pet connection

So there we sat, eating our breakfasts, taking notes while viewing slides on how to rate canine diarrhea on a scale of 1 to 4.  After lunch, I managed to keep down a dozen yummy raw oysters without so much as a stomach lurch while looking at slides of gaping open wounds and infected, pus-filled ear canals.

It’s official: I’ve now been covering veterinary medicine for so long that almost nothing bothers me any more.

This trip, it was the American Animal Hospital Association‘s annual convener, this year’s in Long Beach, a city that tries really hard to overcome a faded and troubled urban core, which is hard to do with when one passes crime-scene tape and cop cars in not one but two locations heading towards The 405 to meet friends for dinner on a Friday night.

Our Kim Campbell Thornton met me there, and we scoped out the programs looking for trends, sources and story ideas. Much as I love hanging with veterinarians — and I really do! — the weather was so nice outside that it was all could do not to bag it all and blow north to Santa Anita.

Instead, I kept myself amused by having my friend Debbie Best, a professor of English, join me on the trade show floor. I’d told Jason Merrihew, the AAHA’s nifty PR guy, that Prof. Best was a doctor — as she is, but of the PhD kind — and he happily agreed to give her a courtesy badge with her creds on it so she could hang out with me for part of the afternoon. The badging staff heard “Dr.” and assumed “DVM,” so Debbie’s badge read “Debbie Best, DVM,” providing her with both a laugh and a souvenir.

I hadn’t invited her there just for fun, though. She’s freaking brilliant, but medicine is not her field. I wanted to get a fresh take on things I have long taken for granted as we wandered the trade show floor.

We both did just a tiny bit of shopping, each buying shirts that read “It’s all fun and games until someone ends up in a cone” with an illustration of a dog in an Elizabethan collar. And yes, we marveled at the sight of blue Kongs, sold exclusively through veterinary channels and designed for the strongest of chewers: Not only is the material stronger, but it’s also trackable by X-ray, owing to the barium impregnated within. (“Absolutely safe,” said the rep, and hmmmmm to that.)

Being more than a little interested in shiny electronics (after all, I had a new MacBook Air on its initial conference run in my slick new messenger bag and an iPhone in my pocket), I was entranced and enthralled by a bluetooth vitals-monitoring kit ($3K to $9K, depending) that allows veterinarians to track patients from home on their own computer. And because the monitoring sensors are wireless, they can be wrapped in a snug vest — more comfortable, and no catching the wires on the cage bars. Nifty!

Dr. Best was not impressed, and saved her drooling for booths filled with books. She slid her hands lovingly over the piles of them and got a glazed look in her eyes. “This is what our conferences look like,” she said. “When medievalists have conferences, it’s … all … books. Mmmmmmm. Books!“

Heck, I didn’t even know that medievalists had conferences, so you really do learn something new every day.

After Dr. Best left, Kim and I compared notes and headed for the seminars. I stuck pretty tightly to the dermatology track, while Kim was more wide-ranging in her interests. The information we got will inform our reporting a long time, keeping us busy until the next veterinary conference, when Kim and I will be joined by Christie in June at when the specialists convene in Anaheim.

Honestly, I can’t wait.

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