As the last year of vet school came to an end, I was considering several job offers, and Emily and I were trying to determine where we wanted to relocate after spending the last seven years living in Stillwater. Every preceptorship that I went on resulted in an offer of employment. The teacher salary crisis was over, and Emily was optimistic that she would be able to find a teaching job near wherever I decided to practice. Despite a great relationship with her parents, neither of us was much interested in returning to the area where Emily was from in southwestern Oklahoma, so Elgin was out. North-central Kansas was a little too flat, a little too remote, and a little too far away from our families for us to consider. The area around Siloam Springs in northwestern Arkansas was beautiful, and I had really enjoyed my time at the practice there. Emily and I considered the offer seriously, but I ended up vetoing the idea due to my fear of not being able to get along well enough with all of the veterinarians at the practice on a long term basis. So we finally decided to return to my hometown and join the practice where I had worked as a veterinary assistant in high school.
In the back of my mind, I had always had the idea of coming home and joining the T-Town Veterinary Clinic. The owners of the practice, Dr. E and Dr. L, had taken care of my family’s animals for as long as I could remember, and they had long been mentors and role-models for me. So after several meetings, we hashed out a starting salary that was satisfactory to all of us, and I agreed to take the job. The best part was that they knew me well enough that they were prepared to let me buy in as a full partner as soon as I was ready to do so. Although I may have been able to have gone somewhere else and received a larger starting salary and more benefits, nowhere else was the partnership option going to be offered so readily.
That settled, we now needed a place to live. My parents, thrilled that we were moving back home, suggested that we purchase a trailer house and move it onto family land near their house. Lacking the finances for a more independent option, we agreed. Shopping for trailer houses is a lot like shopping for cars. We visited lot after lot…new, used, single, and double-wide. It wasn’t the home of our dreams, but we finally found one that was pretty nice and more importantly, affordable, and made arrangements to have it moved to the family land. I spent the few weeks between graduation and starting at the clinic sprucing up the place, building a wooden deck off the back door, and putting up a chain-link fence around the back yard for us to keep the three dogs that we had acquired over the course of veterinary school.
I officially started my career as a veterinarian on May 15, 2006. The first week was a bit of an adjustment as I became accustomed to working with the appointment schedule, determined the locations of the various drugs and instruments that were to be my livelihood, and generally got my feet under me. This process was made much easier by the fact that I had worked in the practice at various times in the past as an unlicensed technician, but I had much to learn before being on call the next week. My second week of practice I was on call Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and as it was Memorial Day Weekend, I was on call the following Monday as well. It was a bit trial by fire, I admit. I spent most of it in a fetal position on the couch at home, praying the pager didn’t go off. When it inevitably did, my heart rate would soar. I’d break out in a cold sweat, and my hands would start shaking. I often had to call Dr. E or Dr. L to ask advice on diagnoses and treatments, where to find the drugs in the clinic, and how much to charge at the end. To their credit, they were always patient and extremely willing to help me when I needed it, which was often. I don’t remember all of the specific calls that I went on that weekend, but one stands out in my memory and is one of my favorite vet stories to this day:
“This is Dr. Carpenter from the T-Town Veterinary Clinic,” I say. “I got a page that you are having trouble with your dog. What can I do for you?”
“Well my dog actually died,” the man replied.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say, a bit confused.
“But I don’t think his juices have congealed yet. Do you think you can shock him with those paddle things and bring him back?” the man asks seriously.
I swear to God. He actually asked me that. I couldn’t make something like that up. This guy, who didn’t sound drunk or high, was seriously asking me to bring his dog back from the dead with a defibrillator.
Struggling to keep a straight face, I respond, “Well sir, first of all I don’t have a defibrillator and second, that only works if the animal is having a heart attack and you shock them as soon as their heart stops. Out of curiosity, how long ago did your dog die?
He thinks a minute. “Probably no more than four or five hours ago.”
“I don’t think there is anything I can do to help you at this point," I say. "I think you should probably just dig a hole and bury him.”
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Chapter 1, Part 3
My reverie is interrupted as I pull into the clinic parking lot and I notice Cole, one of the technicians, has already arrived and is getting out of his truck. Cole is from a town east of us and has just finished his first year at OSU. He is an animal science major with a pre-vet option and is working at the clinic this summer to gain veterinary experience for his vet school application.
“Hey Cole,” I holler as I get out of my truck. “Do you mind going out on a call with me to pull a calf?”
“Yeah sure,” he replies. “What do you need me to get?”
“Can you get a bucket, fill it with Chlorhexidine solution, and drop an OB chain in as well? I’ll get a tray and the drugs we’ll need,” I say as I unlock the clinic door.
We load the instruments and medication that we need into the truck and pull away from the clinic as the rest of the staff begins to arrive. Cole has helped the other veterinarians in the field a few times before, but it is our first time to work together and he seems eager to prove his ability. I can relate. This will be the first time I have pulled a calf on my own, although I have assisted numerous times. We race down the country roads along the edge of town and are soon to the address of the call.
“I think this is the place,” I say as we pull into the driveway. “The guy said he had her in a pen out behind the house.”
At the sight of the neat brick home, I am hopeful that Mr. Smith has a workable set of facilities with which to restrain the heifer (maybe an alleyway or even a chute if we are lucky). As we drive around to the rear of the house and into the pasture, my hopes are dashed. The facilities consist of a pen made up of stock panels, and its dimensions are sixteen feet by twenty feet. No alleyway or chute is in sight. Clearly I am expected to catch the heifer by roping her and tying her to the side of the pen.
I am to find that this scenario is typical in rural Oklahoma. Many people move to the country, buy a small acreage of land and a few head of cattle to put on it, and never bother to purchase adequate fencing and a squeeze chute to facilitate the animal’s medical needs. When they need veterinary services, it is expected that the vet be able to capture and restrain the animals entirely with the tools at his disposal. This is a bit of a problem for several reasons. One is that I am abysmally terrible at roping anything, particularly if that anything is in the least bit mobile. I am not, nor will I ever be considered a roper. Lariat Roping 101 was not a class that was available at veterinary school, and I did not grow up a rodeo cowboy. I grew up on a small farm that was equipped with an alleyway and squeeze chute. We didn’t have to rope things because we had proper facilities.
The second problem is that even if I am able to rope the damn cow, now I am a two-hundred pound man on foot attached by a thin length of braided nylon rope to a thousand pound bovine that is rather pissed at having a tightening loop around her neck. The cow usually responds by either running directly toward me, in which case I promptly drop the rope and look for something to climb, or she runs directly away from me, in which case I become the first contestant up competing in the very under appreciated sport of pasture skiing. The owners of the cattle never think about this. Veterinarians should all be cowboys. You ever notice that the cowboy that rides around the range roping crap is riding, as in on a horse? It makes a pretty damn big difference if you are on horseback when you set out to rope something. Seeing as how I don’t now nor ever plan on owning a horse, and I wouldn’t haul it around on calls even if I did, my roping is not likely to get any more successful in the future.
That being said, the heifer in question today is in a small enough pen that I am able to toss a loop around her head and manage to quickly get the end of the rope wrapped around the fence post. With Cole urging her forward, we get her snubbed up to the post, get a rope halter around her head and tied off so that I can now begin my physical examination. The head and two front feet of the fetus are clearly visible protruding from the vulva. The calf’s tongue lolls out of its mouth lifelessly.
“Well, Mr. Smith, you were right, it is definitely dead,” I say. “We’ll need to get it out if we are going to save the mama.”
As I pull on a pair of shoulder-length plastic OB sleeves, Cole asks me, “Hey Doc? She sure looks stirred up, are you gonna be okay getting up behind her?”
I eye the heifer warily as I pour lubricant over my gloved hands and forearms. She is straining against the rope, setting back with all her weight on the halter, her tail whipping back and forth angrily in agitation. “I guess we’ll soon find out,” I say with resignation.
I ease up behind the heifer and catch hold of her tail as it whips past me. As soon as my hand closes around the tail the heifer lashes out with a hind leg in a vicious kick that would have sent me flying had it made contact. Still holding on to the tail with my right hand, I grit my teeth and step in closer, and ease my left hand as gently as possible into her vulva. Fortunately for me, the heifer makes no more attempts to kick me as I examine her birth canal to check the size of the fetus. It feels like there is enough room between the calf and the heifer’s pelvis to deliver the fetus vaginally, so I motion to Cole to bring up the OB chains and calf puller. At that time the heifer lifts her tail and squirts a heavy stream of urine down my left side, soaking me from armpit to knee. The warm liquid soon soaks through the fabric of my coveralls and begins to run down my torso. Glad I didn’t take a shower this morning. They didn’t put this on the vet school recruiting poster.
Dripping with urine, I loop the metal chains over the front feet of the calf as Cole hooks up the calf puller, an instrument consisting of a hand-operated wench mounted on the end of a long pole at the other end of which is a u-shaped plate that fits against the back of the cow. We get the instrument in place and hook the end of the wench to the chains around the calf’s feet. Cole works the hand crank and begins pulling the calf at my signal. The slack is taken out of the wench cable and the calf’s legs protrude ever so slightly from the back of the cow, but then no more progress is made. The pole of the calf puller begins to bend with tension, but the calf is wedged fast and is not coming any farther. The heifer groans in distress and sinks to her knees before laying over on her side in agony. Fearing to pull anymore, I signal for Cole to release the tension from the puller. Pulling too hard on a fetus that is wedged within the birth canal can put too much pressure on the obturator nerves that run within the pelvis, causing temporary or even permanent paralysis to the cow’s hind legs.
We make several more attempts in vain before I turn to Mr. Smith, “There is not enough room for it to come vaginally. We need to perform a fetotomy. If we can take a leg off the calf, we should have enough room to deliver the rest of the body. I don’t have all of the equipment that I need to perform this procedure, but I’ll call back to the clinic and see if someone can bring it to us.”
