Everyone’s input has been really helpful. I spoke to my vet about it and he raised an interesting point. Aside from just not liking surgery to begin with, a lot of new vets are obviously (and rightfully) nervous about doing surgery. In vet school you only get a few chances to do surgery unless you seek out other electives/outside experiences. Few if any are solo. Once you’re a vet, he said it’s definitely extremely intimidating to go from what you did in school to being on your own doing surgery on your own patient. So if you work at a multi-doctor practice, it becomes a vicious cycle of being nervous about surgery, not wanting to do it, another vet in the hospital does it instead, etc. For him, he just had to keep pushing through that anxiety until he finally felt more comfortable, and those concerns about complications, not seeing what he was doing, and everything else slowly went away. Of course he’s been in practice for almost 15 years (which isn’t a ton of time but he’s definitely not a new vet) so he’s had some years to get over that hump. I just liked his take on it because it seems like most vets start out very nervous to do surgery, and the difference between those who aren’t nervous anymore and those who still are is that the former wanted to continue with it and did it enough that they don’t feel nervous anymore. Of course there’s nothing wrong with not wanting to do surgery with the 1,000 other things you can do especially as a GP. I just like to think that even if I’m extremely nervous years down the line, it’s common and if I decide I want to push past that, i eventually can.
TL;DR: apparently if you want to push past that nervousness, many people end up being able to. Almost everyone starts out very nervous, and if you want to continue doing surgery because you’ll enjoy it, you’ll likely get over that anxiety once you have enough experience under your belt.
