by Jack Kelly
Clinician. Professor. Mentor. Counselor. Coach. Project manager.
Molly Racette (MS’14; Department of Medical Sciences) plays all these roles and more during an average day in UW Veterinary Care’s (UWVC) emergency and critical care unit (CCU).
By 7 a.m., Racette, who serves as section head of the hospital’s emergency and critical care service, is deep in discussion with the service’s overnight clinicians. Patient by patient, they recap the night: Who was comfortable? Who struggled? What went well? How can she help? Around them, machines whir, dogs bark, staff chatter, and shifts change.
Then she’s off to the emergency department. A 10-week-old puppy greets her with kisses en route to the debrief. It was a slow — which does not mean easy — night. One case ended in heartbreak: a pet discharged against medical advice didn’t survive. “It ruined my night,” the overnight clinician tells Racette. “It would have ruined my night, too,” she responds. They sit in somber, companionable silence for a moment before Racette assures him he did everything he could.
Another case went well. “I got lucky,” he tells her. Racette corrects him. “Don’t say luck — say skill!”
Once the debrief is over, she swaps coffee for gummy bears and is back with patients. She performs an ultrasound on a little black kitten, followed by a German shepherd, and then a pit bull mix. She checks on the 10-week-old puppy, who’s desperate for attention from his specialized kennel. “I’d climb in there with you if I could,” she jokes. “But I have work to do.”
As cases come in, she teaches. Residents, interns, and veterinary students gather around the department’s whiteboard and markers race across its surface. What do we know? What does that tell us? What should we do next?
Afternoon brings a potential cancer patient and a dog with bite wounds. Through it all, Racette doesn’t slow down.
While she always wanted to be a veterinarian, Racette’s path to emergency medicine wasn’t linear. She spent her first three years of veterinary medical school studying to be a large animal surgeon, until a summer job changed everything.
She worked the overnight shift as an intensive care unit nurse and “absolutely fell in love with it,” she says. “It’s just you and the patient. They’re often really sick and you get to dedicate all your time to them.”
Racette hasn’t looked back, and she remains especially appreciative of the unpredictable nature of emergency medicine. While some might find it daunting, Racette treats every day, regardless of what patients come through the door, as an opportunity to learn.
“I’m not a cardiologist, but we see cardiology cases and I get to learn what’s new in the field,” she says. That’s true across all the hospital’s services, Racette adds, because a teaching hospital fosters collaboration across departments.
The desire to never stop learning is something she tries to pass on to early career veterinarians and students. “When I’m on the clinic floor, although I am a clinician, I’m trying to be a teacher to the residents, interns, and students,” she says. “I love giving them tools to connect what they’re learning in class and seeing in clinics to future cases they might see.”
Racette also focuses on the process. “There are some things that are inherent to emergency and critical care, including the unstable nature of our patients,” she says. “We are always focused on the process of triage: Is the patient stable and, if not, how can we stabilize them so that we can then figure out what’s going on?”
Through it all — the heartbreak, the happy outcomes, the sour gummy worms — Racette keeps moving. And managing. And teaching.
“Dr. Racette has been an invaluable mentor to me,” says student Isabella Susi (DVMx’26). “She has consistently modeled how to translate knowledge into practice, supported my growth in the ER, and invested in opportunities to help students succeed outside of coursework.”