I walk back to my truck to retrieve my cell phone, mentally cursing in frustration. It would sure be nice if they had decided to equip me first before they sent me out into the field! Novel idea! Don’t I look professional! I explain the situation to the receptionist at work, and she tells me that Dr. L is out on another call close by and she’ll have him come by when he is finished and I can use the tools from his truck, which is equipped with a fully stocked vet box.
Hanging up the phone, I walk back over to the corral where the three of us attempt to make small talk for what seems like forever. As the morning sun begins to get warmer, I discover that I smell strongly of piss and birthing fluids. Finally, I see Dr. L truck pulling down the driveway. He pulls down by the corral and gets out of the truck, looking a bit annoyed to have been sent to bail out the rookie.
“We tried to pull it a couple of times,” I explain as he looks at the fetus protruding from the heifer, my chains still attached to the feet. “It won’t budge and I think we might need to do a fetotomy.”
“Let me give it a try,” Dr. L says quietly.
Dr. L hooks the calf-puller back to the chains that are attached to the calf’s feet and proceeds to deliver the calf with little difficulty. I look on in shock. He didn’t do anything differently from what I had been trying for the past half hour. He even used the chains that I had left attached. Have you ever tried with all of your strength to open a pickle jar and then handed it off to someone else and they open it with ease, making you look like a total fool? Pretty sure that was what just happened. Son of a gun!
I give the heifer an injection of penicillin to prevent infection, an injection of oxytocin to help her pass the afterbirth, and make out the bill for the owner to pay. As I am about to drive away, Mr. Smith looks at me and says, “Don’t worry son, you’ll get the hang of it soon.”
Flipping fantastic! Why did I want to be a vet?
Cole and I discuss what just happened as we drive back to the clinic. “Did you see him do anything different than what we did?” I ask.
“Not a thing, man. He just hooked up and pulled it right out,” Cole says incredulously. “When we tried I thought the pole was going to snap in half.”
“Hey Cole,” I holler as I get out of my truck. “Do you mind going out on a call with me to pull a calf?”
“Yeah sure,” he replies. “What do you need me to get?”
“Can you get a bucket, fill it with Chlorhexidine solution, and drop an OB chain in as well? I’ll get a tray and the drugs we’ll need,” I say as I unlock the clinic door.
We load the instruments and medication that we need into the truck and pull away from the clinic as the rest of the staff begins to arrive. Cole has helped the other veterinarians in the field a few times before, but it is our first time to work together and he seems eager to prove his ability. I can relate. This will be the first time I have pulled a calf on my own, although I have assisted numerous times. We race down the country roads along the edge of town and are soon to the address of the call.
“I think this is the place,” I say as we pull into the driveway. “The guy said he had her in a pen out behind the house.”
At the sight of the neat brick home, I am hopeful that Mr. Smith has a workable set of facilities with which to restrain the heifer (maybe an alleyway or even a chute if we are lucky). As we drive around to the rear of the house and into the pasture, my hopes are dashed. The facilities consist of a pen made up of stock panels, and its dimensions are sixteen feet by twenty feet. No alleyway or chute is in sight. Clearly I am expected to catch the heifer by roping her and tying her to the side of the pen.
I am to find that this scenario is typical in rural Oklahoma. Many people move to the country, buy a small acreage of land and a few head of cattle to put on it, and never bother to purchase adequate fencing and a squeeze chute to facilitate the animal’s medical needs. When they need veterinary services, it is expected that the vet be able to capture and restrain the animals entirely with the tools at his disposal. This is a bit of a problem for several reasons. One is that I am abysmally terrible at roping anything, particularly if that anything is in the least bit mobile. I am not, nor will I ever be considered a roper. Lariat Roping 101 was not a class that was available at veterinary school, and I did not grow up a rodeo cowboy. I grew up on a small farm that was equipped with an alleyway and squeeze chute. We didn’t have to rope things because we had proper facilities.
The second problem is that even if I am able to rope the damn cow, now I am a two-hundred pound man on foot attached by a thin length of braided nylon rope to a thousand pound bovine that is rather pissed at having a tightening loop around her neck. The cow usually responds by either running directly toward me, in which case I promptly drop the rope and look for something to climb, or she runs directly away from me, in which case I become the first contestant up competing in the very under appreciated sport of pasture skiing. The owners of the cattle never think about this. Veterinarians should all be cowboys. You ever notice that the cowboy that rides around the range roping crap is riding, as in on a horse? It makes a pretty damn big difference if you are on horseback when you set out to rope something. Seeing as how I don’t now nor ever plan on owning a horse, and I wouldn’t haul it around on calls even if I did, my roping is not likely to get any more successful in the future.
That being said, the heifer in question today is in a small enough pen that I am able to toss a loop around her head and manage to quickly get the end of the rope wrapped around the fence post. With Cole urging her forward, we get her snubbed up to the post, get a rope halter around her head and tied off so that I can now begin my physical examination. The head and two front feet of the fetus are clearly visible protruding from the vulva. The calf’s tongue lolls out of its mouth lifelessly.
“Well, Mr. Smith, you were right, it is definitely dead,” I say. “We’ll need to get it out if we are going to save the mama.”
As I pull on a pair of shoulder-length plastic OB sleeves, Cole asks me, “Hey Doc? She sure looks stirred up, are you gonna be okay getting up behind her?”
I eye the heifer warily as I pour lubricant over my gloved hands and forearms. She is straining against the rope, setting back with all her weight on the halter, her tail whipping back and forth angrily in agitation. “I guess we’ll soon find out,” I say with resignation.
I ease up behind the heifer and catch hold of her tail as it whips past me. As soon as my hand closes around the tail the heifer lashes out with a hind leg in a vicious kick that would have sent me flying had it made contact. Still holding on to the tail with my right hand, I grit my teeth and step in closer, and ease my left hand as gently as possible into her vulva. Fortunately for me, the heifer makes no more attempts to kick me as I examine her birth canal to check the size of the fetus. It feels like there is enough room between the calf and the heifer’s pelvis to deliver the fetus vaginally, so I motion to Cole to bring up the OB chains and calf puller. At that time the heifer lifts her tail and squirts a heavy stream of urine down my left side, soaking me from armpit to knee. The warm liquid soon soaks through the fabric of my coveralls and begins to run down my torso. Glad I didn’t take a shower this morning. They didn’t put this on the vet school recruiting poster.
Dripping with urine, I loop the metal chains over the front feet of the calf as Cole hooks up the calf puller, an instrument consisting of a hand-operated wench mounted on the end of a long pole at the other end of which is a u-shaped plate that fits against the back of the cow. We get the instrument in place and hook the end of the wench to the chains around the calf’s feet. Cole works the hand crank and begins pulling the calf at my signal. The slack is taken out of the wench cable and the calf’s legs protrude ever so slightly from the back of the cow, but then no more progress is made. The pole of the calf puller begins to bend with tension, but the calf is wedged fast and is not coming any farther. The heifer groans in distress and sinks to her knees before laying over on her side in agony. Fearing to pull anymore, I signal for Cole to release the tension from the puller. Pulling too hard on a fetus that is wedged within the birth canal can put too much pressure on the obturator nerves that run within the pelvis, causing temporary or even permanent paralysis to the cow’s hind legs.
We make several more attempts in vain before I turn to Mr. Smith, “There is not enough room for it to come vaginally. We need to perform a fetotomy. If we can take a leg off the calf, we should have enough room to deliver the rest of the body. I don’t have all of the equipment that I need to perform this procedure, but I’ll call back to the clinic and see if someone can bring it to us.”
I walk back to my truck to retrieve my cell phone, mentally cursing in frustration. It would sure be nice if they had decided to equip me first before they sent me out into the field! Novel idea! Don’t I look professional! I explain the situation to the receptionist at work, and she tells me that Dr. L is out on another call close by and she’ll have him come by when he is finished and I can use the tools from his truck, which is equipped with a fully stocked vet box.
Hanging up the phone, I walk back over to the corral where the three of us attempt to make small talk for what seems like forever. As the morning sun begins to get warmer, I discover that I smell strongly of piss and birthing fluids. Finally, I see Dr. L truck pulling down the driveway. He pulls down by the corral and gets out of the truck, looking a bit annoyed to have been sent to bail out the rookie.
“We tried to pull it a couple of times,” I explain as he looks at the fetus protruding from the heifer, my chains still attached to the feet. “It won’t budge and I think we might need to do a fetotomy.”
“Let me give it a try,” Dr. L says quietly.
Dr. L hooks the calf-puller back to the chains that are attached to the calf’s feet and proceeds to deliver the calf with little difficulty. I look on in shock. He didn’t do anything differently from what I had been trying for the past half hour. He even used the chains that I had left attached. Have you ever tried with all of your strength to open a pickle jar and then handed it off to someone else and they open it with ease, making you look like a total fool? Pretty sure that was what just happened. Son of a gun!
I give the heifer an injection of penicillin to prevent infection, an injection of oxytocin to help her pass the afterbirth, and make out the bill for the owner to pay. As I am about to drive away, Mr. Smith looks at me and says, “Don’t worry son, you’ll get the hang of it soon.”
Flipping fantastic! Why did I want to be a vet?
Cole and I discuss what just happened as we drive back to the clinic. “Did you see him do anything different than what we did?” I ask.
“Not a thing, man. He just hooked up and pulled it right out,” Cole says incredulously. “When we tried I thought the pole was going to snap in half.”
