My decision to become a veterinarian was well-received by exactly no one in my family.  At first it seemed their collective lack of enthusiasm stemmed from my being too young to proclaim that veterinary medicine was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.  My family thought that, like most young people,  I’d change my mind and move on to some new idea by the time I finished elementary school and certainly by the time I’d finished high school.  I often heard them say exactly that.  As time went on, the pull to become a veterinarian grew stronger and with each passing year, my family’s disappointment with this decision became clearer.  The recurring theme was that I should become a ‘real doctor’ or a nurse or an actuary or anything at all except a doctor for animals.  [Note that ‘real doctor’ was the term used by family, I am of the opinion that vets are ‘real doctors’]

I didn’t know any veterinarians who could shepherd me into the profession or who could convince my family of the merit of my choice.  I didn’t even know anyone who’d graduated from college.  My mother was on her way to being a college graduate and, ironically, many of the situations created by her education pushed me closer to the profession that she wished I’d move away from.  My mother started her Bachelor’s degree to become an accountant about the same time I started elementary school, graduating when I was in 4th grade.  She took my brother and me to her night classes and placed us in desks at the back of the classroom to color while she participated in the lectures.  The experience was enjoyable for me–sitting silently was something we routinely practiced at Catholic school as ‘self control time’ and I excelled at that.  Being a college student, my mother had thick, heavy science textbooks around our house and nothing appealed to me more than sitting on our dining room floor (there was never a table in there),  studying the pages of her biology text.  Most fascinating to me were the worm dissections.  Even in the city, worms are plentiful.  My brother and I would take my mother’s dissection kit, dig up unsuspecting worms, and try to re-create the images from the textbooks. We were missing a crucial element to a smooth dissection, the little board that the worm should have been pinned to, so our subjects were quite squirmy and had to be held between our fingers.  As I think about it now, one isn’t supposed to dissect an alive worm so the worm’s demise was the critical step that was missing from our plan.  While some little girls might have run screaming from the undulating worms, I was fascinated.  Enjoying the classroom, spending hours looking through biology textbooks, dissecting worms, all of this was aligning to provide a strong foundation for exactly the profession that my family didn’t want for me.

The thing is, my family was a very practical one.  My maternal grandfather and his family immigrated from the Ukraine some time after WWII.  He was about 17 when he arrived to the US and didn’t speak English.  My maternal grandmother was born in the US to parents who’d immigrated from Poland.  Thankfully, the Polish and Ukrainian languages share enough similarities that my grandparents could understand one another when they met.  One of the earliest memories I have of my Ukranian great-grandmother, who we called ‘Babci’, involved a conversation in her farmhouse kitchen that led to Babci walking out to the yard, into the chicken coop, and soon after coming back with a bird that was to be dinner. My brother and I later found the axe and tree stump where the process by which the bird became our meal had occurred.  My Babci and my grandparents were sturdy, meat and potatoes-eating, newish Americans who were way too practical for pets.  Not only was my mother raised to be practical herself, she was young and caring for my brother and me on her own.  Pets could not be penciled into the schedule or into the budget.  The bottom line was that animals were either on your plate to be eaten or they were a luxury that others with excess time and money enjoyed.  There was no practical use for a veterinarian in the world we lived in.

The low value my family placed on animals never deterred my desire to become a veterinarian.  I saw other people cherishing their pets, I read books about animal diseases, and eventually a small vet clinic opened in our neighborhood.  These were all signs that becoming a veterinarian was, in fact, a practical choice after all. Perhaps sensing that, my mother arranged for me to meet the veterinarian whose clinic was in our neighborhood.  He provided me with solid advice–make sure you earn the best grades you possibly can and choose an academically rigorous high school over the city’s agricultural magnet school.  Disturbingly though, this veterinarian echoed my family’s words that I should consider medical school over veterinary school.  What the what!!!  Did my mother pay this man to say this?!  There I was standing in his vet clinic, excited about the surgery suite, exam tables, animals undergoing his medical care, even the odd vet clinic smells and my ears were hearing exactly what my mother had been saying all along–to go to medical school?? We didn’t delve into the ‘why’ of that advice as there was absolutely no way I was entertaining the possibility of choosing another profession.  Thank you, Doctor, we’ll be leaving now.

When I think back about the veterinarians I’ve met on my journey to entering this profession, there were more than a few who told me to make another choice.  I never dug into their reasons why.  After they recommended another profession, typically human medicine, I’d stop listening to anything else they had to say.  Muting them wasn’t intentional, my brain stopped hearing them because I was so resolute, so full of conviction that I was on the right path and yes, I was also a little bit scrappy.  This isn’t to say that I managed to make it to veterinary school without considering other professions.  When the ‘choose something else’ soundtrack repeats over and over in your life, you can’t help but to hear it.  I did finally consider the alternative of becoming ‘a real doctor’ while I was in college.  I volunteered at a hospital and it took all of about a minute for me to know I was absolutely in the wrong place.  Perhaps I was hoping that by telling my family I tried to let human medical school be my thing, they’d finally let go of the calls, the conversations, the poking and prodding for me to do something other than veterinary medicine.  I was hopeful that my family would come to accept that, even after a lifetime of trying, they could not steer my heart in an alternate direction.  Though they remained disappointed right on through to my graduation from veterinary school, there was never any other choice for me. I was lucky enough to have believed in myself and to have had the encouragement of a few key people who also believed in me and in the worthiness of veterinary medicine.  Not everyone gets that and their dreams may never become a reality.  I was also lucky enough to encounter all the wagging tails and purring cats that I needed to stay focused on what’s always mattered most to me–the animals themselves.