It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Feeding the Rat -- Loneliness and Connection

Last night at a second grade parent meeting, the teacher talked about some of the changes in the children this spring.  The girls in particular, she said, were experiencing a shift.  In the Waldorf curriculum, teachers identify a developmental stage known as the Nine Year Change.  Simply put, this is the period when children begin to realize that they are individuals, distinct from their parents and friends.  The world is no longer a cozy dreamland.  They begin to sense their own mortality and their own isolation.

This recognition of the self as an individual is extremely painful for many.  As Sierra’s teacher put it, they begin to be aware of being outside of a group, and often they see themselves as being excluded where no exclusion exists.  “I’m over here, and you are all over there, and you’re leaving me out, and I don’t like it.”  Meanwhile, she said, the other children are saying, “No, we aren’t leaving you out; we want you to join us.  Come play with us.”  But, the child sees that she is on the outside, she is alone.

What kids of that age don’t yet realize, is that the exclusion comes from within.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that most of us never outgrow that Nine Year Change.  We find ways to cope with and, more often, to mask our feelings of exclusion, of isolation, of loneliness.  Yet, we rarely stare at the reality with acceptance.  We are all alone, and our aloneness connects us – or, it could, if we would let it.

Yet, rather than acknowledging that we are all standing outside that magic circle, we scramble to create a culture of inclusion, of belonging.  We pathologize our isolation.  What’s the first thing that is usually published in a profile of anyone who snaps into an action of mass violence?  “Well, he was always kind of a loner.  He kept to himself.”  We prize conformity.  We bend, twist, pluck, and repress ourselves into constructed groups and unions that may in part meet our need for belonging, but ultimately deepen our loneliness.

Listen to the voices in your head sometimes.  We all have them – the anxieties that we can’t name, the anger that wells up suddenly at seemingly trivial causes, the refusal to look behind our own dogma.  What are those voices saying?

“I’m over here.  Everybody else is over there.  I want to be over there, but they won’t let me in.  I’m not good enough, pretty enough, strong enough, smart enough.  I don’t make enough money.  I’m not fit enough.  I can’t talk to strangers.  I don’t know how to connect.  I don’t know how to connect.  I’ll always be alone.”

So, what do we do with those voices?  We fight them, we bury them, we hide from them.  We dress ourselves to fit in.  We diet.  We buy the “right” foods.  We scramble for more money, bigger cars, bigger TVs.  We lock ourselves into rules – politics, religion, cultural traditions.  We structure relationships within rigid boundaries that will “guarantee” that we are not excluded – if no one else is allowed in, we can’t be left out.  And we lash out at those who threaten the safety of our belonging.

I’m a veterinarian.  I grew up with horses – big animals with a strong flight response.  I learned as a child that you can’t fight a horse to make it do what you want.  The horse is too big, too strong, and you will always lose the tug-o-war.

Our individuality is a horse.  The harder we pull on the rope, the harder it pulls back.  The more we scramble for acceptance and certainty, the more we push others away, and the stronger the isolation grows.

My kids have a book called Three Samurai Cats.  This picture book is based on a Japanese tale of a warlord, a daimyo, whose palace is taken over by a giant rat.  The rat sets up camp in the hall of the palace, eats all of the daimyo’s food, terrorizes the servants, and generally trashes the place.

The daimyo goes to the local samurai training house and asks the master to send a samurai, a warrior, to rid his palace of the rat.  The first samurai, a big, strapping cat warrior, goes to the palace, confronts the rat, engages in battle, and gets his ass handed to him.  The daimyo returns to the palace, and tells the master he needs a stronger warrior, one who is better armed, more fully trained.  A second samurai goes to the palace. This warrior is even bigger than the first, with impressive armor and weapons.  He fights the rat even more fiercely.  And once again, the samurai is defeated by the laughing rat.

The poor daimyo has had it by this time.  But now the training house sends a third samurai.  Let’s just say that this particular samurai cat is less than impressive.  In the pictures, he looks like a hyperthyroid, elderly street cat with scraggly fur covering protruding bones, a notched ear, and a loincloth.  Hardly warrior material.

