Senior Dog Vet and Traveling Vet, Colleen Lambo

Welcome back to our member spotlight series, where we celebrate the passionate professionals shaping the future of senior dog care across the veterinary community!

For our second spotlight, we are excited to feature a certified member whose career is as wide-ranging as it is inspiring. We sat down with Dr. Colleen Lambo to talk about her unconventional path, what the SDVS certification has added to her already remarkable career, and what she has planned next.

Dr. Lambo's Background

Q: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

A: I’m a relief veterinarian working primarily through Roo, which has let me build a very unconventional career. I’ve worked in general practice, palliative and in-home euthanasia care, disaster response, and reproductive conservation work with endangered cats in zoos. I’ve also moved 29 times and lived in six countries, so adaptability is my strongest clinical skill.

For seven years, I focused heavily on hospice and in-home euthanasia care, which shaped my interest in senior pets and quality-of-life medicine. Then relief work gave me a way to build a career around several different interests at once.

Relief medicine ended up fitting me well. As a neurospicy human, I do much better with movement, deadlines, changing environments, and a little bit of chaos. I like walking into new hospitals, learning how different teams function, and bringing ideas between clinics. It turns out I really enjoy building a life around that.

Q: What drew you to veterinary medicine in the first place, and how did your path lead you toward relief work, disaster response, and conservation work specifically?

A: I loved animals and science from a young age and was one of those kids obsessed with animal facts, Ranger Rick magazines, wildlife, reptiles, and anything remotely biology-related. My mom was a nurse, so medicine was always around too. There was never another career option in my mind, which became a problem when I went to apply to vet school where I lived, in England, and couldn’t write an essay explaining why I wanted to be a veterinarian. Ironically, that crisis of self-reflection led me to spend a lot more time and money on my education in the US.

Disaster response work entered my life while I was finishing my internship at LSU during the BP oil spill. I spent months afterward helping with the spill response, and from there I kept finding myself surrounded by people involved in emergency response work. More opportunities followed, and I realized I loved the environment and the teamwork involved.

For a long while I pursued reproductive conservation work in endangered cats. Along the way, I realized I didn’t enjoy research, but I loved the clinical and field side of the work.

Finally, relief medicine found me, and it ended up tying everything together. It gave me the flexibility to continue participating in disaster response, conservation medicine, senior care, volunteer work, and teaching without having to choose only one version of veterinary medicine.

The Impact of SDVS

Q: How did you hear about Senior Dog Veterinary Society, and what motivated you to join the Certification Program? Was there a specific gap in your training or knowledge that you were hoping the certification program would help fill?

A: I originally found SDVS through LinkedIn, which apparently knew me well enough to keep putting it in front of me until I joined. Since senior pets were already a focus for me, the certification felt like a natural fit.

As a relief veterinarian, I market my interest in senior pets in my profile, so I initially wanted the certification for credibility. But you don't know what you don't know, and I quickly realized how much depth there still was to learn despite years of fixating on senior pets.

The program expanded the way I think about anesthesia, pain management, cognitive dysfunction, nutrition, and mobility. I especially appreciated learning more about nuances in anesthesia planning, local blocks, and drug choices for senior patients. It gave me more tools and more depth in areas I already cared a lot about, which made it genuinely fun rather than feeling like just another certification course.

Q: How does the SDVS certification complement the disaster response, relief work, and conservation work you're already doing?

A: The certification impacts my relief work most directly because I’m constantly moving between hospitals with different comfort levels and approaches to senior care. Senior medicine varies a lot between practices, so being able to introduce different approaches to pain management, anesthesia planning, mobility, cognitive dysfunction, or quality-of-life discussions has been rewarding.

I also get to show owners what’s possible for their senior pets, and I’ve noticed that once clients experience a different level of support and conversation around aging pets, they often start asking for it going forward. In that way, relief medicine lets me act as a quiet ambassador for senior dog care across a lot of different communities.

A lot of the skills transfer well into disaster response and conservation medicine. Any time you become more thoughtful about anesthesia, analgesia, mobility, or patient comfort, it carries over into other areas of practice. I work with a lot of older pets, older zoo animals, and medically complicated patients in general, so having more depth in those areas has been valuable across the board.

The Travelling Vet

Q: Your Instagram handle is @nomadicdvm and you call yourself a wandering veterinarian. If you had to pick one snapshot or single moment from your career that perfectly captures why you do what you do, what would it be?

A: Getting deployed to Saipan after Super Typhoon Sinlaku might be the most iconic moment. I got the call while I was boarding a plane out of Ecuador. After landing back in the US, I had less than four hours before my next flight out to race home, repack, and turn around. I spent the flights learning about Saipan (including where it was) and what I was walking into.

There are no resident veterinarians on the island and I was the first to deploy after the storm. That combination of urgency, flexibility, travel, medicine, and stepping into unfamiliar environments honestly captures a lot of what I’ve built my career around.

The connections I’d built led people to think of me when help was needed, and the structure of relief work meant I could actually say yes when those opportunities appeared.

What's Next

Q: What's next for you?

A: Right now I’m continuing to build my skills in disaster response, anesthesia, surgery, and senior-focused medicine. I’ve started doing more teaching and public speaking through Roo, which has been a fun extension of relief work.

I’m working on a software platform called HiVet focused on supporting in-home euthanasia and palliative care veterinarians. During my years in hospice care, I built my own systems and workflows because existing options were too expensive and didn’t really fit the way I function. My goal with HiVet is to build something more useful and accessible for veterinarians doing that kind of work.

Mostly, I want to keep building a career that stays flexible enough for me to keep learning, traveling, helping, and saying yes to interesting opportunities.

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Want to share your story as an SDVS Certified Member?

Get in touch at hello@seniordogvets.com for a chance to be featured in the next SDVS Member Spotlight issue.