Yesterday I officially saw my 4th client-owned dog for acupuncture. This owner was actually the first to schedule an appointment, but she had to push it back due to other things going on in her life. In addition to his initial consult, I also had two follow-up visits scheduled in the morning. I’m glad to have the appointments and to see that people are giving it a chance. It’s always a little nerve-wracking during the appointments because it’s still so new to me, and I have to wait to hear how the patient is responding.
My first patient that I saw belonging to a client did return for a second visit, but they ended up canceling his third appointment. It was disappointing for me, on the one hand. On the other, I know that he has a few things going on medically and is a rough case to start out with. My other patients that have come back for multiple sessions sound like they both saw some minor, but positive, responses following their initial sessions. At the end of one’s appointment today, her owner looked over and commented that his dog was “sitting square,” and that he hadn’t seen her do that in years.
Today’s new patient has a mom that really believes in acupuncture because it saved her from having back surgery following a severe accident years ago. She didn’t schedule a second appointment for her dog yet though because 1. she wanted to just see how he did with it and 2. she ended up scheduling a pretty big surgery for him in two weeks that we have spoken about a couple of times in the past few months that may also make a difference in his mobility. She’s a bit of a worrier and just wants to be sure he gets through that without incident, which is understandable.
I added my brother’s dog to the list of family pets to receive acupuncture earlier this week. He has a recurrent shoulder injury, so my brother wanted to see if acupuncture may help him. I can’t say that Cooper loved the idea of the practice, but he did settle down towards the end. I checked in on him yesterday and heard that it’s not worse than it was and even may have been better the day after his session. He unfortunately seemed to aggravate it again the following day because he’s a big meathead that gets it in his mind that he has to suddenly jerk himself across the street to smell a street sign. We’ll see how he is the week after next and maybe give it another go with some electroacupuncture, if he’ll tolerate it.
The most exciting thing that I’ve seen acupuncture do so far is with my tech’s Cavalier. She acutely lost her hearing a couple of months ago, and we didn’t really know why. She has a history of some otitis media and was actually scheduled to go to Penn and have some imaging and assess her hearing. She did receive acupuncture shortly after losing her hearing and maybe she could hear some loud or high pitched sounds after that, but for the most part, she was blissfully unaware of the sounds around her. The week before her appointment at Penn, she had another session because she was starting to lick her feet again, and we had a quiet afternoon appointment schedule. My tech was off the following day, but when she saw me on Friday, she greeted me with, “I don’t know what witchcraft you did, but Quinn can hear!” In my training, they said that recovering hearing was possible. I have to say that I didn’t really expect much in this case since the improvement was pretty much negligible after the first acupuncture treatment about 6 weeks before the second one. Needless to say, Quinn did not go to Penn since she continues to hear just fine.
In short, things are happening. I’m getting some practice and having some obvious success stories and some other TBD outcomes. It’s still fun and exciting to be working on something new and to see where it goes from here. So far, my acupuncture patients have not worked themselves into a frenzy and tried to projectile vomit on my techs or myself, so that’s a win compared to the corneal ulcer recheck appointment that concluded yesterday’s work day.
“People are very open minded about new things- as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.” ~ Charles Kettering
