Vet Tech Tales: The Early Years

by Phoenix Sullivan

  It was worse than I expected. We weren’t just being sent home for today, but for good.

  “You two, though, have shown you’re dependable. Sharpe and Fiennes were both pretty impressed they could leave you on your own almost immediately. And Kathy had some very nice things to say about you when you were here before. So here’s my proposition. I can use one of you here every week. That way Kathy and Ashley can alternate taking Saturdays off. And my business partner, Dr. Vann, is willing to take the other one on. His clinic is just a couple of miles from your high school. If you can assure us that you’ll come every Saturday, you can work through till the end of the school year. I don’t want you to commit, though, and then fall through.”

  Lisa and I exchanged looks. We knew each other only too well to not know what the other one was thinking. Dr. Norris was a known value that either of us would be willing to work for, but what was Dr. Vann like?

  It was Lisa who asked. “Will Dr. Vann let us spend time in the exam room? The other vets weren’t too good about that, even after we finished everything they wanted us to do.”

  Dr. Norris laughed. “Paul’s a natural teacher. I don’t think you’ll be ignored with him.” He glanced at his watch. “Talk it over between yourselves and with your parents. Meanwhile, since I have enough help in the back, you can stay up front with Dr. Reese and me. Joan may need some help, too, at the desk. The book looks pretty full today, so there should be plenty to do.”

  There was, of course, no question that Lisa and I would take Dr. Norris up on his offer. The only question was who would work with Dr. Vann. It turned out Lisa’s parents decided for us. They had committed to a monthly Saturday class and had sports tournaments that fell on the occasional Saturdays. Since Dr. Vann’s clinic was within biking distance where Dr. Norris’ wasn’t, Lisa took the volunteer position with Dr. Vann.

  Just as Dr. Norris had said, Paul Vann was a natural teacher who genuinely enjoyed people, pets and his profession. Tall, with thinning red hair and a full beard, Dr. Vann had an easy laugh and a natural way with animals. Lisa adored him, adored his clinic and adored the work. So much so that, after a few weeks, she began going in on Sundays, too, to help out with the day’s cleaning, feeding and treatments as well as with the heavy-duty weekly cleaning chores such as washing windows and waxing floors. And it wasn’t long before I was biking my way over there, too, right alongside her on Sunday mornings, the lure of the animals too strong to deny.

  Had we wanted to see the truth, we would have known that Norris and Vann were coming out far ahead in this game. Not only were they getting free labor, they were both getting out of paying an employee on Saturdays and Vann on Sundays as well. Plus, we were generating income for the clinics by grooming a fair number of dogs and cats. It was profitable to keep us on. We were fast learners, conscientious, dependable and good at what we were doing. And all they had to spend in return for our service was a little knowledge, and most of that siphoned out in the natural course of their business.

  Like with my job at the airfield – before being drafted into babysitting – I was getting what I thought was a fair return: a few minutes with the animals in exchange for a few hours of work. And at 15, I believed simply being around the animals was pay enough.

  Four months after the volunteer work began it was over. For me, at least. I turned 16 at semester’s end and summer demanded a full-time paying job to earn money for college. And since I was going to skip my junior year based on my academic record , I’d only have this summer and the next to save up for vet school.

  Reluctantly I bade the clinic, the vets, the assistants and the animals farewell and turned my attention to filling orders in a warehouse: lugging a cart up and down long aisles in a hot metal building and counting out paintbrushes and skeins of yarn for handicraft stores nationwide. I endured the menial labor and looked forward to fall, the start of my senior year, and weekends once again cleaning cages and bathing dogs.

  I began planning my next years – graduation, college, vet school – in meticulous detail, confident of success. Confident that the pieces would all fall with exacting grace right into the holes I so carefully chiseled out for them.

  College Is Only a Setback Away

  The long faces in the kitchen didn’t overly concern me. I was hot and tired after a day of filling orders at the warehouse and a bike ride home. A bit of dinner, a little TV and a good book were all I had mind for.

  “Honey, I’m afraid we have some bad news.”

  I immediately went into denial mode. The life I was structuring had no room for bad news, so there simply couldn’t be anything bad happening that would affect me. My mom brushed a strand of graying hair off her cheek. “Your dad’s company – well, they’ve laid him off.”

  I glanced at my dad, a solemn man in his late-40s with little formal education faced with a sinking economy marked by high unemployment and even higher inflation. Unperturbed, I remained confident in my plan. This was a minor setback, nothing more. A hiccup in the family. Dad would find another job and off he would go every weekday morning once more.

  But the days turned to weeks, and when summer finally wore down, the best Dad had found was a position as a weekend security guard. With the family car tied up on Saturdays, I had no way to get to Dr. Norris’ clinic when school started back up. Unable to stop it, I watched the first piece of my life plan slip away.

  The second piece followed fast.

  “I have to get a job.” The look of panic and disbelief betrayed the unnatural calm in my brother’s voice. “It’s the middle of the semester. Where am I supposed to find work now?”

  A senior in college, majoring in anthropology, my brother was home for a weekend visit he clearly hadn’t wanted to come back for.