Chapter 1, Part 2
So when I graduated and applied to OSU, I had a pretty impressive resume of grades and activities and I was awarded the Regent’s Distinguished Scholarship, a full academic ride. I was majoring in animal science with a pre-veterinary option and was excited to be leaving home for college, except for one small problem: I didn’t know a soul on campus. So when I was approached by the members of Alpha Gamma Rho, a fraternity that was made up of kids from farm backgrounds majoring in agriculture-related fields, I jumped at the chance. Their slogan was, “Building Better Men,” and my parents were impressed by the clean-cut appearance of their members and their impressive record of Top Ten Freshmen recipients. The reality of fraternity life with the AGR’s was a bit like Animal House meets Green Acres. But there were definitely some achievements that I made at the collegiate level that I owe to the support of my fraternity brothers and I definitely, without a doubt, had a good time.
I was pretty straight laced in high school, a good kid who never drank and my biggest vices were committed in the back seat of cars with girls and dipping Copenhagen snuff at livestock shows. At our fraternity initiation party we floated six kegs of beer and killed a bottle of Jack Daniels. I had never seen a keg party and I have never been one to miss out on an experience if I can’t see the harm in it. I did my share of partaking in the evening’s festivities and I found myself drunk for the first time in my life. It was at this party that I saw a sight that I will never forget. Do you remember the scene in Animal House where Belushi shotguns the fifth of Jack Daniels? An upperclassman in the fraternity, who didn’t weigh 150 lbs soaking wet, repeated the act, downing a full bottle in one prolonged series of gulps. I saw him fifteen minutes later in a corner unable to stand. I think he did go on to graduate college, but it might have taken him a few extra years.
I was also to discover that fraternity parties attracted coeds like flies to honey. My high school was pretty small (I graduated with 70 people) and the variety of dateable girls was a bit limited. I now found myself in a veritable Mecca of short skirts and tank tops. School hadn’t even started yet and I had to admit that this whole college thing was looking pretty good.
That said, I was there for a reason, and that was to get into vet school. I knew that this was an extremely selective process and I could not afford to bomb my Friday morning exam because I was still hung over from a Thursday night keg party. College is like high school, if you do your homework and study for your exams, you will probably do alright. It’s just that there are way more distractions in college and it is a lot harder to find the balance between work and play. From the first day of school, I studied first and played later and was able to find the right balance to make the grades I needed and still enjoy fraternity life.
An interesting aspect of living in a fraternity is all of the crazy stupid traditions. One of ours was that when a guy turned 21, the freshmen members had to catch him, strip him down to his underwear, and throw him in Theta pond, the duck pond in the middle of campus. If they fail to do this, the entire freshmen class is forced to swim to the island in the middle of Theta pond and back in their skivvies. While they are thus engaged, the upper classmen kindly give their clothes to the nearest sorority house. My freshman year, an upperclassman turned 21 and we tried to pond him. He played lineman for a college football team in Nebraska before transferring to OSU. We were not successful in getting him anywhere near that damn pond. That is why I can tell you how deep the water in Theta pond is, and how I found myself one day standing in my underwear, dripping with slimy water and covered in goose shit, ringing the doorbell of the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority house to ask the young coeds that answered if they could kindly return my clothes.
Another time-honored AGR tradition occurred every year right before Christmas break. After the last chapter meeting of the semester, the freshmen had from sundown to sunrise the next morning to go out in the country outside of Stillwater and locate, cut down, and bring back the biggest Christmas tree they could find and plant it in the front yard of the frat house. Of course every class’s tree was bigger and better than the year before. The catch was that you couldn’t use a chain saw to cut it down, only axes. So we scouted around the country a few days before and found an enormous cedar tree in a pasture owned by relatives of a classmate, about twenty miles outside of town. We left a few guys behind to dig a big hole in the front yard to plant the tree in and the rest of us loaded up on a flatbed trailer and drove into the country to get our tree. We spent the next four hours taking turns swinging axes at the trunk of the biggest cedar tree I have ever seen. The trunk was large enough that a man couldn’t put his arms around it at the base. We finally got it cut down and managed to drop it with the help of a wench and cable onto the flatbed. We then hauled it back into town, but the tree’s canopy is so broad that we ended up knocking down every road sign on both sides of the road all the way back to Stillwater. There we spent another two hours maneuvering the behemoth into the hole that has been dug and plant it upright in the front yard. When we are finished you can stand in the backyard of the three story fraternity house and see the top of our tree above the rooftop as the sun is coming up. Why did we spend so much time on such a stupid, futile errand? Tradition, man. And it still makes a good story to tell.
It was around this time when I had my first encounter with a bearded and pierced guy with his arm on fire in the chemistry lab and started flirting with a cute blonde in Freshman Follies practices. Those early years of college were a blast, but it was the long, grueling years of vet school that I count as some of the best of my life. This was mostly because of the friends I had at the time. Our core group consisted of Emily and I, Trent and Shalyn, and Moose and Amber.
I first met Moose in undergrad. Trent and I had joined the Pre-Vet Club, which was committed to helping its members apply and get accepted to vet school. Moose was this tall, lanky biology major who always attended the meetings with his girlfriend, Amber. She was a cute, bubbly brunette who was also a biology major, but actually had no interest at all in veterinary medicine. Moose came for the meeting. Amber came for the free snacks and to spend time with Moose. I remember that they were a little hard to get to know at first, partly because I have never been that outgoing about making the first move to meet new people, but mostly because Trent is so good about making the first move but makes the wrong first impression by saying whatever crazy thing just happens to pop into his head, no matter how socially awkward or radical it might be. People usually either crack up or get offended, loving him or hating him based off first impression alone. I was guilty by association. I don’t think Moose or Amber knew what to think of him, so it probably took them a while to warm up to us, but by the time we applied to vet school, we were all friends. We were all accepted and Trent and I decided to be roommates. Moose found out that he had been accepted a little bit last minute and was without a place to stay for the first semester of school, so he ended up bunking in with Trent and I in the two-bedroom trailer house. This resulted in a bit of a cramped living arrangement, but we made it work, and became life-long friends as a result.
Incidentally, Moose did not get his nickname because of his size. He is tall, but fairly thin. It was actually a play off of his last name, Stachmus, which is pronounced Stosh-mus. His friends in undergrad called him, “Crotch-mus,” which Trent and I changed to “Moose-crotch” and then “Moose-Balls” or “Moose-Penis” because it would make him blush bright red in embarrassment, which was pretty damn funny. When people would ask us why we called him that, we would hint that it was because he was actually hung like a moose, which would make him blush redder still, which was even more funny. After several semesters, the joke finally got old but the nickname stuck, although shortened to just “Moose.” In case you were wondering.
All through Vet School, Trent, Shalyn, Moose, Amber, Emily, and I were an inseparable sixsome. Trent, Shalyn, Moose, and I studied for tests together. When the test was over, all of us would go out to eat at a local favorite such as La Vaquera or Hideaway Pizza, and then meet up with the rest of the vet school gang at Murphy’s Bar for beer and darts. Some of my best memories are of meeting at Trent and Shalyn’s, watching Friends on TV while eating Shalyn’s pepper bacon potato soup. She is one of the best cook’s that I have ever known, serving up real southern home cooking. Just the thought of her cooking still makes my mouth water. The six of us vacationed together, taking ski trips to Red River and Breckenridge. The three respective couples were all engaged in the same summer and were all married the next. We were all members of each other’s wedding parties. So although the majority of the vet school years were incredibly hard, what I remember most about this time is that this was the last time the six of us were all together in the same town, where literally every minute that we weren’t studying, working, or sleeping was spent hanging out with our best friends in the world.
I was pretty straight laced in high school, a good kid who never drank and my biggest vices were committed in the back seat of cars with girls and dipping Copenhagen snuff at livestock shows. At our fraternity initiation party we floated six kegs of beer and killed a bottle of Jack Daniels. I had never seen a keg party and I have never been one to miss out on an experience if I can’t see the harm in it. I did my share of partaking in the evening’s festivities and I found myself drunk for the first time in my life. It was at this party that I saw a sight that I will never forget. Do you remember the scene in Animal House where Belushi shotguns the fifth of Jack Daniels? An upperclassman in the fraternity, who didn’t weigh 150 lbs soaking wet, repeated the act, downing a full bottle in one prolonged series of gulps. I saw him fifteen minutes later in a corner unable to stand. I think he did go on to graduate college, but it might have taken him a few extra years.
I was also to discover that fraternity parties attracted coeds like flies to honey. My high school was pretty small (I graduated with 70 people) and the variety of dateable girls was a bit limited. I now found myself in a veritable Mecca of short skirts and tank tops. School hadn’t even started yet and I had to admit that this whole college thing was looking pretty good.
That said, I was there for a reason, and that was to get into vet school. I knew that this was an extremely selective process and I could not afford to bomb my Friday morning exam because I was still hung over from a Thursday night keg party. College is like high school, if you do your homework and study for your exams, you will probably do alright. It’s just that there are way more distractions in college and it is a lot harder to find the balance between work and play. From the first day of school, I studied first and played later and was able to find the right balance to make the grades I needed and still enjoy fraternity life.
An interesting aspect of living in a fraternity is all of the crazy stupid traditions. One of ours was that when a guy turned 21, the freshmen members had to catch him, strip him down to his underwear, and throw him in Theta pond, the duck pond in the middle of campus. If they fail to do this, the entire freshmen class is forced to swim to the island in the middle of Theta pond and back in their skivvies. While they are thus engaged, the upper classmen kindly give their clothes to the nearest sorority house. My freshman year, an upperclassman turned 21 and we tried to pond him. He played lineman for a college football team in Nebraska before transferring to OSU. We were not successful in getting him anywhere near that damn pond. That is why I can tell you how deep the water in Theta pond is, and how I found myself one day standing in my underwear, dripping with slimy water and covered in goose shit, ringing the doorbell of the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority house to ask the young coeds that answered if they could kindly return my clothes.