The daimyo is furious and humiliated.  The rat laughs openly and calls for more food.  The third samurai acknowledges the rat, watches the rice balls rolled out to the rat, and sits down on a mat to wait.  At this point, the daimyo can barely stand it.  When is this supposed warrior going to do something?  Why isn’t he even trying to fight the rat?  Is he just too old, too tired, too weak?

The rat eats every last grain of rice in the palace while the cat waits.

Eventually, the rat grows so rotund that his legs can no longer reach the ground.  The cat stretches, stands up, and rolls the rat out of the palace and down the hill.

Our isolation and the voices that arise from it are like the rat.  When we fight them, when we armor ourselves against exclusion with shields of labels, conformity, and arbitrary rules and spears of jealousy and anger, we get our asses handed to us.

What happens instead if we welcome the rat, hand it a comfortable seat in the corner, and give it a rice ball?  What if we say to those voices, “Yes, okay, I see you.  Sit over there for a while will you?  I’ll get to you when I have time, but right now I have parts of myself to share with someone over here.”?  What happens when we stop fighting the universal human truth – that we are all alone, and that it is that loneliness that unites us.

 

The Bone Pile and the IDS File

My weekday job involves writing and doing other communications work for an online veterinary community.  One of the longstanding features of this community is the Message Board area where veterinarians post questions, comments, or quandaries regarding cases, clients, life, and almost anything you can think of.  It’s sort of like a giant doctors’ rounds.

Two concepts that pop up in the Message Boards fairly often are ideas that cross over neatly into everyday life.

The Bone Pile -- (Spoiler alert: Do not read the following if you still operate under the belief that “doctors” possess superpowers.)

Whenever someone, often but not always a new graduate, posts about a case that went wrong and about their fear, horror, anxiety, and shame surrounding the case, almost inevitably, a more experienced veterinarian will chime in with this phrase.  “Every practitioner has a bone pile.”

It’s true. Medical practitioners -- whether veterinarians, dentists, or physicians -- are human.  And human beings make mistakes.  We make errors.  We have failures.  Sometimes we fail to communicate.  Sometimes we miss something.  Sometimes we forget something. Sometimes our skills prove to be insufficient.  Sometimes we fail to follow through.  Sometimes fate and physiology are not on our side.  Sometimes we just plain screw up.  These errors, failures, and losses stack one upon the other, forming the “bone pile” of the career.

In life, we all have our bone piles.  All of our failures, mistakes, cruelties, and inadequacies pile in the corners of our lives.  The cutting words spoken to a friend, the failure to listen to our children’s stories, the relationship that we blew entirely, the addictions, the jobs that we’ve lost, the financial setbacks, the burnt pie crusts.  The bone pile isn’t always stocked with T-rex femurs.  Some of the bones are tiny – wispy fish bones that poke and annoy, but are almost invisible.

Most of us don’t like to look at our bone piles.  We stack furniture in front of them, cover them with pretty clothes or expensive electronics, blur the outlines with food, drugs, sex, or alcohol, run from them into the next ill-considered job or relationship.  We call this “moving on.”  And, indeed, one can’t set up residence in the bone pile.  It’s a creepy, hard, and uncomfortable place that lacks the things we need in order to sustain us.  There is no love or nutrition in the bone pile.  It’s haunted by the ghosts of shame and failure.

But, to deny it, is to deny ourselves.

Here’s where medical practitioners do something right.  We speak of the bone pile almost fondly and return to it on occasion, but not with self-flagellation – with a purpose.  You see, doctors (of all stripes and spots) have learned that the purpose of the bone pile is education.  We perform necropsies on our mistakes – carefully dissecting away the layers to discover exactly what happened.  In hospitals, human physicians hold Morbidity and Mortality rounds, in which a case that produced an undesirable outcome is selected and presented in a peer group.  The purpose of these rounds isn’t to shame the doctor in charge.  It isn’t a public flogging.  The M and M is meant to highlight where mistakes occurred and ways of preventing those errors in the future.

We can’t “move on” from our failures or losses until we understand why they happened, and until we learn what we can do to keep the same pattern from repeating.  The bone pile will always grow – that’s the nature of human existence.  Yet, acknowledging the bone pile and its usefulness helps us to grow, to build our experience, and to move away from past errors.  Yes, so that we can make new ones!