  “I thought you had a job.”

  “I teach four labs a week. That’s barely enough for groceries.”

  “What about your scholarship?”

  “It pays for school, but not my apartment or anything else.”

  “There isn’t anything left in the college fund?”

  Dan shook his head. “Mom and Dad raided it to pay their own bills. It’s gone.”

  Gone. Anger welled in me. Even if Dad landed a job tomorrow, my parents wouldn’t be able to build up any kind of savings before the next school year. If they had to cut off subsidy to my brother now, where would that put me in the fall? I would have to rely on what little I had made over the past summer and what little more I would make this next one. So much for the car I wanted to buy. Every penny would now have to be squirreled away for other expenses.

  It wasn’t fair.

  And what I was thinking deep down wasn’t fair either. That Dan had gotten at least some support for three years, but I would get nothing. That the male in the family had gotten the help he needed to put him in a position to get a job that might one day support a family of his own. Even in the mid-1970s, traditional values from a dying age had managed to win out again.

  “What about me?” I asked quietly.

  “So you don’t go to college. You’re a girl anyway. What difference would it make?” Shoulder-length hair did not automatically make my brother a fan of women’s lib. Not when his own future was on the line.

  “Do you think you have some sort of entitlement, just because you happened to be born first and be born male?”

  He shrugged. “That’s how things are.” Then, with a pointed stare he hit home. “And you know Mom and Dad believe that too.”

  I hung my head. It was no use arguing or staying angry with him. He wasn’t to blame. The generations that had come before were. It was the misguided dogma and brutal catechism learned at a paternal ancestor’s knee that kept the myth alive. It was 40 years and more ingrained in my parents’ very being. In my mom who quit her secretarial job the day she married and who held proudly to the fact that she had never learned to pump her own gas. In my dad who worked finger to the bone to provide for his family. In the way they responded to my oft-voiced complaint
s that Dan had been allowed to do something at whatever age I happened to be with a simple phrase that held for them all the wisdom of the world encapsulated in five small words: “That’s because he’s a boy.”

