out direction sheets for the doctors so they can write down everything they did at the farm call, which they bring back for us to enter into the computer. We currently don’t have a system to take payments in the field, so once an invoice is generated, we call the client for payment over the telephone or mail out the invoice as we work with many Amish clients. Usually one day a week, I am scheduled to go out on the road with the veterinarian, helping with anything from restraint to x-rays, blood draws, vaccinations, medication administration,