Another time-honored AGR tradition occurred every year right before Christmas break. After the last chapter meeting of the semester, the freshmen had from sundown to sunrise the next morning to go out in the country outside of Stillwater and locate, cut down, and bring back the biggest Christmas tree they could find and plant it in the front yard of the frat house. Of course every class’s tree was bigger and better than the year before. The catch was that you couldn’t use a chain saw to cut it down, only axes. So we scouted around the country a few days before and found an enormous cedar tree in a pasture owned by relatives of a classmate, about twenty miles outside of town. We left a few guys behind to dig a big hole in the front yard to plant the tree in and the rest of us loaded up on a flatbed trailer and drove into the country to get our tree. We spent the next four hours taking turns swinging axes at the trunk of the biggest cedar tree I have ever seen. The trunk was large enough that a man couldn’t put his arms around it at the base. We finally got it cut down and managed to drop it with the help of a wench and cable onto the flatbed. We then hauled it back into town, but the tree’s canopy is so broad that we ended up knocking down every road sign on both sides of the road all the way back to Stillwater. There we spent another two hours maneuvering the behemoth into the hole that has been dug and plant it upright in the front yard. When we are finished you can stand in the backyard of the three story fraternity house and see the top of our tree above the rooftop as the sun is coming up. Why did we spend so much time on such a stupid, futile errand? Tradition, man. And it still makes a good story to tell.
It was around this time when I had my first encounter with a bearded and pierced guy with his arm on fire in the chemistry lab and started flirting with a cute blonde in Freshman Follies practices. Those early years of college were a blast, but it was the long, grueling years of vet school that I count as some of the best of my life. This was mostly because of the friends I had at the time. Our core group consisted of Emily and I, Trent and Shalyn, and Moose and Amber.
I first met Moose in undergrad. Trent and I had joined the Pre-Vet Club, which was committed to helping its members apply and get accepted to vet school. Moose was this tall, lanky biology major who always attended the meetings with his girlfriend, Amber. She was a cute, bubbly brunette who was also a biology major, but actually had no interest at all in veterinary medicine. Moose came for the meeting. Amber came for the free snacks and to spend time with Moose. I remember that they were a little hard to get to know at first, partly because I have never been that outgoing about making the first move to meet new people, but mostly because Trent is so good about making the first move but makes the wrong first impression by saying whatever crazy thing just happens to pop into his head, no matter how socially awkward or radical it might be. People usually either crack up or get offended, loving him or hating him based off first impression alone. I was guilty by association. I don’t think Moose or Amber knew what to think of him, so it probably took them a while to warm up to us, but by the time we applied to vet school, we were all friends. We were all accepted and Trent and I decided to be roommates. Moose found out that he had been accepted a little bit last minute and was without a place to stay for the first semester of school, so he ended up bunking in with Trent and I in the two-bedroom trailer house. This resulted in a bit of a cramped living arrangement, but we made it work, and became life-long friends as a result.
Incidentally, Moose did not get his nickname because of his size. He is tall, but fairly thin. It was actually a play off of his last name, Stachmus, which is pronounced Stosh-mus. His friends in undergrad called him, “Crotch-mus,” which Trent and I changed to “Moose-crotch” and then “Moose-Balls” or “Moose-Penis” because it would make him blush bright red in embarrassment, which was pretty damn funny. When people would ask us why we called him that, we would hint that it was because he was actually hung like a moose, which would make him blush redder still, which was even more funny. After several semesters, the joke finally got old but the nickname stuck, although shortened to just “Moose.” In case you were wondering.
All through Vet School, Trent, Shalyn, Moose, Amber, Emily, and I were an inseparable sixsome. Trent, Shalyn, Moose, and I studied for tests together. When the test was over, all of us would go out to eat at a local favorite such as La Vaquera or Hideaway Pizza, and then meet up with the rest of the vet school gang at Murphy’s Bar for beer and darts. Some of my best memories are of meeting at Trent and Shalyn’s, watching Friends on TV while eating Shalyn’s pepper bacon potato soup. She is one of the best cook’s that I have ever known, serving up real southern home cooking. Just the thought of her cooking still makes my mouth water. The six of us vacationed together, taking ski trips to Red River and Breckenridge. The three respective couples were all engaged in the same summer and were all married the next. We were all members of each other’s wedding parties. So although the majority of the vet school years were incredibly hard, what I remember most about this time is that this was the last time the six of us were all together in the same town, where literally every minute that we weren’t studying, working, or sleeping was spent hanging out with our best friends in the world.
Chapter 1, Part 1
BEEEEEEEP, BEEEEEEEP, BEEEEEEEP! The shrill, smoke-alarm sound of my pager going off awakens me from my early morning slumber. Groggily, I make a grab for it on the nightstand beside my bed, succeeding in knocking it flying onto the floor where it screams out a few final beeps before falling silent. Grumbling under my breath, I stumble out of bed and retrieve it from where it lies, pushing the button on the side to display the text message. The name and phone number of the client is followed by the brief message: Heifer having trouble calving. Needs vet to come out.
I pick the phone up from the receiver and call the number on the pager as I walk into the kitchen where Emily is already up and getting ready to go to school.
“Did you get a call?” She asks as she pours herself a cup of coffee from the pot.
I nod distractedly as the rancher answers the phone in my ear. “Mr. Smith? This is Dr. Carpenter from the T-Town Veterinary Clinic,” I say in a professional tone that I have been practicing. “I received a page that said you are having trouble with a heifer calving.”
A pause from the other end, followed by, “Uhhh. You must be new.”
I grit my teeth. This is not the first time I’ve heard this comment. “Yes sir. How long has your heifer been in labor?”
“I don’t know. I found her out by the pond this morning, but she may have been at it a while. It looks like the calf is already dead and part of it is hanging out of her. Do you think you can come out and pull it?” is Mr. Smith’s reply.
“Sure. Can you give me directions to your place?” I quickly jot down the directions on a notepad and give him an estimation of how long it will take me to get there. Hanging up the phone, I quickly get dressed and brush my teeth.
As I am pulling on my work boots Emily hands me a cup of coffee, asking, “Do you have time for some breakfast?”
“No. I’m not really hungry anyway. I’m going to run up to the clinic and grab a few things and head on this call. A calf-pulling. I love you, and I’ll see you after work,” I call over my shoulder as I’m heading out the door.
The first time I can remember wanting to be a veterinarian was when I was nine years old. My dad and I had taken a cow to the Oklahoma State University Veterinary Hospital to have a corn removed from between its toes. As we were waiting for our case to be seen, one of the clinicians at the hospital took us on a tour of the large animal clinic. It was like walking into a scene that was some surrealist combination of an E.R. and a zoo. In one area a veterinarian was passing an endoscope down the throat of a horse to examine its esophagus, showing us on the monitor the different parts of the anatomy. Through a glass window, you could see a team of surgeons clustered around a blue-draped figure that was recognizable as a pig only by the tip of its snout poking out from underneath the surgery drape. In a stall in the barn stood an elk and across from it was a camel. I remember thinking that to work with so many different animals and to do so many interesting things had to be the greatest job in the world. I had originally wanted to make a career out of capturing wild animals for zoos, like John Wayne in Hatari!, but I had learned that this career path wasn’t much of an option at the time, as most zoo animals were captive bred. So this seemed like an acceptable alternative. My enthusiasm for the industry continued as I grew older and became more involved with helping my dad doctor our livestock and watching Dr. E and Dr. L, the local veterinarians in my hometown, work on our animals when they were sick.
I grew up on a small family farm consisting of 80 acres of pasture land in central Oklahoma near a small town of about 7000 people. My parents were teachers, my mom teaching home economics and my dad taught history. Later, Dad became the athletic director and then high school principal. Financially we were middle class, which was saying something in an area where the average income per household is still less than $30,000 and 20% of the population lives below the poverty level. Although we were far from rich, we could afford to run a small herd of Beefmaster cattle on our land which was part of the original acreage that was homesteaded by my great, great grandfather in the late 1800’s.
I am an only child, which, I am quick to point out to people, means something entirely different when one comes from a rural, agricultural background. Not having any siblings meant that I was the only person my dad could call on for help building fence, digging ditches, tending the stock, and the myriad of other chores and responsibilities that came with raising livestock. I was never spoiled. My parents spent too much of their day dealing with discipline problems from other people’s children to allow me to get away with much at home. I did have several cousins that were close to my age that lived within walking distance of my house, but I spent a lot of time alone as a child which led to the development of a very healthy imagination. I spent countless hours as a lone Comanche warrior, stalking imaginary buffalo across our pastures, as a knight-errant, ridding our woods of bandits, and as an Amazon explorer, tracking the elusive Oklahoma anaconda. Thankfully there weren’t a lot of neighbors who lived close enough to witness me as a youngster, traipsing around with wooden swords made out of axe handles, because I would have looked like a total weirdo. And I did pretty much cut that out by high school. For the most part.
The other thing that came with having a lot of time to myself as a kid was that I developed a love for reading. From the time I learned to read I have had a book in my hand. My favorite topics early on were dinosaurs as well as ancient and medieval history, which I read about extensively in the family set of encyclopedias. I later became interested in the fantasy series of Lloyd Alexander and Jane Yolen, and the westerns of Louis L’Amour and Don Coldsmith. Even in college and veterinary school, where the required reading was overwhelming, I usually had a novel of some kind tucked away for when my studies were finished. I believe this early love for reading contributed greatly to my education and laid the foundation for a diligent and successful academic career throughout my life.
