Chapter 2, Part 2

I pull into the parking lot of the vet clinic at a quarter ‘til eight the next morning. The clinic consists of a plain brick building with a flat roof and a tin metal barn off to the side. The interior consists of a single exam room, a small surgery room that doubles as a second exam room when needed, a lab area, a small pharmacy, the receptionist office, a waiting room and a kennel. The barn houses a set of equine stocks and a hydraulic squeeze chute for working cattle. Behind the barn are a set of working pens and a small loafing shed for hospitalized livestock. When Dr. E built the clinic in 1980, he was a solo practitioner new to the area and designed the clinic for the needs of one veterinarian. The barn was an old Hostess bread warehouse. Dr. L joined the practice a few years later. Now that I have arrived on the scene, the clinic is definitely a small shell for three busy veterinarians. Point in fact, there are four cars waiting in the parking lot as I pull in to park.

I get out and unlock the front door and prepare to meet the rush. Two of the clients are dropping off animals for elective surgery, a dog to spay and a cat to neuter. Another has a puppy that had been vomiting the night before and the last is an ADR dog. ADR stands for “Ain’t Doing Right” and is a universally understood abbreviation in the veterinary industry originating with a pet owner’s description of their animal’s ailment - “She just ain’t doing right, doc.” Our more grammatically correct colleagues to the north sometimes say IDR, or isn’t doing right, but the meaning is the same.

I take the surgery animals back to the kennel to await their procedures as the rest of the staff arrive for work. Dr. L administers a pre-operative injection to the dog and prepares his surgical pack to perform the spay while Dr. E works up the vomiting puppy in the exam room. When he finishes, I take the ADR dog back to the exam room. The patient is a nine-year old Chihuahua with elderly owners that are complaining of a three-day history of anorexia and lethargy. I take a thorough history of the animal, discussing vaccination history, diet, and past medical problems. The dog is not on heartworm prevention, hasn’t been vaccinated in five years, and is fed a diet consisting primarily of table scraps. Off to a good start so far, I think to myself. My physical exam reveals severe periodontal disease with rotten, tartar covered teeth, a severe heart murmur, and congested lungs. I explain these findings to the owners, telling them that their dog is in congestive heart failure and that the dog’s dental condition could very well be contributing to the problem. I recommend testing for heartworms and performing chest x-rays and bloodwork to fully evaluate the degree of heart failure.

“How much is all that gonna cost,” the grizzled old man asks skeptically.

Doing a quick tally on the ticket, I reply, “Counting the physical exam that I just performed, the total would be around $300 for further diagnostics.”

The owner actually snorts as he exclaims, “Hell, it’s just a dog! Can’t you just give him a shot or something and fix him?”

“Unfortunately sir, they don’t make a shot that will just fix a failing heart,” I answer. “Especially when we don’t know for sure why it is failing in the first place.”

“Well, we just can’t spend that much money on a dog,” says the man’s wife. “I’ve got about $100 of my social security check left. What can we get done for that much?”

I consider my answer. “I tell you what. We’ll start him on a diuretic to help draw some of the fluid off of his lungs and an antibiotic to help treat the infection that he has in that mouth. Bring him back in a week and we will recheck his lungs and see where we want to go from there.”

As the couple leaves with their dog, Dr. E walks up and asks, “What was going on with that one?”

“Heart failure and periodontal disease for sure, probably has heartworms too, but they couldn’t afford much of a workup,” I say. “It sure is a lot different than vet school, Bob.”

“How do you mean?,” he asks.

“In school, we performed every diagnostic option at our disposal and worked up every single problem before we decided on a treatment option,” I say. “Here either they can’t afford or are unwilling to do all that and I end up having to do a lot of treatments based on guesswork.”

