What Vets Actually Wish You'd Been Tracking

Veterinary consultations run on information the owner brings. The animal can't give a history, so what you know — and what you don't — largely determines how efficiently a diagnosis gets reached.

Here's what vets consistently need and rarely get.

"How long has this been going on?"

The most-asked question in the consulting room, and the one most often answered with "a while now" or "a few weeks? Maybe longer?"

Duration genuinely changes the differential diagnosis. A cough for three days and a cough for four months are different problems with different likely causes and different investigation plans.

What to do: when you first notice something odd, note the date. Anywhere. A phone note takes five seconds and turns a vague answer into a precise one.

"How much weight has he lost?"

Owners almost always underestimate this, because they're comparing to a mental image rather than a number.

What to do: weigh monthly, record it with the date. This one habit is worth more than the rest combined.

"How much is he actually eating and drinking?"

Discussed at length elsewhere on this blog, but the short version: measure it once so you know the real figure. "Normal" and "a bit less" are not measurements.

"Is it getting better, worse, or staying the same?"

Trajectory determines urgency. A limp that's slowly improving and a limp that's slowly worsening are managed completely differently.

Owners struggle with this because day-to-day variation obscures the trend, and because a good day feels like recovery.

What to do: a one-line daily note. Even a simple better / same / worse. Over three weeks a pattern appears that no memory would produce.

"Can you show me what it looks like?"

This is the big one, and the most under-used tool available to owners.

An enormous amount of what matters happens at home and doesn't happen in the consulting room:

Lameness that vanishes on adrenaline in the practice
Coughing fits
Seizures
Collapse episodes
Odd breathing at rest
Head tilts, tremors, twitching
Difficulty getting up
The exact way they're moving

Film it. Landscape, good light, from a distance that shows the whole animal. For a limp, film them walking away from and towards the camera on a hard surface. For a cough, film the episode.

Vets are consistently emphatic about this. Video changes diagnoses.

"Which lump is new?"

Older dogs accumulate lumps and nobody remembers which is which.

What to do: map them. A drawing with numbers, or photos with a coin for scale and a date. Measure with a ruler. Then "this one has gone from 6mm to 14mm since April" replaces "I think that one might be bigger?"

"How many times has this happened?"

For seizures, vomiting episodes, collapse, urinary accidents, and diarrhoea — frequency drives treatment decisions.

Whether an epileptic dog has one seizure every six weeks or three a month is the difference between monitoring and starting medication. And human recall of frightening events is unreliable in both directions.

What to do: log the date and duration of every episode. Nothing more elaborate is needed.

"Are you actually giving all the medication?"

Vets ask this delicately, and the honest answer is very often no — a dose gets missed, a tablet gets spat out, the course gets stopped when things improve.

This matters enormously, because a treatment that appears to have failed may simply not have been given. That can lead to a change of drug, further investigation, or an escalation that was never necessary.

What to do: tick off each dose. Be honest with your vet about what's actually been given, including the doses the cat definitely spat out. Nobody is judging, and it materially changes the interpretation.

"What's his normal?"

Resting breathing rate, gum colour, heart rate, how far he can walk, whether he can jump onto the bed.

Without a baseline, "his breathing seems fast" is unquantifiable.

"When did the last one happen?"

Vaccinations, deworming, flea and tick treatment, dental work, previous blood results, past illnesses, previous surgeries, medication reactions.

Practices hold records, but if you've moved or used different vets, that history can be scattered. Keeping your own copy is useful — ask for a copy of blood results each time and keep them.

Previous blood results are especially valuable. A creatinine of 140 means one thing on its own and something quite different if it was 95 two years ago.

The consultation that goes well

Here's what a well-prepared owner brings:

A written timeline. When it started, what's changed, what you've tried.
The numbers. Weight over recent months, food and water intake, resting breathing rate.
Video of the abnormal thing.
A photo of the lump, the rash, the discharge — things that come and go.
The medication list, with actual doses and honest adherence.
Previous results, if you have them.
Your three main questions, written down. You will forget them otherwise.
A second person, or permission to record, because retention in a stressful consultation is poor.

That consultation runs faster, costs less in unnecessary diagnostics, and reaches an answer sooner.

The unglamorous truth

None of this is complicated. It's a monthly weight, a note when something starts, a video when something odd happens, and a list of medications.

The reason it doesn't happen isn't difficulty — it's that there's no prompt. Nobody reminds you to weigh the dog, and by the time you need the information, the window to have collected it has closed.

The tool is not the point. A notebook and a phone camera will do all of this. What matters is having the information when someone asks for it — because the day someone asks is the day it's too late to start collecting.