Academics were always my strong point in school. I made good grades all the way through and graduated near the top of my class, even in vet school. It was something that came relatively easy for me early on, but I didn’t slack off. When I was assigned homework, I finished it; when a test was scheduled, I studied for it. Most people of average intelligence do well in high school if they will do these things and not get overly distracted by sports, hormones, or delinquency. Doing well academically was something that I expected of myself, it wasn’t something that I took great pride in or bragged about, it was just what I did. In this country, being a gifted student does not make one popular or gain the respect of one’s peers. Athletic achievement, originally intended as an extracurricular activity to provide recreation and exercise, has long since become the primary focus if not necessarily the purpose for attendance in high school. Think I’m wrong? How many parents do you know who can tell you the score to the state championship game that their child starred in but don’t have a clue what their ACT score was? Which is fine until graduation comes and the majority of these high school hondos never play at the competive level again in their lives. Until they have to find something else in which to take pride in and in which to define themselves as a person. Then a lot of these kids struggle because that jump shot which made them a god in high school but just wasn’t quite good enough to make it at the college level, much less professionally, just isn’t that marketable in a job interview.
Luckily, I didn’t have that problem. I was never a very good high school athlete. Oh, I played. Participation is pretty much compulsory starting in grade school; after all, one’s social status is firmly based on athletic ability, particularly among boys. I was on the basketball team from the 5th grade until I finally threw in the towel my Junior year. In middle school I was better. I hit an early growth spurt (same 5’10 in the eighth grade that I am today) and was the backup center. Unfortunately, by the time we were in high school, the point guard was taller than I, and I wasn’t fast enough or coordinated enough to be very good at all. So I turned to other activities, such as FFA, student council, band, and golf. This broad spectrum involvement meant that I was a part of almost every group at our small school where cliques were inevitable. So although I was never the most popular kid in any of the cliques, I was an accepted member of them all.
The organization that gave me the most confidence in myself at that time in my life was, ironically enough, the Junior Beefmaster Breeders Association, an organization where kids could exhibit the cattle that they had raised at such things as the county and state fairs, as well as larger, national shows. Through this organization, I found success at an activity other than academics and was able to travel and meet a lot of other kids my age from across the country and even took a leadership role on their national board of directors. About this time I also discovered girls. To be more accurate, girls discovered me (I had long since knew of their existence and admired them from afar). For some reason at this time my appreciative glances began to be returned and I started dating. One relationship became pretty serious and my parents would say that I definitely became “distracted” by the above-mentioned hormones. I would say that I fell in love for the first time. Unfortunately, sometimes the flames that burn brightest do not last. I’m not going to go into great length about this subject here as it would take too long to detail the events of that relationship. Let me just say that I wish her well, wherever she is today.
So by the time I was a senior in high school I was confident enough in myself to run for student council president. My opponent was the quarterback of the football team, the starring player on the basketball team, from one of the wealthiest families in town, and definitely the most popular kid in our school. Due to this he had been voted our class’ president all through high school. He was the stereotypical high school god. All the girls wanted to date him, all the guys wanted to be him. He could be incredibly arrogant and wasn't always nice to the people around him. I definitely considered myself the underdog. But a funny thing happened. I won. Although I wasn’t a campus god, I was everyone’s friend. The jocks liked me because I had spent years sweating beside them in the gym, the FFA kids liked me because I wore the same blue corduroy jacket at the county fair as they did, and the kids in the band liked me because I played the trumpet and marched beside them at football games. And even though everyone wanted to be like the other guy, quite a lot of people also thought he was arrogant and remembered when he had made fun of them over the years. (Incidentally, my arrogant opponent later grew into a humble, considerate adult and has led an amazing life helping people around the world. So people really can change.)
I pick the phone up from the receiver and call the number on the pager as I walk into the kitchen where Emily is already up and getting ready to go to school.
“Did you get a call?” She asks as she pours herself a cup of coffee from the pot.
I nod distractedly as the rancher answers the phone in my ear. “Mr. Smith? This is Dr. Carpenter from the T-Town Veterinary Clinic,” I say in a professional tone that I have been practicing. “I received a page that said you are having trouble with a heifer calving.”
A pause from the other end, followed by, “Uhhh. You must be new.”
I grit my teeth. This is not the first time I’ve heard this comment. “Yes sir. How long has your heifer been in labor?”
“I don’t know. I found her out by the pond this morning, but she may have been at it a while. It looks like the calf is already dead and part of it is hanging out of her. Do you think you can come out and pull it?” is Mr. Smith’s reply.
“Sure. Can you give me directions to your place?” I quickly jot down the directions on a notepad and give him an estimation of how long it will take me to get there. Hanging up the phone, I quickly get dressed and brush my teeth.
As I am pulling on my work boots Emily hands me a cup of coffee, asking, “Do you have time for some breakfast?”
“No. I’m not really hungry anyway. I’m going to run up to the clinic and grab a few things and head on this call. A calf-pulling. I love you, and I’ll see you after work,” I call over my shoulder as I’m heading out the door.
“Be careful,” she calls as I’m tromping down the front steps, my coveralls thrown over my shoulder, coffee in one hand and the keys to my truck in the other. As I am pulling out of the gravel driveway in front of our house, I wonder why on earth I ever wanted to get into this crazy profession.
________________
The first time I can remember wanting to be a veterinarian was when I was nine years old. My dad and I had taken a cow to the Oklahoma State University Veterinary Hospital to have a corn removed from between its toes. As we were waiting for our case to be seen, one of the clinicians at the hospital took us on a tour of the large animal clinic. It was like walking into a scene that was some surrealist combination of an E.R. and a zoo. In one area a veterinarian was passing an endoscope down the throat of a horse to examine its esophagus, showing us on the monitor the different parts of the anatomy. Through a glass window, you could see a team of surgeons clustered around a blue-draped figure that was recognizable as a pig only by the tip of its snout poking out from underneath the surgery drape. In a stall in the barn stood an elk and across from it was a camel. I remember thinking that to work with so many different animals and to do so many interesting things had to be the greatest job in the world. I had originally wanted to make a career out of capturing wild animals for zoos, like John Wayne in Hatari!, but I had learned that this career path wasn’t much of an option at the time, as most zoo animals were captive bred. So this seemed like an acceptable alternative. My enthusiasm for the industry continued as I grew older and became more involved with helping my dad doctor our livestock and watching Dr. E and Dr. L, the local veterinarians in my hometown, work on our animals when they were sick.
I grew up on a small family farm consisting of 80 acres of pasture land in central Oklahoma near a small town of about 7000 people. My parents were teachers, my mom teaching home economics and my dad taught history. Later, Dad became the athletic director and then high school principal. Financially we were middle class, which was saying something in an area where the average income per household is still less than $30,000 and 20% of the population lives below the poverty level. Although we were far from rich, we could afford to run a small herd of Beefmaster cattle on our land which was part of the original acreage that was homesteaded by my great, great grandfather in the late 1800’s.
I am an only child, which, I am quick to point out to people, means something entirely different when one comes from a rural, agricultural background. Not having any siblings meant that I was the only person my dad could call on for help building fence, digging ditches, tending the stock, and the myriad of other chores and responsibilities that came with raising livestock. I was never spoiled. My parents spent too much of their day dealing with discipline problems from other people’s children to allow me to get away with much at home. I did have several cousins that were close to my age that lived within walking distance of my house, but I spent a lot of time alone as a child which led to the development of a very healthy imagination. I spent countless hours as a lone Comanche warrior, stalking imaginary buffalo across our pastures, as a knight-errant, ridding our woods of bandits, and as an Amazon explorer, tracking the elusive Oklahoma anaconda. Thankfully there weren’t a lot of neighbors who lived close enough to witness me as a youngster, traipsing around with wooden swords made out of axe handles, because I would have looked like a total weirdo. And I did pretty much cut that out by high school. For the most part.
The other thing that came with having a lot of time to myself as a kid was that I developed a love for reading. From the time I learned to read I have had a book in my hand. My favorite topics early on were dinosaurs as well as ancient and medieval history, which I read about extensively in the family set of encyclopedias. I later became interested in the fantasy series of Lloyd Alexander and Jane Yolen, and the westerns of Louis L’Amour and Don Coldsmith. Even in college and veterinary school, where the required reading was overwhelming, I usually had a novel of some kind tucked away for when my studies were finished. I believe this early love for reading contributed greatly to my education and laid the foundation for a diligent and successful academic career throughout my life.
Academics were always my strong point in school. I made good grades all the way through and graduated near the top of my class, even in vet school. It was something that came relatively easy for me early on, but I didn’t slack off. When I was assigned homework, I finished it; when a test was scheduled, I studied for it. Most people of average intelligence do well in high school if they will do these things and not get overly distracted by sports, hormones, or delinquency. Doing well academically was something that I expected of myself, it wasn’t something that I took great pride in or bragged about, it was just what I did. In this country, being a gifted student does not make one popular or gain the respect of one’s peers. Athletic achievement, originally intended as an extracurricular activity to provide recreation and exercise, has long since become the primary focus if not necessarily the purpose for attendance in high school. Think I’m wrong? How many parents do you know who can tell you the score to the state championship game that their child starred in but don’t have a clue what their ACT score was? Which is fine until graduation comes and the majority of these high school hondos never play at the competive level again in their lives. Until they have to find something else in which to take pride in and in which to define themselves as a person. Then a lot of these kids struggle because that jump shot which made them a god in high school but just wasn’t quite good enough to make it at the college level, much less professionally, just isn’t that marketable in a job interview.
Luckily, I didn’t have that problem. I was never a very good high school athlete. Oh, I played. Participation is pretty much compulsory starting in grade school; after all, one’s social status is firmly based on athletic ability, particularly among boys. I was on the basketball team from the 5th grade until I finally threw in the towel my Junior year. In middle school I was better. I hit an early growth spurt (same 5’10 in the eighth grade that I am today) and was the backup center. Unfortunately, by the time we were in high school, the point guard was taller than I, and I wasn’t fast enough or coordinated enough to be very good at all. So I turned to other activities, such as FFA, student council, band, and golf. This broad spectrum involvement meant that I was a part of almost every group at our small school where cliques were inevitable. So although I was never the most popular kid in any of the cliques, I was an accepted member of them all.