“Yeah, welcome to the real world, son,” Dr. E says with a wry grin. “These people don’t care if you know with absolute certainty what all is going on with their animals, they just want you to make them better. And most of the time if you can make an educated guess, you’ll get it right. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

Dr. E is in his mid fifties, a tall man with huge hands and feet. In his younger days he played baseball and basketball at Oklahoma State before attending vet school. He is loud and boisterous with a joke for every occasion. He and Dr. L are the ultimate odd couple. Dr. L is quiet and reserved, more methodical in his actions. Although they don’t see eye-to-eye on every issue, they have established a great practice and are well respected in the community. Both are excellent teachers and willing mentors.

The next patient that I see is an 8-month old boxer puppy that had been hit by a car early that morning. He is able to walk but is not putting any weight on his left rear leg, which is dangling unnaturally limp. Fearing the worst, I runs my hands over the leg, feeling the grating of bone against bone that signifies a fracture.

“I’m afraid the femur is broken, Mr. Edwards,” I tell the concerned owner, who is a teacher at the local high school. “I’ll need to take an x-ray of it to see how we can best repair the leg.”

“Do whatever you need to do,” the man replies. “The little guy is a member of the family, and we want to do whatever we can to make him better”

I pick the dog up and ask Cole to help me with the radiographs. We walk out the clinic back door to the barn, where the x-ray unit is located. The machine is a hulking monstrosity, six feet tall, unimaginably old and painted olive green. It looks like it came out of the engine room of a submarine. Due to it’s age and appearance I have started referring to it as Sergeant Surplus. It is a contrary and temperamental piece of equipment to work with.

“Cole, why don’t you put on the lead apron while I see if I can get this old soldier to report for duty,” I say as I flip the on switch and the unit sputters to life.

As he shrugs into the lead apron that will shield his body from the radiation of the x-rays, Cole asks, “How old do you think this piece of crap is anyway?”

“Ancient,” I reply. “This thing was probably radiographing shrapnel in dudes back in WWII. Dr. E must have gotten it from an Army surplus store or something. You should probably salute it in honor to its service to this great nation.”

Cole laughs, “That’s great. Did you learn how to work with this kind of stuff in school?”

“No, man,” I reply. “In school everything was digital, on computers. This is all OJT - On the Job Training.”

Cole holds the dog still while I click off a couple of films of the leg. I then take the films into the small dark room in the corner of the barn. The interior of the room is pitch black. The red light bulb that once provided illumination burned out sometime shortly after my birth and was never replaced. Interesting things lurk in the dark corners. Spiders, scorpions, Jimmy Hoffa’s body...that sort of thing. I hang the undeveloped films on metal hangers and suspend them within the developer chemicals of the dip tanks for processing. Five minutes later, I switch the films over to a different dip tank to fix the image to the film. Five minutes after that the films are developed and ready to be read. Holding the first film up to a light box, I study the fractured bone. Simple transverse fracture to the left femoral diaphysis. Should be easily repaired with an imtramedullary pin. Of course I’ve never seen that surgery, much less performed one. I take the films back into the clinic and seek out one of my colleagues for advice.

“Hey Bob,” I call, “can you take a look at these films with me?”

“Yeah, that should be a snap to fix,” he says after looking at the films. “Schedule it for in the morning and I’ll help you through it.”

I go over the radiographs with Mr. Edwards back in the exam room and explain the treatment plan. He agree to leave the dog with us for surgery the next day. I place a temporary splint over the broken leg to keep it stabilized and start the dog on pain meds and antibiotics before taking it back to the kennels.

At noon Dr. E, Cole, and I go to the Bullet Cafe for lunch. This small-town cafe is the social hub of the community, popular more for the conversation than the quality of their specials. The crowd at our table is quite the slice of local flavor: a few farmers, a couple of small town lawyers, a local factory owner, a city administrator, and a couple of veterinarians round out the dinner table most days. All are armchair philosophers and self-proclaimed experts on issues various and sundry. The table itself is one of those long tables where people sit down and eat and when they are finished somebody else takes their place. The faces change without so much as a lull in the conversation. It stays full all morning with coffee drinkers and then from 11 to 2 with the lunch crowd. They even hung a sign over it that reads, "World's Problems Solved Here." The lunch crowd is such a diverse mix of ages, backgrounds, and educations that you really get a lot of unique perspectives and quite the mix of topics. Today for instance, the discussions include the tribal customs of pacific islanders (tribes who wear gourds on their privates), suicide cults past and present, and Caribbean scuba diving hot spots. Eclectic and mundane topics alike get equal billing and all due attention.

