Who would want a veterinary symptom video

July 18, 2008 12:15 PM

Donating a veterinary disease symptom video - would any library / video collection want this? Is any university veterinary school collecting things like this?

I do not want to spend a lot of time on this; I couldn't bear it right now. But I want to resolve this as soon as I can.

I've got a couple of video clips of a cat in either respiratory or vomiting distress; probably respiratory. I think it might be useful to vets or vet students or animal owners in diagnosing a pretty dangerous and awful condition. I didn't realize exactly how serious the condition was when I saw it, although I did realize it was pretty bad and made the video to send to my vet.

Now the thought that I might have seen this behavior earlier and not reacted bothers me a lot.

Anyway, I'd like to contribute this video in some way to the public body of knowledge. I have found some vet schools by Googling, but does anyone know for certain of some repository or library that would collect this kind of thing?

Please don't ask for more information about the cat.

posted by amtho to pets & animals (5 answers total)

Check your mefi mail - I have a possible recommendation.
posted by meggan at 1:29 PM on July 18, 2008

I do not, unfortunately, but in addition to asking vet schools, you might ask local pet-sitters if they know of anywhere they go for that sort of information, or in fact if the video would be useful to them, if you know enough about the situation to be sure what the video is showing (e.g. if your vet has now looked at it and told you exactly what's going on.)

I lost a cat earlier this week while I was out of town, in a way that might have been avoidable if my pet-sitter had been more knowledgeable about signs and emergency treatment for his medical condition. The only tiny silver lining so far is that the sitter is part of a group of local pet-sitting businesses, and apparently they are all working on putting together better information for all their businesses' staff about the condition he had, and trying to find a local vet who will come to their meetings and do some short presentations on this and other emergency pet health situations. So I have some hope that maybe future cats and cat owners won't go through what I've been through this week. Maybe something like that is going on near you, too.

I'm really sorry; I know at least some of what you're going through right now, and I hope you are able to put the videos to use in a way that will give you some peace with your situation.
posted by Stacey at 1:38 PM on July 18, 2008

There are a lot of those videos on YouTube (which is how I figured one of my cats might have asthma - she's now undergoing diagnosys). You could post it there, and possibly help save someone's cat. I'm very sorry about your kitty.
posted by neblina_matinal at 1:41 PM on July 18, 2008

YouTube would be a very last resort. I don't really want to look at, deal with, or have available to me these files. Plus some kind of systematic collection would be a nice thing to contribute to.
posted by amtho at 4:08 PM on July 18, 2008

I understand, I really do. But listen, you want to do a nice thing and I get it, but if it's best for you, just delete the files, and don't give it a second thought. Don't feel guilty about it. Don't feel guilty about whatever went on before, either. It does nobody any good... And please take care.
posted by neblina_matinal at 6:14 AM on July 19, 2008