the medicine
A real doctor.
Veterinary medicine isn't the backstory. It's the daily practice. Twenty-plus appointments a day, the patients who can't tell you where it hurts, and a doctrine forged in the grey zone between what medicine can do and what it should.
7
years in practice
2,000
appointments seen while building VetSoap (now Voxxo)
daily
real-patient AI use
the path
Becoming the doctor
I graduated from UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine in 2019, and I still think back on that program fondly. The learning was that good. Seven years into practice, I still say it: if I redid my clinical year tomorrow with everything I know now, I'd walk away having learned just as much again.
They warned us in school about burnout and compassion fatigue. None of it truly prepares you for the reality of the job: constantly balancing a client's finances against your ability to help their pet, and knowing that sometimes all the money in the world still can't save them.
the practice
Clinic life
Twenty to twenty-five appointments a day, plus walk-ins, plus emergencies. General practice and urgent care, dogs and cats. Every appointment is a triage of three things at once: the pet's health, the client's finances, and the client's capacity to follow through.
So I've learned to practice in the grey zone. What is the one diagnostic with the highest chance of actionable intelligence? When is watching and waiting the right medicine, with safety nets and explicit triggers? The thing I tell my clients most:
Sometimes time is the biggest diagnostic.
And under every plan sits a hierarchy I don't negotiate with:
The animal's experience first. The family's dignity and solvency second. The doctor's comfort last.
the crossover
What medicine taught the machines
The part that burned me out was never the medicine. It was the documentation. At my worst I was two, three hundred medical records behind. All the care, all the client education, all the thoroughness: none of it provable. Omissions become liability; the record is the only proof the care ever happened.
So in December 2025, with zero coding experience, I started building the tool I couldn't buy. It became VetSoap, now Voxxo, a veterinary platform: voice-to-SOAP documentation, discharge instructions in the client's own language, a deep veterinary knowledge layer, flowsheets by voice, and now full practice management. I built it over the course of several months while seeing two thousand appointments, and now I see five to ten more patients a day, and every conversation makes it back into the record, where it can protect the pet, the client, and the medicine.
The rest of that story is on the machines page.