Cat Bite Ends Veterinarian’s Career [Podcast]

Disability coverage for veterinarians is often treated like something you think about later, after the practice is stable, after the loans feel manageable, after life quiets down. In my conversation with Dr. Michelle Custead, a board-certified veterinary medical oncologist and practice owner, what stood out was how rarely “later” arrives on schedule — and how quickly an ordinary day can turn into a career interruption that no one planned for. Custead runs Ally Veterinary Specialty Center, a boutique referral practice in Waltham, Massachusetts. When we started talking about disability risk, she didn’t begin with dramatic scenarios. She began with the temperament of the profession. Veterinarians, she said, are “a really hardy bunch.” They work hands-on, do hard work every day, and tend not to center themselves. The attention stays on the animal, the client, the case. That mindset is part of what makes veterinarians good at what they do. It is also part of what delays income protection planning until it becomes urgent. When I asked why disability planning feels more culturally obvious for physicians and dentists than for veterinarians, Custead’s answer was blunt in its simplicity. Veterinarians aren’t taught to protect their income as part of training. They aren’t guided through “how to protect your wealth or your income.” And because many vets have made it through years of physically demanding work without being seriously injured, a quiet belief sets in: we’ve been fine so far, we’ll probably be fine tomorrow. The episode turns when Custead starts talking about the injuries she’s seen — not as horror stories, but as normal occupational events. Cat bite makes risk feel unavoidable Cats don’t bite like dogs. Custead described cat teeth as “little, teeny daggers” that can inject bacteria deep into tissue. The wound can close quickly, trapping infection underneath. She’s known “numerous” veterinarians who needed multiple surgeries on their hands to recover from a bite and the infection that followed. Those aren’t minor injuries in a profession built on dexterity, grip strength, restraint, injections, procedures, and physical control of frightened animals. How a surgeon faces the same dexterity risk from a single off-duty moment is described in a conversation with Dr. Nii Darko, a trauma surgeon who tore a hand ligament cutting up a mattress and could not operate for weeks. To understand why that matters, you have to listen to the way she describes it. It isn’t dramatic. It’s matter-of-fact, almost routine. And that tone is the point. This kind of disabling event isn’t framed inside veterinary culture as “disability.” It’s framed as something that happens to people who do real work. That is exactly why disability insurance is so often delayed. Equine injuries push the point further. Custead has stories from colleagues in equine practice that are the kind of accidents no one imagines until they’ve heard them once. A horse leaning against a barn door and crushing a clinician’s hands. Fractures on both arms in an instant. A surgeon unable to operate. Again, the important detail isn’t just the injury. It’s how sudden it is, and how quickly “I’m fine” becomes “I can’t work.” There is a common assumption that veterinarians are less exposed than human clinicians. Custead argued the opposite. Many human physicians are not at meaningful risk of being bitten or kicked at work. Veterinarians are. Some veterinarians develop allergies to pets that can worsen over time. And many vets carry the same scale of educational debt as physicians — hundreds of thousands of dollars — without the same institutional compensation structure. For veterinarians carrying that kind of loan burden, the premium discounts available on veterinary disability insurance can meaningfully change what coverage costs over a career. When the conversation moved from individual disability to practice ownership, Custead’s perspective shifted from personal planning to operational continuity. As a practice owner, she now feels responsibility not only to colleagues and patients, but to payroll, employees, and their livelihoods. The question becomes: if the doctor can’t work, what happens to the people and patients who depend on that doctor? That’s when disability stops being a personal product decision and becomes a business resilience issue. Custead described building her practice from the ground up and trying to create a culture different from what she had seen elsewhere — a practice where clinicians feel supported and seen by leadership. She spoke about the split that often appears in medical businesses: business leadership in one silo, medical staff in another, with limited communication between them. That disconnect, she said, can generate resentment and burnout because staff don’t understand the decisions being made and don’t feel protected. The conversation does not stay in the safe territory of physical injury. Custead raised a more difficult risk: veterinary mental health. She said that among medical professions, veterinarians are often cited as having an unusually high suicide rate, and that the profession has built a movement around the idea of “Not One More Vet.” She described hearing, with disturbing regularity, about colleagues who have died. Her explanations weren’t packaged or political. They were human: comfort with euthanasia, financial pressure, crushing loans, exhaustion, and the psychic toll of being accused of greed by clients when the work is rooted in care. In print, that point can sound like an “issue.” In audio, it sounds like a lived reality. Listening changes how it lands. From there, we returned to planning. Custead made a comparison that is especially relevant for veterinarians: the way clinicians plan for anesthesia emergencies. Before a procedure, you plan the “what ifs,” even if you hope they never occur. She argued that the same mindset should apply to personal and business continuity. If something happens, who is called first? Who can access resources? Who can make decisions? And, for practice owners, who can run payroll and communicate with clients? She described what it looks like when contingency plans don’t exist. As an oncologist, she regularly coordinates with family veterinarians. Sometimes she simply cannot reach a practice — calls and emails go unanswered — and only later learns the veterinarian had a heart attack or another sudden event and the doors closed. Patients are told to find care elsewhere. In some communities, that means waiting months. In oncology, where pets may be mid-protocol, delay can be catastrophic. The unsettling truth of the episode is not that disability insurance is complex. It’s that veterinary culture makes risk easy to postpone and hard to confront. It’s easier to buy liability coverage because the threat feels external and definable. It’s harder to plan for disability because it requires imagining your own interruption, your own impermanence, your own limits. Custead’s most useful insight isn’t a checklist. It’s a reframing: disability planning isn’t about pessimism. It’s about respecting how quickly a normal day can become an operational crisis — for an individual veterinarian and for a practice. The parts that linger most are the ones that are easy to skim past on the page: the tone when she describes the cat bite, the pause before she talks about suicide, the way she speaks about responsibility after becoming a business owner. If you want to understand how those risks actually feel inside the profession, you’ll get more from hearing her say it than from reading a summary of what she meant.