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Reviewed by Mansoor Ahmed for Readers' Favorite
SOAP Notes: Irreverent Confessions of a Veterinary Technician by Frannie O'Callaghan is a candid and, at times, surprisingly moving memoir from behind the scenes of a veterinary clinic. O'Callaghan is a licensed vet tech with over a decade of experience, and she holds nothing back: the urine in the shoes, the fecal matter in the scrub pockets, the centrifuge that exploded and sent blood up the walls on a bad day in her first month. But the book is far more than a collection of gross stories. It walks you through what a vet tech actually does — the blood draws, the anesthesia monitoring, the surgical prep, the microscope work — and makes clear this is a skilled, demanding, and chronically undervalued profession. It also takes an honest look at the emotional weight of the job: the compassion fatigue, the alarmingly high suicide rates in veterinary medicine, and what keeps people coming back despite it all.
Frannie O'Callaghan writes the way she presumably talks: fast, warm, and honest. I found myself laughing at the chapter where she describes the interview that landed her a job, which hinged almost entirely on whether she could recite the recipe for an Old Fashioned from a parked car outside an ice cream drive-thru. The pace of SOAP Notes moves well; short, punchy chapters keep things from feeling heavy even when the subject matter is serious. The individuals — the doctor who rates techs by preventive care package sales, the coworker who bear-hugged her mid-meltdown without a single question — feel completely real. The theme running underneath everything is simple and affecting: people who do hard, thankless, badly paid work because they genuinely care about animals deserve to be seen.
