My Cat Gets Better Medical Care Than I Do!!

If my next annual wellness visit includes a treat, complimentary mani-pedi and someone who actually gives a sh*t, I may be willing to switch practices!

Yesterday I took Ozzy to the vet for his annual wellness visit and found myself thinking, "My cat gets better medical care than I do!"

This isn't about competence. Modern medicine is nothing short of miraculous. We can replace joints, transplant organs, perform robotic surgery, and diagnose diseases that would have gone undetected a generation ago.

Medicine has become more sophisticated. Care has become more efficient. Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

At Ozzy's appointment, Dr. Claire spent time looking in his ears, examining his eyes, his teeth, listening to his heart and lungs, feeling his abdomen, reviewing his history, discussing his diet, and asking how he was doing since his brother-from-another-mother died unexpectedly from a heart attack (RIP sweet Barney).

Meanwhile, my own annual physical often feels like a race against the clock.

To be fair, I do get examined. Or perhaps "acknowledged" is the better word.

As I watched Ozzy receive a level of attention most humans would envy, I found myself thinking that if I handed a stethoscope to my eight-year-old friend June, she would probably spend more time exploring my ears, nose, and throat than some medical professionals. Because she'd be interested…curious…and genuinely cares about me.

And that's what struck me. The difference wasn't expertise. It was attention.

The longer I live, the more I realize attention is one of the rarest gifts we give each other. We're all moving faster. Scanning instead of reading. Hearing instead of listening. Looking instead of seeing.

It's not that nobody looks. It's that nobody seems to linger long enough to actually see.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this isn't really about veterinarians and physicians. Ozzy's vet is caring. So are the technicians. So is everyone at the animal hospital. Their concern for their patients is obvious. And I believe my doctors care, too.

The problem is the system.

Veterinary medicine still seems to leave room for care to be expressed. Human healthcare increasingly rewards something else: Efficiency. Documentation. Productivity. Compliance. The appointment becomes a metric. The patient becomes a timeslot. And the physician becomes a data-entry specialist with a medical degree.

I don't blame physicians for this. In many ways, they're victims of the same system as the rest of us. I suspect most entered medicine because they wanted to help people. What they got instead was a stopwatch.

Recent reporting on what some are calling a "doctor drain" found that female physicians are leaving clinical practice at significantly higher rates than their male colleagues and often nearly fifteen years earlier. The reasons are hardly surprising: crushing administrative burdens, endless electronic documentation, after-hours messages, caregiving responsibilities at home, workplace inequities, and a growing loss of control over their schedules.

The very people who entered medicine to care for patients are burning out because the system increasingly leaves little room for caring. If doctors feel trapped, exhausted, and unable to practice medicine the way they envisioned, is it any wonder patients feel rushed and unseen?

This isn't a doctor problem…it's a system problem, and the consequences are felt on both sides of the exam table. The people providing care are exhausted by a system that doesn't make time for caring. Or reward it. And patients feel it.

Not because they're receiving poor medicine. Because they're missing something equally important: Connection. Curiosity. Presence…the feeling that someone is genuinely interested in understanding what's going on with them.

Ozzy's appointment reminded me that care isn't a procedure...it's attention. It's curiosity. It's taking a little extra time to look, listen, ask another question, and notice something that wasn't on the checklist. It's lingering long enough to see.

In a healthcare system capable of replacing knees, transplanting organs, and mapping the human genome, it seems odd that one of the things patients and physicians miss most is something so basic: time.

The irony is that nothing about Ozzy's appointment was remarkable. And yet, that's what made it remarkable.

No groundbreaking technology.

No miracle cure.

No dramatic diagnosis.

Just a healthcare professional who had enough time to look, listen, ask questions, and pay attention.

That shouldn't feel like a luxury.

But increasingly, it does.