Drinking from the Trough Page 7
Veterinarians go through training and education every bit as rigorous as medical doctors, and our supplies are the same price as human medical supplies. It takes time and skill to perform our job, just as it takes time and skill for physicians to treat their human patients. Vets charge a fair price for their services; the difference to the clients is that the money for the vet comes directly out of their pockets. Loving animals and our work doesn’t make the expenses involved any less.
But once in a great while, just about every vet will treat a beloved pet for free. And this day, that beloved pet was Bryan’s Mickey.
I checked on the dogs; they were still sleeping in the cool house.
I spent late afternoon operating on Mickey. When he was in recovery, I went into the house to let Tipper out. I stepped through the door into the family room and spoke Tipper’s name. Her head perked up, and I put her on her leash to take her to the dog pen.
I came back inside to get Keli. She hadn’t moved. In fact, I realized, she was in the same position she’d been in before I’d begun Mickey’s surgery hours ago. I called her name, but she didn’t respond.
I tentatively stepped over to her. I tried to move her; there was no voluntary movement. I lifted her forelimb. It was warm but limp. I let it go, and it fell back onto the cushion with a soft plop.
With a sinking feeling in my gut, I checked her mucous membranes by lifting her lip and pushing on the gums to see how fast the color would return to red.
Her gums were pale pink, and the capillary refill time (how long it takes the gums to turn red again) was slow.
My heart dropped to the floor. This was not just an old dog asleep.
Keli, my sweet pup, was in a coma.
My hands shaking with fright, I picked up the phone to call my old classmate and friend Anna. Anna had returned to CSU to study for a PhD in anatomy after seven years in veterinary practice in Arizona. She lived across the street in the farm’s chicken house, which had been converted long ago into a house we usually rented to vet students.
I cried hysterically into the phone, trying to explain. Anna came over immediately. I called Earl, who was working in Denver, and, in a shaky voice, told him what was going on. When I realized there was no way he could be with us, I started to cry.
Anna and I carried a limp fifty-pound Keli out to the backyard and placed her under her favorite tree, shaded from the late afternoon’s roasting heat.
A simple blood test revealed internal bleeding. We ran through the possible causes and decided it was one of two things—neither of which could be treated successfully, particularly in a fifteen-year-old comatose dog.
While Mickey recovered from his tail amputation, Anna and I prepared to put Keli to sleep under her ash tree.
I tried to raise a vein with the syringe full of euthanasia solution so I could euthanize my own dog, but my hands were shaking so hard as to be nonfunctional, and I couldn’t see through the flood of my tears.
Anna managed the injection while I cradled Keli’s head and supported the forelimb that held the vein Anna was going to use, whispering softly to her until she drifted away.
We let Tipper come out to say goodbye to her. Then I put Tipper back in the dog pen and went to Keli’s body to hold her lifeless paw.
That night, the retired dentist who owned the local pet cemetery and crematory picked up Keli’s body for cremation. He didn’t usually make house calls after hours; he never said, but I think it was kindness as well as professional courtesy—and probably practicality too. It was broiling hot, so leaving her body beside the tree was not an option. Her body was too big for our freezer (never look in a vet’s freezer), and the only other possibility was for Anna and me to take Keli’s body in the dark of night over to the anatomy cooler at the vet school, undoubtedly raising the suspicions of the campus police.
After that, I was left alone at home with a heavy heart. I called my father to tell him that Keli was dead. He and my stepmother had met their granddog three years earlier, on their final visit to Colorado. Dad had never been an emotional man, though it was always obvious to me that he was a dog lover. Now he was seriously ill with heart disease, and he must have been thinking about his own mortality, because he called me back later to say how bad he felt about Keli and that he had been thinking of her all evening. Our conversation eased my tears a little while I waited for Earl to come home.
That was Friday night, but it wasn’t my last encounter with Keli; she came back to say goodbye.
