Some of it might just be luck of the draw, but I'd say my experience in GP so far has been 50/50 routine and odd things. Like in emergency, there seem to be "theme nights" where nearly every patient will be coming in with the same problem, but there's still a pretty wide variety of stuff overall. Some days we're praying for more exam/vaccines visits because of all the crazy sick visits. Just in the last 2-3 months, I've seen pyometra, osteosarc, FB, splenic masses, a dog with a piece of buck shot that was migrating into the spinal cord near one of the cervical vertebrae, mega-esophagus, phantom limb pain from a prior amputation, multiple toe amputation (dog keeps developing tumors on its toes), osteomyelitis, cat with chronic upper respiratory congestion that won't respond to anything at all and is still bad even after being flushed/scoped under anesthesia, two (dead) dogs found shot, a severe clotting disorder found on a dog that had just come in as a tech appointment to boost its canine influenza vaccine, a snake bite with really awful edema, multiple dog fights including a puppy with insane wounds (and a WBC count of 25,000 after two weeks of antibiotics), worst case of happy tail ever necessitating an amputation, and a cat that presented with a weird, obviously bulging eye that ended up having a tumor in its head.
I thought GP would be a little more "boring" but in terms of variety in the cases, it's about on par with emergency if not more diverse, IME. Emergency has the added adrenaline rush that comes with dealing with a lot of critically ill patients and codes, but hemoab after hemoab and FB after FB and so on got repetitive, too. And the schedule of surgeries for our surgery specialty service was a lot more repetitive and boring than either GP or emergency, IMO. Anywhere from 3-5 TPLOs per day plus maybe a hemilaminectomy or a soft tissue surgery that'd usually be some kind of mass removal. The more interesting surgery cases usually came in through emergency at night, and the boarded surgeons rarely saw them. It probably also varies a lot from specialty to specialty and workplace to workplace. The ophthalmologist's regular schedule was pretty repetitive, but he also got called out to the zoo sometimes and did a lot of neat things like ophthalmic surgery on a snake. And the IM service seemed to see a wider range of train wrecks. I feel like although the specialists sometimes saw really bizarre, unique cases, those were definitely not representative of the majority of their workload and that GP doctors may see a wider range of issues on a more regular basis.
Anyway, I've come to expect a certain level of monotony and repetition in every job. It's really not the end of the world. Variety is nice to keep you from getting bored, but repetition has its benefits, too.
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Is Vet School Debt manageable? Does Specializing in the long run help?
