VETgirl On The Run
Getting to know Amanda Shelby, RVT, VTS (Anesthesia & Analgesia)
Saddle up for a wild ride, Vekrel Pack. We're headed to the heart of Music City for Vekrel U this summer. So mark your calendar to join us for our Ruten-Tuten Good Time, June 27th to 29th, 2025, at the Renaissance National Hotel. We're bringing the heat with hot chicken, honky-tonking, and some seriously amazing CE. Registration opens soon at Vekrel-On-The-Run.com. Hi, Vekrel here today, and super excited to talk to two amazing veterinary technicians. One is Amy Johnson, who is our Senior Manager of CE, or Continuing Education at Vekrel, who's been with us for, oh my gosh, has it been three years? I think it's been three years, and also excited to be able to welcome the amazing Amanda Shelby. So Amy, before we begin, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself, and then I'll let you pass it on to Amanda? Yeah, absolutely. So as Justine said, my name is Amy Johnson, and I am our Senior Manager of CE here. I am a veterinary technician living in Colorado. I have been a veterinary technician for 25-plus years with a great majority of that spent in education, and I've had the opportunity to teach in tech schools, work with education and nonprofits with veterinary distribution, and now very happy to be here with Vekrel. I am specialized in Laboratory Animal Medicine through ALAS, and I'm a certified veterinary journalist, and again, just education is really my thing. So that's where I've spent the great majority of my career focusing. So at this point, what I'm going to do, Amanda, I'm going to pass it to you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? Thank you, Amy and Justine. I'm super excited to be welcome to the team at Vekrel. I am a registered veterinary technician. I have been almost 20 years, so I say I'm almost a classic car. I got my start at Murray State University where I earned a bachelor's in Pre-Vet Animal Health Technology in 2006. I got my first job at the University of Florida in the anesthesia department, and I was hooked. Originally, the plan was to apply to vet school, and I just felt, as a technician, I got to do a lot of the hands-on work in the trenches and couldn't leave it. So I got my VTS in anesthesia at Animal Juzia while at UF in 2010, and then my spouse's career, he finished his PhD there and took us to Baton Rouge in Louisiana. So I picked up a job at LSU, Louisiana State University, and the anesthesia department carried on with my passions. While they gave me a lot of opportunities to be involved in research, which resulted in peer-reviewed publications, helped with Junior Surgery Lab, really got some hands-on instructional experience there, so that was super exciting. Picked up teaching adjunct faculty role at Baton Rouge Community College and explored education as well, really enjoyed the interaction with the students, residents, both veterinarian and technicians in those facilities. In 2016, my husband got an opportunity to move back to the state of Indiana, where we are both from. We went to high school together, very boring, and so I moved into industry with Jurox Animal Health, which has recently been purchased under new ownership, and so with that new ownership, I was looking for a role that allowed me to continue building educational assets for Jurox. I helped build Think Anesthesia, which is an online platform that will be under new ownership, and I wanted to continue that. I decided to pursue a master's in education where it really focused on adult education using instructional systems and technology and design, and Vet Girl was a perfect fit. It's advancing the lives and pets through education using technology and building educational assets to close performance gaps, so I'm happy to be here. Well, thank you so much for joining our team. For those of you guys who just got back from Vet Girl U 2024 in hot, humid, but amazing New Orleans, we really appreciated Amanda jumping right in and due to flight delays, taking over and running and moderating our Anesthesia analgesia masterclass. So that was amazing, by the way, for those of you guys who don't know, we just released the registration for Vet Girl U 2025 in Nashville. So you want to check out our website because this one's going to sell out fast. All right, so Amanda, great information about your background. Tell me what you do outside of work to keep yourself balanced. What hobbies do you have? What do you do for work-life balance? Well, I would say that we probably are all guilty of what do you call it? Not a workaholic, a workahphrolog, right? So I'm definitely a workahphrolog. I work every moment of the day in some capacity. I do enjoy outside of veterinary medicine specifically, gardening. I incorporate edible landscaping into my suburban home, where I try to be self-sustaining year around with fruits and vegetables that I can and freeze. So that's a super exciting thing for me. I'm also an adventurer, mostly out in nature. I do enjoy the mountains, so I try to get away a couple times a year and explore off the grid mountainous territories. And then my oldest daughter and I show American quarter horses together. So we stay pretty busy. Those are actually my favorite type of horse. I'm not a horse person, but they are like the easiest to handle, best temperament, and they just have the cutest sign quarters, but that's another story. All right, Amy, go ahead and dig it away. So I think one of the things that we saw with both you and I as we introduced ourselves is we've been in the industry 20, 25 years. And as you look at a lot of the statistics when it comes to veterinary technicians, the average life of a technician in practice is going to be five to seven years. So we're definitely an oddity when it comes to that. So tell me what it is that you love about being a technician and what has made it so easy for you to be able to stay in this field as long as you have. Yeah, I've been really fortunate working with some outstanding anesthesiologists that really empowered their veterinary technicians to understand the scope of what they were doing and why they were doing it. So for me, the hands-on application is what really drives me to being a veterinary technician. You know, there my original plan was vet school, but I just felt that if I pursued veterinary school and ultimately becoming an anesthesiologist would have been the goal. I would have been removed some from doing the hands-on, and