After lunch I go out on a call to a farm a few miles away from the clinic to vaccinate three horses for rabies, west nile virus, and tetanus. While I am there, the owner asks if I will examine the teeth on one of the horses.

“That gelding keeps dropping grain when he eats,” says Mrs. Kelly, a matronly woman in her early fifties. “I was wondering if he needs his teeth floated.”

Taking a pen light from the chest pocket of my coveralls, I open the horses mouth and grasp his large pink tongue with one hand, pulling it gently to the side of his mouth as I shine the light to the back of his mouth with my other hand.

“Yes, ma’am, he has some pretty sharp points on those lower teeth,” I tell Mrs. Kelly. “Would you like for me to float his teeth while I’m here?”

“Oh could you?” she asks. “That would sure save me from having to haul him in to the clinic or having you come back out just for that.”

I get the dental floats out of my truck. These tools are basically long handles with small pieces of metal file welded to the ends that are used to grind the sharp points from the edges of horse’s teeth. These points are formed by the side-to-side motion that horses make when they chew and interfere with eating causing the animal to drop grain from it’s mouth. I sedate the gelding with an injection of Xylazine and wait a few minutes for it to relax the animal. Then I proceed to grind the points off of the teeth with the floats.

When I am finished, I reach in with my right hand to feel the now smooth edges of the teeth, checking my work. As I am withdrawing my hand I feel a sharp sensation of pain and hear distinct crunching sound. It turn out that this sound is the metacarpal bones in my right hand being crunched by the front teeth of the horse who decided it would be a good idea to bite down hard at just that moment. Choking back a curse, I manage to extract my mangled hand from the horses teeth. I tentatively flex a few times and discover that nothing is in fact broken, but it is beginning to swell and the back of the hand is rapidly turning a lovely shade of purple.

“Oh, he didn’t get you did he?” Mrs. Kelly asks.

“Yeah, just a bit,” I answer through gritted teeth.

“You ornery devil,” she says as she swats the horse playfully on the rump. “Why did you do that for?”

I write Mrs. Kelly out a bill, pack up my equipment, and head back to the clinic. Later that night I am sitting in front of my computer at home sending an email to my vet school classmates, typing a description of the day’s events titled Sergeant Surplus and the Purple Hand. After graduation we all dispersed to various jobs and internships across the country and we now communicate primarily through email, recounting our victories and disappointments to those most sympathetic to our plight. This connection serves to keep me sane and not feeling like an incompetent nincompoop. Most of the time, anyway. I sign off and pick up my copy of the veterinary surgery book to read up on the surgical techniques required to place an intramedullary pin to repair a femoral fracture. Nothing like a little light reading to unwind after a long day at work.

Chapter 2, Part 1

It is 11:30pm. I have just gotten out of the shower and am getting ready to go to bed when the pager begins shrieking loudly from the nightstand. Horse with colic. Needs a vet to come out, is the message on the text display. With a groan I pick up the phone and make the call.

“This is Dr. Carpenter from the T-Town Veterinary Clinic. Do you have a horse that is colicking?” I ask.

A woman’s voice answers in a slow drawl with a pronounced accent, “Yeah, Doc. This is Jenny Jones. We take all our animals to yall. We have this mare that’s been colicking. She won’t eat and she’s been down rollin’ and stuff.”

“Yeah, that sure sounds like she could be colicking,” I say. “Do you need me to come out and take a look at her?”

“Yeah, I think you should,” she says. “We done give her some Banamine a couple of times, and she seems to be a little better, but we’d sure feel better if you took a look at her.”

