During Murphy’s botched resuscitation, when I was finally allowed to be with him and still trying to come to terms with his transformation from jumping and excited to dying in advanced heart failure I said to the vet. “But he was running up Elrick Hill yesterday with his ball in his mouth”. She replied, “I find that very difficult to believe”. Like I am a liar?

Now that I am educated about the proper treatment of acute heart failure in a dog, I find her incompetence hard to believe. I think it’s the denial from the clinic that anything untoward happened that is making me so angry. That and the way he and I were treated…..ie shoddily.

When he died, 30 minutes after she gave him an IV slug of butorphanol, which the data sheet says do not give as a fast IV injection and do not give to dogs who are in respiratory difficulty, and which she refused to reverse when she told me she had given it, without my permission, when I was 10 yards away shut in an empty consulting room…..to help his anxiety about not being able to breathe for fluid in his lungs…….she looked astonished. She put her stethoscope on his chest and announced “he’s gone”. He gave 2 more dying gasps and she said to the nurse, “get the pentobarbitone”….like I had asked her to euthanise him, and she had just pronounced him dead…….I told her she’d done quite enough and not to dare touch him. She looked offended.

Senior vet tells me she has a promising career ahead of her. As what?