I felt as a technician I could work with the patient and then work with students directly one-on-one. So I really enjoyed that application that kept my drive going. So yeah, I think that would really sum up why I feel I've been a vet tech for as long as I have. That's awesome. Now tell me why anesthesia and analgesia, why'd you pick that and decide to pursue that VTS? Well, I either knew I wanted, so I don't particularly enjoy working with moving creatures. I knew I wanted to be in clinical pathology or anesthesia, which is interesting, but I enjoy the challenge that anesthesia presents. You have to know about disease processes and physiology. You have to understand pharmacology with the drugs, and I like to see that interaction in the real space, right, so the body. So I like how all those features all come together in the real world scenario of performing anesthesia and analgesia. Maybe I'm type A and I like to control all the numbers. You know, I want the heart rate to be just this or the blood pressure, but that's really what appealed to me. And you know, most of the patients aren't moving for the time I'm working with them. So I think that appeased me there. And I just really enjoyed it. I had great mentors. Well, you should know we have no type A people on our Vectoral team. Just kidding. Our next question, again, dealing with that VTS, how is having that VTS helped you and your career? Yeah, I think, you know, it's always a hard decision for people to pursue a VTS. It does take a lot of time. It's consuming professionally and personally, you're dedicating study time, etc. There's an expense associated obviously. And we don't always see the biggest return depending on where you're employed. I've been very thankful to the employers I've had and they've been very supportive of pursuit of the VTS. It has allowed a lot of opportunities. I feel it allowed me the opportunity to be involved in research projects. Yes, there was a technical skill element that got that invitation, but that VTS allowed me to hone those skills to really make that a priority. And my employers made that a priority for me. It allowed me to write books. I did so with my co-editor, which is a diplomat in anesthesia, Carolyn McEwan. We've written some clinical textbooks, a side cage side books that we feel helps people in the trenches. It allowed me to publish review articles through various journals. It's allowing me to be an editor for several journals. I do feel that it allows us to reach a little bit further in having these opportunities present themselves. Not that you can't do it without a VTS, but I think it accelerated the process for me. Awesome info. Now, what do you know now that you wish you could have been told before you became a veterinary technician? And I should disclose that I love how all of us are like. We've been in the field over 25 years, but we're not going into more detail on how many years. But what are some of the things you've learned over those two decades that you wish you could have done differently or that you wish somebody had told you? This is a challenging question because I'm learning every day, new application, new technology, how I might be utilized in a new capacity. Obviously, this is a role where I'm using clinical knowledge that I've gained and applying it to a technology so we could share that. I think for me, looking back, it's really finding someone who listens to you as your mentor and provides you some guiding information. I found myself in undergrad with an advisor didn't particularly listen to where I wanted to go and what questions I had about the industry. And I just feel that you should never be scared to ask questions about what you're getting into and what that might look like. And as people now, you know, further down the line in our career and trenches of having these experiences giving back and good mentorship and listening to our mentees and then encouraging them to ask some hard questions or asking them hard questions, I think is where we should be giving back and where I wish I was more comfortable doing earlier in my career. So those that know me and have heard me lecture or seen me write, know that utilization is really one of the top things that I really like to harp on and really like to talk about. So I think that's a perfect way to kind of end this podcast in talking about veterinary technician utilization. So Amanda, what are your thoughts on veterinary technician utilization? Yeah, I think these two questions, you know, the previous one and this one really go hand in hand is our profession is still kind of in the infancy of development. I mean, we've been around for a while, but we're still advancing and we're not consistent coast to coast. And so utilization varies widely from facility to facility, from state to state as far as practice acts. And so I'd really like to see us work more collaboratively with our colleagues and peers, not just in the veterinary technician world, but extending that to the veterinarians, our legislations, our state VMA organizations, really getting involved as the industry and profession and not just as technicians or veterinarians to encourage maximum use of every team member, not just the vet tech, but the assistant, the client service representative and really allocating tasks to those individuals so that the veterinarian can be the prescriber, the person providing a prognosis, the diagnosis, and ultimately surgery so that they're really fine tuning their skill set while we are able to support them to help the most pets and to do so in a manner that, you know, satisfies the client's needs and ultimately provides better care to the whole food chain, everything, just this one health concept that we're all interconnected, pets and people, our food chain, every country really. That would be my hope is that we could really just become a little more professional coast to coast here in the United States. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Amanda. You know, it's always a great opportunity to be able to introduce our team members to our amazing, huge podcast listener audience. And we truly are honored and so excited that you are going to be part of our Beckerel team and just wanted to thank you in advance for all that you do. Thank you. I'm super excited to be part of the team. Can't wait to dive in and start creating. So thank you so much, both of you. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]