“How much Banamine have you given her?” I ask.

“About 40cc. We just give it to her in the muscle,” is the answer.

I’m a bit taken aback as this is close to 3 times the recommended dosage for this particular painkiller. “Well that should be plenty. If you would, don’t give her anymore before I get there, okay? How do I get to your place?”

“Do you know where Banner Hill’s at?” she asks.

I grew up and have lived in this area my entire life and I am amazed at how many landmarks and locations people use that I have never heard of. “I’m afraid not, can you give me directions?”

The lady proceeds to give me directions for a trip that is at least a 45 minute drive from my house. I tell her that I will need to stop by the clinic on the way and pick up a few supplies, but that I can probably be there in a little over an hour. I hang up the phone and begin to get dressed.

Emily is already in bed when I walk into the bedroom. “Are you going to have to go in?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve got to go look at a horse that is colicking out in the country.”

“Do you think I could help if I went with you,” she asks, sitting up in bed. “At least I could talk to you and keep you awake as you drive.”

“I’d love the company,” I reply as I pull on my boots. “But I need to leave pretty quickly. Can you be ready soon?”

She dresses hurriedly and we load up in the truck and head out on the call. It is a relatively cool night for early June and we roll down the county roads with the windows down, listening to red dirt country on the stereo. I’m a bit apprehensive as this is the first colic case that I have ever seen on my own. In vet school while I was on the equine surgery rotation, we were allowed to do the initial physical examination on colic cases that were referred to the teaching hospital, but as most of these cases ended up going to surgery, they were quickly out of our hands.

As we pull into the client’s driveway, my head lights illuminate a small crowd of at least ten people lounging around the front yard. A woman in a stained tank top holds the lead rope of a geriatric bay mare that is standing three-legged, dirt and mud caked to its back and sides. Half of the bystanders are shirtless and most are holding beer cans. I will soon find out that this is a common scenario that I will encounter time and time again on farm calls. Veterinary emergencies constitute a legitimate form of entertainment in rural Oklahoma, bringing family members and neighbors alike crawling out of the woodwork for a good look to see what the vet will do. As with most spectator sports, drinking just makes the show that much more enjoyable. I warily take in the crowd as I park the truck. Okay we’re about five seconds away from hearing Dueling Banjos out here. What the hell have I gotten into this time? Great call to bring the wife along on Colby!

I park the truck and Emily and I make our way across the yard towards the crowd, carrying my medical trays and equipment.

I walk over to the woman holding the horse and stick out my hand, “I’m Dr. Carpenter. I assume from all the mud that this is the mare that’s been colicking.”

“Yeah Doc,” says Mrs. Jones, “She was really rolling and carrying on a while ago, but she seems to have calmed down a lot since we gave her the Banamine, but we just wanted someone to take a look at her to be sure.”

I’d hope so after 40 cc of the stuff! Hope her kidneys don’t burn out. “Yeah, I really wouldn’t recommend giving more than 15 cc of Banamine, but let me take a look at her and we’ll see how she’s getting along,” I say, getting out my stethoscope.

I commence with my physical exam, listening to her heart rate and respirations, then moving farther back to listen to the rumblings of the horse’s guts or a lack thereof that would indicate a colic. Colic is a generic term that incorporates any condition that can cause abdominal pain in a horse, ranging in severity from simple gas and indigestion to a ruptured intestine. Equine medicine, more so than most other aspects of the industry, still holds on to many such old-school terminology, and it is essential that one know and use them in order to be taken seriously by horse owners “in the know.” Talking the talk is as important in how competent one is perceived as a “horse vet” as being able to walk the walk. I conclude my examination by taking the mare’s temperature with a rectal thermometer and checking the color of her gums by flashlight.

“Mrs. Jones, everything is checking out pretty normally so far.” I say. “She has good gut sounds all the way around, and she has a normal heart rate, which usually indicates that they are not in any discomfort. The color of her gums is good and pink, so I’m not seeing any evidence of dehydration or shock, and her temperature is normal. I would like to pass a tube on her to see if she has any gas on her stomach, just to be sure.”

