I grew up in a Philadelphia neighborhood of row homes (now fashionably called townhouses) where everyone lived physically smushed right next to each other. Many of these neighbors influenced my understanding of both animals and people. Down the street lived one such person, an elderly Polish man whose name I never knew. The man lived with what must have been his sons and daughters though I didn’t know them or speak to them. The old man passed time by feeding and watching pigeons. He didn’t speak English at all and though I couldn’t understand his words, his voice was kind and his demeanor gentle. The man’s gray wool pants were too big for him and held up by suspenders. He was thin. So thin that he had no shape under his food-stained clothing. The man wasn’t very tall and was smaller still as he hunched over a bit when standing. The hair that he had on his head and the stubble on his face were both bright white. I was curious about him because he spent a lot of time outside of his house and so did I. When he…
"The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is tenacity."
Every Christmas, Birthday, or other celebration that involved gifting led to my asking for a pet. It was clear from early on that dogs were off limits. Too expensive and too much responsibility. Cats were also off limits. Too allergic (my mother, not me). My quest for a pet that met the qualifications of being ‘cheap,’ ‘not a lot of responsibility’ and ‘nonallergenic’ began. In a time that pre-dates Target and Walmart, the store of the day was Woolworth. Woolworth was a large-ish (by the standards of 1980) store that sold everything from food brought to you at a counter to sewing machines to hamsters. As a child, I spent many hours at Woolworth. I never really had any money to spend and I distinctly remember being followed around by store clerks as though they could sense our empty pockets. Even so, I wasn’t there for anything more than to pass time. To pass time and to develop a plan to acquire one of those adorable hamsters. Much as I’d envisioned myself snuggling up and rolling around with a dog, I developed a clear vision of myself holding…
As is typical of when first meeting someone, the question of ‘what do you do’ often comes up. While I would love to enthusiastically answer that question with pride for my profession and simply state, “I’m a veterinarian” inevidbly the follow-on question is “where do you practice.” That then leads into ‘the explanation’ of how I’m in the Army serving on Active Duty as a veterinarian. Most responses to that are along the lines of how people don’t know we have vets in the Army (I didn’t either until I was looking to match up my career with my husband’s.) While there’s then an opportunity to explain about the military’s medical research programs and the support that I, as a lab animal vet, give to those programs, I usually choose to mention the need for vets based on military working dogs. Military working dogs generously serve our country with a passion most of us humans will never know. But that’s not why I deflect the conversation to the dogs. I deflect the conversation to the…
Some questions to ask yourself if you’re thinking about becoming a veterinarian: Do I enjoy being in a classroom? While some undergraduate and graduate programs now allow you to learn on-line, vet school is still very much a ‘sit, stay’ learning experience. This is at least the case while you’re learning core subjects before the fun of clinical rotations begin. Am I okay with things like blood, pus, maggots, and poo? Yes, all of these and even more pleasantries one can only begin to imagine like cleaning unmentionable parts of horses and expressing anal glands. Animals give unconditional love and a whole lot more. Now, if you’re someone who’s incredibly squeamish about caring for humans, you may do quite fine with animals. It’s a strange phenomenon that the same type of material (poo for example) from a dog can leave me completely unfazed. That same material from a human and I am running as fast as this 5 foot 1.5 inch body can move itself. After vet school, you’ll choose what you really want to do and can certainly go into a specialty where…