Sunday morning, I had a seven thirty tee time with my golf buddy, after which we went for a late breakfast while our husbands slept.
By midafternoon, I was napping on the couch. Tipper was spread out along the length of the couch on the floor below me, sleeping. You know that period when you know you are asleep but not in a deep sleep? That’s when I felt a poke on my arm.
Keli used to poke us with her nose. Keli was also what I call a “face dog,” meaning we could do a face-to-face hug. My eyes were closed because I was dozing, so I didn’t see anything. I put my arm around her fuzzy neck as she stood by the couch, not quite knowing what was happening. I felt furry pressure on the side of my face.
I woke up immediately. Only Tipper was there, and she was still sound asleep. Besides, Tipper never poked anyone.
I remembered bringing Keli into the house via the cat clinic door one time when my tech assistant was bent over, looking through the microscope. Keli beeped her dead center in her rear end, much to the tech’s embarrassment and my delight.
So I knew it had been Keli standing at the couch before she went to the Rainbow Bridge. It was Keli saying goodbye. Of this I am certain.
Earl and I considered spreading Keli’s ashes on our favorite Hawaiian island of Kauai but ultimately decided we wanted to keep her close by. Her ashes, safe inside a lovely heart-shaped, lacquered paper box, rested on a shelf in the living room, reminding us of her long life and gift of companionship, love, laughter, and paw prints in the snow.
6
A Syringe and a Lariat
Vet school orientation day came at last—only a year later than I’d planned. But I was finally here, the sting of last year’s rejection replaced by pure enthusiasm. I’d practically skipped the whole way from home to the anatomy building. It wasn’t far—less than a mile—and the beautiful weather matched my mood.
I stared at the titanic stack of books and course notes and instruments. The stack was taller and heavier than I was.
I had assumed that orientation would just involve meeting kindly professors and their teaching assistants, then finding the cubicle and seat I’d be assigned to for the year. It never occurred to me that I’d need a forklift to haul a hundred pounds of bone-crushing study paraphernalia home. Fortunately, a friend I’d met in pre-vet science classes took pity on me and gave me and my gigantic load a lift home in her van.
Orientation barely hinted at what was to come.
Veterinary school was like being in a ring with a rodeo bull. I had trained hard to be there, I wanted to be there, but the unrelenting rush of information was terrifying. Sometimes, it was so scary that I felt like I was about to be—or had already been—thrown off the bull, with no rodeo bullfighters to distract the beast.
And it was exhilarating. Lots of my classmates lived on caffeine and not enough sleep. I don’t use caffeine, and, with a few notable exceptions, I slept just fine. I felt the stress as much as anyone else, but with the hard work, I felt a peculiar type of joy.
I’d been a teacher for nine years before entering vet school. At the ripe old age of thirty, I was considered a nontraditional student, a “nontrad.” That extra bit of life experience made a huge difference.
I’d spent all my free time over the previous five years fulfilling the prerequisite science classes, so I was used to the struggles and challenges of the hardest classes in the undergraduate curriculum and to balancing that coursework with the responsibilities of daily life, marriage, and a career in teaching.
But I’d left behind a secure tenured teaching job—a job I’d enjoyed and had worked hard to get—to begin this new adventure. Would this be worth it? Would I succeed? Or would I go down in flames, with no job to fall back on?
Veterinary medicine is one of the most demanding programs at Colorado State University. Our professors and teaching assistants did what they could to ease the stress, but the student had to have the intestinal fortitude to go for it. You wouldn’t make it if all you did was quake in fear. You had to find a way to survive.
And pass.
You couldn’t squeak by with a D average either. Too many Ds was called “D-ing out,” and you’d be bounced from the program. The admissions committee would decide whether or not you would be allowed to restart the program the following year.
I felt the blood drain from my face when Dr. Banks, our head anatomy professor, proclaimed with great authority that the grade we got on our first test, no matter what class it was in, would be the grade we’d get on every test at vet school. Despite my experience as a teacher and my joy in being a student, I’ve never been a great test taker.