I walk back to my truck to get my twitch, which is an ax handle with a short loop of rope tied to one end. I place the loop around the mare’s upper lip and begin to twist the ax handle, tightening the loop around the lip. This serves to focus the horse’s attention and releases endorphins which aid in restraint, kind of like holding a cat by the scruff of its neck. This is necessary as I begin to pass a ten foot long rubber tube up the mare’s nostril, through her nasal sinuses to her throat, where I must be careful to allow her to swallow the end of the tube before passing it down her esophagus and into her stomach. It is important to ensure that the tube is down the esophagus and not the trachea for what is to follow. Despite the twitch around its lip, the horse tries to throw her head up in the air and paws the ground in agitation at the invasiveness of the procedure. It takes several attempts before the mare finally swallows and I can finish passing the tube. As these events take place, the crowd of spectators begin to drift closer.

“Have you ever done this before?” asks a middle-aged man with skinny legs and a prominent beer gut, making him reminiscent of a pregnant pelican.

“Quite a few times, actually,” I reply grimly. “You just have to wait for the horse to swallow the end of the tube. If they don’t swallow it, you can’t go any farther. Ahh, there she goes. See, you can see the end of the tube moving down that groove on the left side of her neck there. If you can see it there, you know you are in the right spot.”

As the tube passes into the stomach, a small amount of gas escapes from the end of the tube I hold in my hand. I sniff it gingerly, assessing the faintly sweet aroma of fermented grass. I then place the end of the tube in my mouth and apply suction, attempting to siphon any liquid that may be on the stomach. Some years later I was to perform this particular procedure out on the farm by truck headlight and would fail to see the stomach contents coming back down the tube and was rudely surprised by a mouthful of the acidic fluid. The examination was then temporarily halted while I dry-heaved in the bushes. This night, however I am more fortunate as no fluid is obtained.

“Whatcha doin’ that fer?” asks a rather unkept looking woman in the crowd wearing a tube top.

“Horses are unable to vomit,” I explain. “So I am checking to see if there is any reflux on the stomach, which could indicate a blockage. I’m not finding anything, though. A little bit of gas, nothing else. I’m going to go ahead and give her a gallon of mineral oil through the tube. That should act as a laxative and coat her GI tract to help relieve any indigestion.”

This is the reason that I was so careful to make sure that the tube was down her esophagus and not her trachea. Putting a gallon of mineral oil down the trachea and into the lungs tends to do bad things to a horse. Like make them dead. The owners tend to frown on that sort of thing, so I try to avoid that if at all possible. Emily opens the bottle of mineral oil and hands me a half liter dose syringe that I use to pump the oil down the tube and into the horse’s stomach. Afterwards I withdraw the tube and take the twitch off the mare’s lip. She snorts in appreciation and starts grazing in the yard.

“Well guys,” I say, gathering my equipment. “I think she will be fine. I’d keep an eye on her for the next hour or so and definitely check her in the morning. I wouldn’t give her any feed tonight, just hay and water, and start her back on a half ration tomorrow. And I’d probably keep an eye on where you gave her all that Banamine. Sometimes that can cause abscesses if given in the muscle.”

Emily helps me load the gear back in the truck and I make out Mrs. Jones’ bill. She pays and thanks me for coming, apologizing for disturbing my evening.

“Glad to help ma’am. That’s what they pay me for,” I say as I start the truck.

As we are heading back towards the house, Emily laughs about the crowd of onlookers. “You’d think they would have something better to do than stand around gawking at a sick horse,” she says.

“I guess there just wasn’t that much going on at Banner Hill tonight,” I say ruefully. “I’m just glad to get that out of the way. I’d been dreading seeing a colic because of the whole passing the tube thing. Glad it went well. Man am I ready for bed.”

Chapter 1, Part 4

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

“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.)

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!