The organization that gave me the most confidence in myself at that time in my life was, ironically enough, the Junior Beefmaster Breeders Association, an organization where kids could exhibit the cattle that they had raised at such things as the county and state fairs, as well as larger, national shows. Through this organization, I found success at an activity other than academics and was able to travel and meet a lot of other kids my age from across the country and even took a leadership role on their national board of directors. About this time I also discovered girls. To be more accurate, girls discovered me (I had long since knew of their existence and admired them from afar). For some reason at this time my appreciative glances began to be returned and I started dating. One relationship became pretty serious and my parents would say that I definitely became “distracted” by the above-mentioned hormones. I would say that I fell in love for the first time. Unfortunately, sometimes the flames that burn brightest do not last. I’m not going to go into great length about this subject here as it would take too long to detail the events of that relationship. Let me just say that I wish her well, wherever she is today.
So by the time I was a senior in high school I was confident enough in myself to run for student council president. My opponent was the quarterback of the football team, the starring player on the basketball team, from one of the wealthiest families in town, and definitely the most popular kid in our school. Due to this he had been voted our class’ president all through high school. He was the stereotypical high school god. All the girls wanted to date him, all the guys wanted to be him. He could be incredibly arrogant and wasn't always nice to the people around him. I definitely considered myself the underdog. But a funny thing happened. I won. Although I wasn’t a campus god, I was everyone’s friend. The jocks liked me because I had spent years sweating beside them in the gym, the FFA kids liked me because I wore the same blue corduroy jacket at the county fair as they did, and the kids in the band liked me because I played the trumpet and marched beside them at football games. And even though everyone wanted to be like the other guy, quite a lot of people also thought he was arrogant and remembered when he had made fun of them over the years. (Incidentally, my arrogant opponent later grew into a humble, considerate adult and has led an amazing life helping people around the world. So people really can change.)
Friday, May 29, 2009
Prologue, Part 2
Two months later, I am on preceptorship in rural Kansas when news finally reaches me about the test results. A preceptorship is basically an unpaid externship lasting three weeks in which the veterinary student leaves the campus to a destination of their choosing to acquire additional educational experience. Most are set up with private practices where the students are allowed to observe and assist veterinarians in the field. A few students choose to attend hospital rounds at other universities or specialty practices around the country. I have had three preceptorships, all in mixed-animal, private practices in rural communities. One was in Siloam Springs, AR, one in Elgin, OK, and the last here in the pancake-flat, wheat field and cattle feedlot country of north-central Kansas.
I have mixed emotions about the last three weeks. This is by far the most time that Emily and I have been apart since we have been married. I’m not the most talkative person in the world in the first place and conversations over the phone aren’t any better. The practice I am preceptoring at is not very busy this time of year and the majority of the past three weeks has been spent vaccinating the calves that were born last spring for Blackleg, Leptospirosis, and Brucellosis. Heifer calves that are vaccinated for Brucellosis are required to be tattooed in their right ear with a symbol identifying them as having been vaccinated and my hands seem to be permanently stained green with tattoo ink.
One memorable experience came when I was learning to castrate bull calves to make them into steers for the feedlots. A local rancher hauled in a load of ten yearling bull calves to be castrated and then left to pick up another load. Dr. Gibson showed me how to slice the bottom of the scrotum away, break down the cremaster muscle to seperate it from the spermatic chords, and clamp and sever the chords with an emasculator tool. He watched me castrate a few head and then had to leave on an ambulatory call away from the clinic as I finished the rest of the pen. I castrated the fifth or sixth bull in the pen exactly as I had the ones preceding it, and was in the process of giving it an injection of penicillin to prevent infection, when I heard what sounded like a fountain of water hitting a cement floor. Fearing the worst, I walked to the back of the squeeze chute that was restraining the steer and discovered to my horror that a large amount of blood was pouring from between the animal’s legs.
Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap! What the hell am I supposed to do with this? I did this one just like all the rest, why is this sucker bleeding like a stuck hog? Son of a gun, what do I do now?
There was no one around to ask for advice. Dr. Gibson wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. So I grabbed the emasculator, a stainless steel implement that is designed to crush and clamp the blood vessels running through the chords that attach the testicles to the body, in theory preventing the hemorrhaging that was taking place before my eyes. I knew I had applied it correctly when I castrated the steer in the first place, but it was the only thing at hand to apply to the bleeding vessels. With one hand I reached up into the open end of the truncated scrotum and grabbed a handful of bleeding tissue while I used the other hand to apply the tool. And then I held it there for a very long time as sweat ran down my face and curse words spewed forth with colorful variety. When I finally felt like it had been long enough, I mentally crossed my fingers and removed the tool. The fountain of blood had slowed to a mere trickle. Breathing just a bit easier, I watched it for a full minute and when no additional bleeding was evident, I eased the animal out of the chute as gently as I could and watched it walk all the way back into the holding pen. Taking careful note of its appearance so I could check on it later, I went back and finished castrating the remaining animals without incident. When I checked on the steer at the end of the job, it was still holding up well, so I finally breathed a sigh of relief. When Dr. Gibson returned, I told him of the experience.
“Oh, yeah, you’ll have a bleeder or two like that occasionally when you’re cutting calves,” he replied nonchalantly. “‘Specially when they wait until they’re yearlings and have some size to ‘em before they bring ‘em in. Sometimes you have to stitch up the bottom of their sack to stop the bleeding.”
Well, that would have been helpful to know beforehand!
So, from this experience I learned both how to castrate calves and how to handle the potential complication of excessive post-operative hemorrhaging. Unfortunately, the rest of the preceptorship has been pretty slow and I did not get the opportunity for very much hands-on experience. So I am in the process of packing my bags and preparing for the long drive back to Oklahoma when I get a call from Shalyn that the results of the National Board Exam have been reported to the state licensing office. With trembling hands I call the number. My voice shakes as I give them my name and ID number. I can’t even breathe as they enter my information, and finally, after what seems like an eternity has passed, I get my answer.
“Congratulations Mr. Carpenter, you passed.” The receptionist replies. “An eighty two percent.”
Oh thank you, God! Glory be, Hallelujah! I can’t believe it. I passed. I passed. I actually passed.
The breath I’ve been holding escapes in a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you, ma’am. You don’t realize it, but that’s the best news that I’ve heard in a month.”
I’m too excited to sit still. I pace back and forth outside of the house that I have been staying at for the past three weeks, eyes filled with tears of relief.
I can’t believe I passed. I don’t have to retake that horrible test. And an 82%. I only needed a 70 to pass. Hell, that’s a B. I knew that I had flunked it and I really made a B.
I recall a line from the Adam Sandler movie, Billy Madison. Hurrah for school! Hurrah for me!
I call my wife, my parents, my friends.
This is it! All I have to do now is finish the rest of the year at the Teaching Hospital and graduate and I’ll be a vet. I’ve wanted this since I was nine years old and I’ve done it!
I have mixed emotions about the last three weeks. This is by far the most time that Emily and I have been apart since we have been married. I’m not the most talkative person in the world in the first place and conversations over the phone aren’t any better. The practice I am preceptoring at is not very busy this time of year and the majority of the past three weeks has been spent vaccinating the calves that were born last spring for Blackleg, Leptospirosis, and Brucellosis. Heifer calves that are vaccinated for Brucellosis are required to be tattooed in their right ear with a symbol identifying them as having been vaccinated and my hands seem to be permanently stained green with tattoo ink.
One memorable experience came when I was learning to castrate bull calves to make them into steers for the feedlots. A local rancher hauled in a load of ten yearling bull calves to be castrated and then left to pick up another load. Dr. Gibson showed me how to slice the bottom of the scrotum away, break down the cremaster muscle to seperate it from the spermatic chords, and clamp and sever the chords with an emasculator tool. He watched me castrate a few head and then had to leave on an ambulatory call away from the clinic as I finished the rest of the pen. I castrated the fifth or sixth bull in the pen exactly as I had the ones preceding it, and was in the process of giving it an injection of penicillin to prevent infection, when I heard what sounded like a fountain of water hitting a cement floor. Fearing the worst, I walked to the back of the squeeze chute that was restraining the steer and discovered to my horror that a large amount of blood was pouring from between the animal’s legs.
Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap! What the hell am I supposed to do with this? I did this one just like all the rest, why is this sucker bleeding like a stuck hog? Son of a gun, what do I do now?
There was no one around to ask for advice. Dr. Gibson wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. So I grabbed the emasculator, a stainless steel implement that is designed to crush and clamp the blood vessels running through the chords that attach the testicles to the body, in theory preventing the hemorrhaging that was taking place before my eyes. I knew I had applied it correctly when I castrated the steer in the first place, but it was the only thing at hand to apply to the bleeding vessels. With one hand I reached up into the open end of the truncated scrotum and grabbed a handful of bleeding tissue while I used the other hand to apply the tool. And then I held it there for a very long time as sweat ran down my face and curse words spewed forth with colorful variety. When I finally felt like it had been long enough, I mentally crossed my fingers and removed the tool. The fountain of blood had slowed to a mere trickle. Breathing just a bit easier, I watched it for a full minute and when no additional bleeding was evident, I eased the animal out of the chute as gently as I could and watched it walk all the way back into the holding pen. Taking careful note of its appearance so I could check on it later, I went back and finished castrating the remaining animals without incident. When I checked on the steer at the end of the job, it was still holding up well, so I finally breathed a sigh of relief. When Dr. Gibson returned, I told him of the experience.