Five days later, I huddled in the microbiology lab, writing the answers to an epidemiology quiz—my first official test at vet school.
Grades were posted the next day, taped to the window near the cubicles and the TAs’ office. I approached the window with trepidation and ran my finger down the list of student ID numbers until I found mine and the grade next to it: a D.
“D for Doomed,” I muttered, feeling as if a heavy weight were crushing me.
I remembered the first time I’d tried the balance beam in gymnastics. I was thirteen years old, and I shook so hard with fear that if it hadn’t been for my spotters, I would have fallen off. But I didn’t fall, and eventually, I learned to walk that narrow beam.
I gritted my teeth and swore that I’d learn this too.
A week later, we had our first true exam—not a quiz, but a full-fledged anatomy test. The textbook was by none other than our own intimidating Dr. Banks.
Exam protocol was more complicated than in-class quiz taking. While half of us sat in our cubicles and worked our way through an extensive multiple-choice test that would be graded by computer, the other half went from station to station in the gross anatomy laboratory, clipboards in hand, identifying and answering questions about pinned structures. When the time was up, the groups swapped places.
Again, I approached the results posted on the window. Again, I ran my finger down the list until I found my student ID number. This time, my grade was an A.
I refused to fail, no matter what the Dr. Bankses of the world predicted.
We saw Dr. Banks daily in the lecture hall. Students were silent during the lectures, aside from occasional questions. Some of that silence, especially during the first few weeks, was fear and uncertainty in navigating the foreign environment of professional school. Our class was small, compared to typical undergraduate settings—only 140 students. You couldn’t hide from instructors among a mass of peers. Anonymity was impossible; Dr. Banks had a talent for learning our names from our student ID “mug shots,” and by the third week of the semester, he knew everyone.
Add to that his imposing presence—he was a large man with a once-athletic build now shifting to obesity—his bombastic voice, and his rapid-fire wit, and it’s no wonder we cowered before him.
But we didn’t cower for long. Being with the same group every day, united in our common purpose and the demands of the coursework, molded us into a family. My cubemates even called me “Mom.” As we settled into the new routines of vet school, the in-class silence became more about fascination and dedication.
The family feel also meant that exchanges between instructors and students were more informal and often unfiltered. Dr. Banks’s humor was frequently crude and occasionally lewd, and he could make a joke out of almost anything. He could also skewer you if he thought you were a smartass.
In 1983, wristwatches that could be programmed to beep at a specific time were the latest cool technology. Dr. Banks’s pet peeve was the scattered sounds of these watches beeping at ten minutes before the hour, when the lecture was supposed to be over. He made it clear that he would not tolerate the devices.
One day, students who owned these watches synchronized them so they would all chirp at the same moment. At the appointed time, a chorus of electronic alerts began to trill like blackbirds in a marsh. Dr. Banks whirled about, his lip curling in anger. He quickly realized the jest and laughed. He could (most of the time) take as good as he gave.
The courses and labs during the first two years of vet school took place on CSU’s main campus, not far from my house, so I walked or rode my bike every day, in all kinds of weather.
I returned home for lunch every day too, for a bit of downtime and de-stressing. I ate lunch and watched my soap opera, All My Children. I’d been a fan since the series began in 1970, and I discovered that the show was popular with lots of vet school students, both men and women. We couldn’t just study nonstop; everybody needed a break.
Before heading back to campus, I took Keli for a walk and held Pruney in my arms for another minute or three. Then I hugged and kissed the horses so that I could smell their comforting aroma all afternoon.
The first year of veterinary school involved mostly anatomy and physiology—where we learned normal animal structures and their functions—as well as a course called Agents of Disease. The latter included everything from bacteriology, mycology, and parasitology to the nutritional requirements of all species of animals. Thursday afternoons, a guest lecture series called Perspectives brought in speakers who presented real cases.