  But this … I couldn’t let college and my dream of being a veterinarian fall through simply because of my gender. Or for the lack of a few dollars. If there was a way to get into college I would.

  ~~~

  For me, schoolwork always came easy. I absorbed without having to study, not understanding why the classes had to be paced so slow. Resentful that my classmates were holding me back.

  I breezed through accelerated courses – science, math, English. I crammed four years of advanced high school work into three and, with visions of scholarships dancing through my head, tested high on college entrance exams. All the schools I didn’t want to attend courted me handsomely. But I had my eye on Texas A&M, with its College of Veterinary Medicine just an easy transition away. The scholarship offer seemed excruciatingly slow to come, but come it did. Textbooks, classes and fees would be covered. I only had my off-campus living expenses to take care of. Two summers of savings coupled with a few hours of part-time work a week and my freshman year would be a done deal. My life plan was back on track.

  Two days after I turned 17 I graduated high school – a full year early. The summer sped by as I worked hard to amass a few extra dollars. It was an exciting time, with my focus needlesharp on the courses I would be signing up for, the apartment I would be renting, and the job I would have to get hired for to keep the plan going.

  Biomedical science would, of course, be my major. With any luck, I would be able to get into my first animal husbandry class in the fall. Since my scholarship also came with credit for a handful of freshman courses, I didn’t have to fill my schedule with many of the normally required classes, leaving me free to pursue courses that often weren’t offered till the sophomore year. I was quite smug in the knowledge that I had an advantage over many of my freshman counterparts competing for the few seats available in the pre-vet classes. Getting an earlier start meant I had a very good chance of getting all my prerequisite classes out of the way by the end of my junior year. And that ultimately meant I wouldn’t have to wait till I’d completed my senior year to apply to vet school. I’d gotten through high school in just three years; I’d do the same in undergrad school too.

  With my easy success in academics to this point, there was no question I would be accepted into vet school on my first try, no matter the daunting statistics of the number of applicant hopefuls for each open seat in the college. I had heard the stories of students who were in masters programs still waiting to be accepted into vet college after two, three or more applications in as many years. That, of course, could not happen to me. And why were some of those folk being accepted anyway? I shuddered to think that any student could be accepted into or be graduated out of vet college with anything below a 3.5 average. Did I want someone who may have failed a class or even made a C in one treating one of my animals? A pity, I thought, that all graduates got the same degree. How could an animal owner ever tell what quality of education lay behind the diploma hanging on the office wall?

  So it was in mid-August I waved good-bye to my childhood and marched confidently toward the beckoning light of Texas A&M.

  How Long Is Four Months in Teenager Years?

  College Station, Texas, in August is hot. Three weeks before school started I moved into my new apartment with the bare minimum in tow. Security deposit, first and last month rent, and the sundry fees the scholarship failed to cover ate deep into my bank account. First order of business before school started was to look for a part-time job. For transportation, I had a bicycle and a bus pass, limiting my options of where I could work. I pedaled far and wide, fortunately finding a position less than a mile from my apartment at a fast-food establishment – honest work with a flexible schedule. I signed on for 20 hours per week. That seemed reasonable given the 18-hour course load I had scheduled.

  Only, somehow, the 20 hours quickly grew to 30 as the workforce shifted.

  “Good help is hard to keep,” my manager told me philosophically as he scratched through yet another name on the schedule and penciled “Phoenix” in its place.

  I was arriving either early in the morning or staying late into the night. When I wasn’t at school, I was at work. I remembered my brother’s despair at having to find a job mid-semester in a college town, and I knew how desperately I needed to keep this one. Thirty hours turned into 35, then slipped into 40. I was afraid to say no. Afraid that if I did I would be thrown out on the streets with no income and no hope.

  Likewise, my 18-hour course load turned into much more than that. Advanced Biology and Animal Science – two sophomore courses I had fought hard to get into in just my freshman year – required long labs. History and Literature required hundreds of pages of reading. And Calculus and Chemistry required hours of meticulous calculations. Suddenly there just weren't enough hours in a day. Never one to accept failure, I refused to drop any of my classes. I slogged through as best I could, denying the obvious and convincing myself I still had a firm grip on both work and school.

  Even Animal Science, which I had looked forward to all summer, had become painful. Many of the labs were held on university grounds that were off-campus. That meant longer commutes by bike or bus, and my work schedule rarely allowed the additional time off I needed to get to the remote classes. I missed two labs, the most allowed before they forcibly expelled you from the class, and was tardy to several others. Only my grades for the lectures, which I fought for, kept me in class.

  Oh, but what a class it was! For a city-raised girl, it was eye-opening and fascinating. Learning the different breeds of swine. Judging the conformation of quarter horses. And for a confirmed vegetarian who didn’t believe in the exploitation of farm animals, it proved a bit unsettling too. We judged live steers during one lab, estimating such things as what their dressed weight would be, the size of their rib eyes and how much marbling they would produce. Next lab, the slaughtered steers were presented to us neatly laid out on little foam trays ready to validate our guesses.

  In the cattle barns, I made friends with a black bull calf, only just weaned when I first met him. I made a point to visit him whenever I was by. He’d take bits of hay out of one hand while I scratched him on the head with the other. A playful tyke, he’d sneak up behind me, stick his nose between my shoulder blades and give me a gentle shove that usually staggered me into the stall fence. The more growth he got, the farther I went.

  I was picking myself up off the stall floor after one such push when I heard a male voice behind me.

  “Know what’s in store for that calf, don’t you?” A first-year vet student sporting a checked cotton shirt, worn denim jeans and scuffed boots that had seen their share of barns spat a wad of tobacco into a dark corner of the stall and climbed down from the fence where he’d been watching. “One of the students’ll be castrating him in class next month. And next year he’ll be part of the Animal Science lab.”

  “So?” I said, trying to sound as nonplussed as possible, though I was plenty plussed at thought of the little calf’s future.

  He smirked. “Just don’t go getting too attached to anything around here. One way or another, they all wind up dead.” He sauntered off toward the dairy barn without a backwards glance.

  And that cowboy’s going to be a vet? I thought. I bet he doesn’t even graduate. I had read the books. Vets weren’t cynical. They were caring, decent people. Even the large-animal vets who worked with money-making meat herds. That’s because the ranchers cared about their animals’ health and wanted them treated as humanely as possible.

  At least that’s what I thought until the Animal Science class visited the neighborhood slaughterhouse. The abattoir was a small one, catering mainly to the needs of the university. The pens outside held only a few dozen head of bawling cows, not the few hundred to be found on any given day at a regular
commercial facility. Inside, carcasses chained by their back legs hung from the ceiling while blood drained from their necks down to the concrete channel below. Swine, cows, goats and the odd sheep waited their turn in the hot building.

  The man demonstrating that day was stout with muscles that bulged under his overalls and the heavy rubber apron he wore – an obvious match for any of the animals that might rebel their fate at the last minute. Deftly, he caught a procession of doomed beasts and showed us the proper technique for killing each species. An electric jolt to the forehead seemed to be the favored method of the day.

  Another man, built much like the first, hooked up the dead animals and demonstrated how they were bled and made ready for the tanner. The tanner then expertly skinned each animal from nose to tail with a single long stroke that flayed the skin in one continuous piece. In a matter of minutes, a bleating cow or pig had been divested of everything that had made it a unique, living individual and had been hung anonymously on a conveyor line, ready to be processed and shipped to market within the day.

  The lab reinforced my decision that large animal medicine was not for me. While a humane endeavor, keeping animals healthy that were destined for the slaughterhouse seemed counter to all I believed. I would, I vowed, never be a part of that particular cycle.

  That is, if the choice between large and small animal work was even one I would ever get to make.

  As the semester drew to a close, it became obvious that between the demands of work and school my grades were perilously close to slipping. Since I was obligated to continue working to pay the bills, my only choice for next semester would be to cut way down on course hours if I were to have any chance of keeping up a high grade point average, meaning it would probably be an extra year or two before I could apply to vet school. It was a catch-22 that I never expected, never planned for.