“Oh, yeah, you’ll have a bleeder or two like that occasionally when you’re cutting calves,” he replied nonchalantly. “‘Specially when they wait until they’re yearlings and have some size to ‘em before they bring ‘em in. Sometimes you have to stitch up the bottom of their sack to stop the bleeding.”
Well, that would have been helpful to know beforehand!
So, from this experience I learned both how to castrate calves and how to handle the potential complication of excessive post-operative hemorrhaging. Unfortunately, the rest of the preceptorship has been pretty slow and I did not get the opportunity for very much hands-on experience. So I am in the process of packing my bags and preparing for the long drive back to Oklahoma when I get a call from Shalyn that the results of the National Board Exam have been reported to the state licensing office. With trembling hands I call the number. My voice shakes as I give them my name and ID number. I can’t even breathe as they enter my information, and finally, after what seems like an eternity has passed, I get my answer.
“Congratulations Mr. Carpenter, you passed.” The receptionist replies. “An eighty two percent.”
Oh thank you, God! Glory be, Hallelujah! I can’t believe it. I passed. I passed. I actually passed.
The breath I’ve been holding escapes in a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you, ma’am. You don’t realize it, but that’s the best news that I’ve heard in a month.”
I’m too excited to sit still. I pace back and forth outside of the house that I have been staying at for the past three weeks, eyes filled with tears of relief.
I can’t believe I passed. I don’t have to retake that horrible test. And an 82%. I only needed a 70 to pass. Hell, that’s a B. I knew that I had flunked it and I really made a B.
I recall a line from the Adam Sandler movie, Billy Madison. Hurrah for school! Hurrah for me!
I call my wife, my parents, my friends.
This is it! All I have to do now is finish the rest of the year at the Teaching Hospital and graduate and I’ll be a vet. I’ve wanted this since I was nine years old and I’ve done it!
Prologue, Part 1
December 11, 2005
Clickity-clack. Click, click, clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. My ears are filled by the noisy progress emitting from the neighboring cubicles as the occupants pound their way through a standardized typing test. It is amazingly difficult to concentrate with the amount of chatter their fingers are producing on the keyboards. Sweat beads my forehead as my concentration returns to the computer before me. My stressed-out features are highlighted by the glow of the monitor whose display contains the questions upon which my future is hinged. I stare dumbly at the random queries expressed concisely in Times New Roman before me. How long is the road that has led to this moment? Four years? Has it been four years since I began classes at Oklahoma State’s College of Veterinary Medicine?
The time that seemed to crawl by so slowly at the living of it now appears to me only in brief glimpses from my memory. I vividly recall my first year spending countless waking hours in the anatomy lab, the harsh bite of formaldehyde filling my nose and making my eyes water. I intently dissected latex-injected blood vessels away from their surrounding muscle tissue and fat, my pristine white lab coat long since horribly stained with the brown spatter from the preserved cadavers. Long, grueling nights were spent at the old wooden desk in my room, my back hunched at the shoulders as I poured over my class notes from the day’s physiology lectures. I would fill the gaps in the presented information by reading passage after passage from the veterinary textbooks that had taken up the remainder of the student loans left over from paying that semester’s tuition. How many tests and finals had passed since then as we struggled to learn multiple subjects on multiple species? I recall more recently the mixture of elation and terror that filled me as we underwent our first live-animal surgeries. Elation that we were finally able to use the skills that we had paid so dearly in time and money to acquire, and terror that for the first time an actual life was being entrusted to our inexperienced hands. Most recent of all was the time spent in the Teaching Hospital our fourth year as we began to apply all the knowledge that we had obtained thus far on actual cases.
All of this has brought me to where I am now: sitting in a cramped little cubicle in front of a computer in a dreadful little room at a testing center in Tulsa, OK, as I valiantly struggle to assimilate four years worth of information into one National Veterinary Board Exam. It is absurdly hard. After three years of undergraduate classes at OSU consisting of biology, chemistry, physics, and genetics, followed by four years of veterinary school, I have taken a lot of hard tests. Nothing has prepared me for the feeling of inadequacy that fills me as I stare at the computer screen.
I have learned nothing. I know nothing. And I can think of nothing as seven of the ten people in this little room are pounding on a keyboard as they take a stupid typing test! I mean really? I’ve committed four years of vet school, a total of seven years since high school and I’m in debt to the tune of sixty-thousand dollars in student loans for this moment. It is kind of important to me! If I don’t pass this test, I can’t get a veterinary license. If I can’t get a veterinary license, I can’t practice medicine, which means I can’t get a job. And I don’t have a whole helluva lot of other skill sets to offer. So do you think I could at least get a friggin’ quiet place to bomb this test and fail at my life’s pursuit?
No, evidently not. And so I continue to take the test, answering the questions to the best of my grievously limited knowledge and laughable experience. Finally the last question has been answered and my test is submitted. On shaky legs, I walk into the waiting area of the testing center. Close to six hours has passed since I entered. My eyes ache and fatigue fills my body.
In the waiting room I meet up with Trent and Shalyn. I first met Trent in my first chemistry lab at OSU. The safety video that cautioned us to not set our arm on fire with the Bunsen burner was rewinding in the VCR as we lit up to boil a beaker of water. Real first day of class, orientation type stuff. Trent was a few years older than I and had spent a few semesters at a small private school playing college baseball and had struggled a bit finding out what he wanted to do after a shoulder injury put the skids on the sports career. At the time he had a face full of black beard, wore baggy clothes and had multiple piercings. His alternative look made him a bit scary, to be honest. This first impression was not helped when he reached across the lit burner and promptly set his arm on fire. It was the first and only time I have ever seen the lab safety shower being utilized. Afterwards, I was talking to a friend about studying for a quiz after class when Trent walked up, literally smoldering, to ask if he could study with us. We traded looks and reluctantly agreed. Despite our initial differences, Trent and I ended up hitting it off and have been best friends ever since.
In the time that passed, Trent cleaned up his look and lost the piercings. We applied and were accepted to veterinary school together and had numerous misadventures along the way. We became roommates and were moving into a single-wide in a mobile home park before the first semester of vet school started when we first met Shalyn. She was in our vet school class and was moving into the trailer across the road from ours when Trent made her acquaintance and asked her over for a beer. I happened to be sitting on our couch in my boxer shorts watching TV when she came walking through our door, so maybe I shouldn’t make too much fun of Trent for great first impressions. Trent was quickly smitten and the two were soon an item and married between the second and third years of vet school. As we were neighbors throughout most of vet school, I was often their third wheel. So as I exit the testing center with defeat heavy on my soul, at least I am amongst friends.
“Well, what did you think of that?” I ask them as we gather our coats.
Trent answers with typical poetry. “Up the ass with no KY.”
“At least it’s over with,” Shalyn responds. “Of course now we have to wait a couple of months to find out the results. I think I’ll start studying now instead of waiting until I actually find out that I flunked and have to re-take it.”
“I could use a drink,” I say as we walk out into the parking lot. “Emily won’t be back to pick us up for about an hour. I say we grab a sixer and do our best to kill it before she gets back. It might make me a bit less likely to walk into oncoming traffic.”
We buy a six pack from the gas station and retreat to the alley behind the testing center where we spend the next hour sitting with our backs against the brick wall, drowning our sorrows in cheap, low-point beer. When Emily pulls up I am quite sure we are a sorry sight to behold.
“So, how did it go?” asks Emily as we pile into her car and she pulls back onto the highway. “Did you guys ace it?”
“Actually we are all pretty sure we flunked,” I respond darkly.
“I bet you all did way better than you think,” she responds optimistically. “Do you want to hang out in Tulsa a little before we go home?”
“No, I would just like to go home and try and forget this day ever happened,” says Trent from the backseat.
Emily and I met in undergrad at OSU. Her sorority and my fraternity were paired in a song and dance competition that only freshmen could compete in called Freshman Follies. Any tradition that pitted the Greek houses against each other was taken extremely seriously at OSU and as kitschy as it was, spending weeks in the company of pretty sorority girls wasn’t too bad a proposition to a bunch of freshmen college guys, so we were pretty game for the festivities. To this day my singing is hardly suitable outside of the confines of a shower or solo car ride, but I could play the guitar a bit and had volunteered to help with the musical accompaniment. When one of my pledge brothers got sick and fell out of the competition, I was enlisted to take his place. Emily was recruited by her sorority as she had been in choir in high school and we were dance partners on a few of the songs. She was gorgeous. Petite and blonde, with a sweet personality that belied a fun-loving, feisty edge, she was an infectious elementary education major and way out of my league. We were both involved in relationships with other people at the time, but we did enjoy each other’s company and became friends over the course of the semester. When I returned to OSU as a sophomore the next fall, I was single and when I ran into Emily working at the student union bookstore, I decided to man up and make my play.
“Can I get anything else for you,” she asked flirtatiously as she rang up my books.
“Well, your phone number would be nice,” I responded suavely.
At least that is how I remember the conversation. We went out a couple of times and then she told me that she was getting back together with her old boyfriend. I wasn’t too upset as I had recently gotten out of a long-term relationship and was still full of wild oats that needed sowing before I was ready to commit to anything serious. But I came to regard her as the one that got away and wandered what might have been. So it was with complete surprise when several semesters and several failed romantic interests later I got a phone call from a total stranger who happened to be one of Emily’s sorority sisters wanting to set me up with Emily for a sorority date party. I pretended to check my schedule while secretly being elated to have a second chance. The night of the date party was fun for both of us and we started dating again after that and have been together ever since. Emily has been with me through all of the highs and lows of vet school and has never failed to be supportive all the way. I proposed after the first year and we were married after the second and now live in a small house just south of campus. Emily graduated in 2002 with her elementary education degree. State funding for education, always dismally low in Oklahoma, was at crisis level at the time and teachers were being laid off right and left across the state. Emily had decided to take advantage of the fact that we were going to be in Stillwater for a few more years and was pursuing a master’s degree in special education in the evenings to become more marketable. She did manage to find a teaching job during the day, but it was a forty-five minute drive to Ponca City, where she taught elementary special education. As busy as I was with vet school, she stayed equally busy and we didn’t get to see each other very much except at nights. She had therefore graciously volunteered to drive Trent, Shalyn, and I to Tulsa for the national board exam and had taken the opportunity to do some shopping in the city while we took the test.