Strangely named diseases paraded through the presentations and into our brains for consideration: fistulous withers, balanoposthitis, lumpy jaw, wobbler syndrome, wooden tongue, cryptorchidism, left displaced abomasum, pyometra, and Sweeney. What the hell was Sweeney? Certainly not the Demon Barber of Fleet Street!
The answer arrived in the form of Dr. Simon Turner, an equine surgeon from Australia, at the first Thursday lecture. Sweeney is the dysfunction of the equine forelimb due to injury to the suprascapular nerve that supplies impulses to some of the muscles of the scapula. It shows up as atrophy or wasting away of the muscles located in the horse’s shoulder area.
Each student had an assigned space in a locked part of the anatomy building called the cubicles, or “cubes.” Each cube was a room, with assigned seats along a countertop work surface and shelves for supplies and equipment, such as microscopes and slides. My place was D-5: cube D, seat five. We all had keys to the building so we could study or dissect our specimens anytime, day or night.
I generally stayed away from the building during the off-hours; I studied better at home, after dinner, when Earl was in Denver working, the dog asleep on the floor, and the cat sacked out on the couch. When I needed a short break, I went out to the barn and visited the girls. That was much better than trying to concentrate in the palpable tension of the anatomy building.
The only exception was Friday nights, when my classmate Heidi and I played badminton with the Pakistani club. After badminton, we went to our respective cubes in the anatomy building and studied for a while.
One Friday evening about ten, I left through the gross anatomy laboratory, nicknamed the “gross lab,” where dissections took place. The students from Hawaii were busy dissecting their assigned dog and swigging beer, clearly having a grand time. I don’t know if it was the extra study or the beer, but they were among the top students in the class.
Students weren’t the only ones in the anatomy building at odd times. Dr. Banks was known to roam the halls in the wee hours. If you had the gumption, you could approach him and get clarification about the topics he covered in his lectures.
The topics were
crucial to our understanding of veterinary anatomy, but his lecture notes were practically undecipherable.
I wasn’t willing to wander around at three in the morning on the off chance that I’d run into him, so I ventured into his office one afternoon during normal working hours. I did my best to hide my nervousness as I told him I was having difficulty understanding the difference between hydrostatic pressure and colloid osmotic pressure. Could he please explain the difference for me?
He glared at me. “Did you read the lecture notes?”
I nodded. “Yes, but I didn’t understand them.”
“Read them again, and read the textbook,” he growled. “Don’t come back until then.”
I fled, tail between my legs, but I did as he demanded. Then, still uncertain that it all made sense, I worked with three of his teaching assistants until I was sure I understood. It was a harsh lesson but a successful endeavor; I’ve never forgotten the difference between the two types of pressure in the vascular system.
My classmates and I would have been in serious trouble when we hit the neuroanatomy section if not for a secret weapon.
Dr. Banks’s lectures on the anatomy of the nervous system sounded like an utterly alien language, even for jargon-dense vet school. His lecture notes were as unintelligible as his lectures. This wasn’t teaching as I knew it; it was torture.
I wasn’t alone in my frustration. Almost everyone in the class was floundering in a confusing sea of terms, structures, and concepts.
By the dark of night, we rendezvoused in the lecture hall and gathered before our secret weapon, my cubemate Anna. I didn’t know how or why, but Anna understood this puzzle, and more importantly, she understood how to teach it.
Anna stood on the lecture hall stage and drew elegant pathways of each cranial nerve. Cranial nerves are the nerves that emerge directly from the brain and exit through foramina—spaces—in the skull. Olfactory, optic, facial—there are twelve pairs in all. Anna explained the structure and function of each one and clarified which nerve exited through which space in the skull. She transformed us from a pack of confused students who had tried and failed to understand the professor’s gobbledygook to students who thoroughly understood cranial nerves. Now that was teaching.