This week: Luck
Lucky or unlucky, you be the judge. It is hard to define the quality we call 'luck'. It can be as unfathomable as any mystery in the universe or as predictable as those formulas on a physics professor's blackboard. I have always thought of luck as a word that you should use to describe some event in the past rather than the future.
When I have won at the mahjong table or made a great investment, I would describe myself as lucky. To use luck to describe the future, such as 'I am going to be lucky tonight at the mahjong table', is just wishful thinking.
In my profession there is certainly a great deal of science involved. Science allows us to predict nature, or at least try, and it helps me predict the course of diseases and to stop them in their tracks. But there is always a certain degree of luck involved, where science as it stands at the moment cannot predict all that nature throws at it. For example, when I give an annual vaccination to an animal, I cannot predict whether this animal will have an adverse reaction to the vaccine. And I cannot predict that if an adverse reaction does occur, whether it will be life threatening or just a mild swelling around the face.
This is where risk management comes into play. In this example I would compare the risk of the vaccination reaction with the risk of not receiving the vaccination. I see cases of lethal distemper or parvovirus, for which dogs can be vaccinated almost weekly, while I only see a mild vaccine reaction once every two years, and I have not yet seen a death. So, statistically speaking, it is an easy decision.
I had two recent experiences that highlight how unpredictable luck can be. The first case was a cat that hadn't eaten for a few days and had vomited a few times. It took some time for the owners to realise the cat was sick because it was left home with a carer every day while the owners were at work. So when the cat arrived at the clinic it was pretty sick.
I performed an X-ray, which revealed an odd square object in its intestines. It was very hard to see among the rest of the gut, but it was there and we were lucky to have seen it. It was an open-and-shut case - the cat needed to be stabilised, then we needed to surgically explore its abdomen under anaesthetic.