It is a quiet ride back to Stillwater as the three vet students ponder what news they will receive when the test results come back. We are not comforted by the knowledge that a very large percentage of last year’s class did not pass the test, even on their second attempt after graduation. We had even seen one of those poor bastards in the test center with us taking it for a third time. How terrible to have come so far only to fail at the very end. Two months will pass before we know whether we will share that fate. Two months where time will seem to stand still and in which I will pray more than I have ever prayed before.
Clickity-clack. Click, click, clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. My ears are filled by the noisy progress emitting from the neighboring cubicles as the occupants pound their way through a standardized typing test. It is amazingly difficult to concentrate with the amount of chatter their fingers are producing on the keyboards. Sweat beads my forehead as my concentration returns to the computer before me. My stressed-out features are highlighted by the glow of the monitor whose display contains the questions upon which my future is hinged. I stare dumbly at the random queries expressed concisely in Times New Roman before me. How long is the road that has led to this moment? Four years? Has it been four years since I began classes at Oklahoma State’s College of Veterinary Medicine?
The time that seemed to crawl by so slowly at the living of it now appears to me only in brief glimpses from my memory. I vividly recall my first year spending countless waking hours in the anatomy lab, the harsh bite of formaldehyde filling my nose and making my eyes water. I intently dissected latex-injected blood vessels away from their surrounding muscle tissue and fat, my pristine white lab coat long since horribly stained with the brown spatter from the preserved cadavers. Long, grueling nights were spent at the old wooden desk in my room, my back hunched at the shoulders as I poured over my class notes from the day’s physiology lectures. I would fill the gaps in the presented information by reading passage after passage from the veterinary textbooks that had taken up the remainder of the student loans left over from paying that semester’s tuition. How many tests and finals had passed since then as we struggled to learn multiple subjects on multiple species? I recall more recently the mixture of elation and terror that filled me as we underwent our first live-animal surgeries. Elation that we were finally able to use the skills that we had paid so dearly in time and money to acquire, and terror that for the first time an actual life was being entrusted to our inexperienced hands. Most recent of all was the time spent in the Teaching Hospital our fourth year as we began to apply all the knowledge that we had obtained thus far on actual cases.
All of this has brought me to where I am now: sitting in a cramped little cubicle in front of a computer in a dreadful little room at a testing center in Tulsa, OK, as I valiantly struggle to assimilate four years worth of information into one National Veterinary Board Exam. It is absurdly hard. After three years of undergraduate classes at OSU consisting of biology, chemistry, physics, and genetics, followed by four years of veterinary school, I have taken a lot of hard tests. Nothing has prepared me for the feeling of inadequacy that fills me as I stare at the computer screen.
I have learned nothing. I know nothing. And I can think of nothing as seven of the ten people in this little room are pounding on a keyboard as they take a stupid typing test! I mean really? I’ve committed four years of vet school, a total of seven years since high school and I’m in debt to the tune of sixty-thousand dollars in student loans for this moment. It is kind of important to me! If I don’t pass this test, I can’t get a veterinary license. If I can’t get a veterinary license, I can’t practice medicine, which means I can’t get a job. And I don’t have a whole helluva lot of other skill sets to offer. So do you think I could at least get a friggin’ quiet place to bomb this test and fail at my life’s pursuit?
No, evidently not. And so I continue to take the test, answering the questions to the best of my grievously limited knowledge and laughable experience. Finally the last question has been answered and my test is submitted. On shaky legs, I walk into the waiting area of the testing center. Close to six hours has passed since I entered. My eyes ache and fatigue fills my body.
In the waiting room I meet up with Trent and Shalyn. I first met Trent in my first chemistry lab at OSU. The safety video that cautioned us to not set our arm on fire with the Bunsen burner was rewinding in the VCR as we lit up to boil a beaker of water. Real first day of class, orientation type stuff. Trent was a few years older than I and had spent a few semesters at a small private school playing college baseball and had struggled a bit finding out what he wanted to do after a shoulder injury put the skids on the sports career. At the time he had a face full of black beard, wore baggy clothes and had multiple piercings. His alternative look made him a bit scary, to be honest. This first impression was not helped when he reached across the lit burner and promptly set his arm on fire. It was the first and only time I have ever seen the lab safety shower being utilized. Afterwards, I was talking to a friend about studying for a quiz after class when Trent walked up, literally smoldering, to ask if he could study with us. We traded looks and reluctantly agreed. Despite our initial differences, Trent and I ended up hitting it off and have been best friends ever since.
In the time that passed, Trent cleaned up his look and lost the piercings. We applied and were accepted to veterinary school together and had numerous misadventures along the way. We became roommates and were moving into a single-wide in a mobile home park before the first semester of vet school started when we first met Shalyn. She was in our vet school class and was moving into the trailer across the road from ours when Trent made her acquaintance and asked her over for a beer. I happened to be sitting on our couch in my boxer shorts watching TV when she came walking through our door, so maybe I shouldn’t make too much fun of Trent for great first impressions. Trent was quickly smitten and the two were soon an item and married between the second and third years of vet school. As we were neighbors throughout most of vet school, I was often their third wheel. So as I exit the testing center with defeat heavy on my soul, at least I am amongst friends.
“Well, what did you think of that?” I ask them as we gather our coats.
Trent answers with typical poetry. “Up the ass with no KY.”
“At least it’s over with,” Shalyn responds. “Of course now we have to wait a couple of months to find out the results. I think I’ll start studying now instead of waiting until I actually find out that I flunked and have to re-take it.”
“I could use a drink,” I say as we walk out into the parking lot. “Emily won’t be back to pick us up for about an hour. I say we grab a sixer and do our best to kill it before she gets back. It might make me a bit less likely to walk into oncoming traffic.”
We buy a six pack from the gas station and retreat to the alley behind the testing center where we spend the next hour sitting with our backs against the brick wall, drowning our sorrows in cheap, low-point beer. When Emily pulls up I am quite sure we are a sorry sight to behold.
“So, how did it go?” asks Emily as we pile into her car and she pulls back onto the highway. “Did you guys ace it?”
“Actually we are all pretty sure we flunked,” I respond darkly.
“I bet you all did way better than you think,” she responds optimistically. “Do you want to hang out in Tulsa a little before we go home?”
“No, I would just like to go home and try and forget this day ever happened,” says Trent from the backseat.
Emily and I met in undergrad at OSU. Her sorority and my fraternity were paired in a song and dance competition that only freshmen could compete in called Freshman Follies. Any tradition that pitted the Greek houses against each other was taken extremely seriously at OSU and as kitschy as it was, spending weeks in the company of pretty sorority girls wasn’t too bad a proposition to a bunch of freshmen college guys, so we were pretty game for the festivities. To this day my singing is hardly suitable outside of the confines of a shower or solo car ride, but I could play the guitar a bit and had volunteered to help with the musical accompaniment. When one of my pledge brothers got sick and fell out of the competition, I was enlisted to take his place. Emily was recruited by her sorority as she had been in choir in high school and we were dance partners on a few of the songs. She was gorgeous. Petite and blonde, with a sweet personality that belied a fun-loving, feisty edge, she was an infectious elementary education major and way out of my league. We were both involved in relationships with other people at the time, but we did enjoy each other’s company and became friends over the course of the semester. When I returned to OSU as a sophomore the next fall, I was single and when I ran into Emily working at the student union bookstore, I decided to man up and make my play.
“Can I get anything else for you,” she asked flirtatiously as she rang up my books.
“Well, your phone number would be nice,” I responded suavely.
At least that is how I remember the conversation. We went out a couple of times and then she told me that she was getting back together with her old boyfriend. I wasn’t too upset as I had recently gotten out of a long-term relationship and was still full of wild oats that needed sowing before I was ready to commit to anything serious. But I came to regard her as the one that got away and wandered what might have been. So it was with complete surprise when several semesters and several failed romantic interests later I got a phone call from a total stranger who happened to be one of Emily’s sorority sisters wanting to set me up with Emily for a sorority date party. I pretended to check my schedule while secretly being elated to have a second chance. The night of the date party was fun for both of us and we started dating again after that and have been together ever since. Emily has been with me through all of the highs and lows of vet school and has never failed to be supportive all the way. I proposed after the first year and we were married after the second and now live in a small house just south of campus. Emily graduated in 2002 with her elementary education degree. State funding for education, always dismally low in Oklahoma, was at crisis level at the time and teachers were being laid off right and left across the state. Emily had decided to take advantage of the fact that we were going to be in Stillwater for a few more years and was pursuing a master’s degree in special education in the evenings to become more marketable. She did manage to find a teaching job during the day, but it was a forty-five minute drive to Ponca City, where she taught elementary special education. As busy as I was with vet school, she stayed equally busy and we didn’t get to see each other very much except at nights. She had therefore graciously volunteered to drive Trent, Shalyn, and I to Tulsa for the national board exam and had taken the opportunity to do some shopping in the city while we took the test.
It is a quiet ride back to Stillwater as the three vet students ponder what news they will receive when the test results come back. We are not comforted by the knowledge that a very large percentage of last year’s class did not pass the test, even on their second attempt after graduation. We had even seen one of those poor bastards in the test center with us taking it for a third time. How terrible to have come so far only to fail at the very end. Two months will pass before we know whether we will share that fate. Two months where time will seem to stand still and in which I will pray more than I have ever prayed before.
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