If the inevitability of failure depresses you (it depresses all of us a bit, I think), then you may be glad to see the next tool.

The IDS File

The IDS file is usually mentioned in the same message threads that reference the bone pile.  New practitioners often have to be told about this tool, and sometimes experienced practitioners need a reminder to return to the IDS file periodically.  IDS stands for one simple principle: I Don’t Suck.

“I Don’t Suck” is a hard concept for most humans to grasp.  For veterinarians (and I suspect physicians) who tend to be goal-oriented perfectionists, the IDS concept is both incomprehensible and essential.  After all, if we tell ourselves that we are horrible, that we have failed, that we suck, that makes us good people, right?  Self-flagellation is virtuous, isn’t it?  After all, beating ourselves up over a mistake will keep us from making that same mistake again.

Uh, no.

It sounds good.  And we all do it.  We writhe in guilt over the case that went wrong – obsessing, losing sleep, researching until our eyeballs pop out of our heads like Boston Terriers with glaucoma.  We label ourselves – “I did it again.  I can’t be in relationships.  I should just die alone.”  “I can’t believe I said that to her.  I’m a horrible mother.”  The problem with the “I Suck” approach to our humanity is that it doesn’t prevent us from making mistakes, and it doesn’t make us any better in the areas where we’ve failed.  I’d argue that it makes us worse.

This is a hard story to tell.  A number of years ago, I was called out to castrate a horse.  Gelding is a common surgery, and I’d performed hundreds by that time.  The patient was a gorgeous, 6 year old, well-mannered stallion who was only being gelded because he was being moved to a stable that didn’t allow stallions and he wasn’t going to be used as a breeding animal anyway.  The surgery went well.  I never could pinpoint a moment where anything went wrong.  When he stood there was no bleeding beyond the typical few drips.  I watched him in his stall for about 20 minutes to be sure.  I wasn’t on call that night, and I’ll never know what happened exactly, but he began bleeding that evening.  I still don’t fully know the chain of events, but the upshot was that my patient wound up bleeding to death in the trailer on the way to the referral facility.

Realistically, I don’t know if I committed an error in surgery, if the horse did something later on that opened a clot, or if there was an error on the part of one of the other practitioners that saw him that evening.  I never will know.  But, this horse looms large in my bone pile.

Here’s what happened to me.  I excel at self-flagellation.  For months, I spent the drive to work wracked in nausea, my vision blurred so badly I could barely see the road.  I was terrified to do any surgeries.  At all.  The record lurked in my stack of files because I couldn’t face writing it.  I told myself that I could never geld another horse again.

None of this made me a better veterinarian.  Clinical acumen and anxiety-ridden paralysis don’t exactly go hand-in-hand.  Telling myself I sucked only got in the way of the confidence I needed to treat my other patients properly.

Fortunately for me, I had a boss who was more than willing to share the stories of his own bone pile, an office manager who had no intention of coddling me and booked surgeries for me (including geldings) just as she always had, and a technician who blessedly saw the shakes I tried so hard to hide and made certain that she could be there to assist me and who always had the phrase that got me through many a tough case, “I know you can do it.  I have great faith in you.”

And I had my IDS file.  It’s a literal file these days, still hanging in the rack in my home office.  Back then, my IDS file was a collection of cards, notes, and pictures from clients jammed into my cubby slot and briefcase.  Each of those cards said essentially the same thing: “Thank you for caring for our animal.  You are a wonderful veterinarian.  We are grateful for you.”

Human nature is a funny thing.  Even though I said that the story of the gelding disaster was hard to tell, those words were much easier to type than the messages of the IDS file.  We are much more comfortable with our failings than we are with our strengths.  Typing the phrase “you are a wonderful veterinarian” feels awkward and self-aggrandizing.  Even alone in my office in pre-dawn quiet, I feel embarrassed, as though I should duck my head and blush.  Yet, in this same office, I can glance around the room and see at least three mementos belonging to my IDS file.

In our everyday lives, the IDS file may be harder to compile.  I’m learning to build mine from bits and pieces.  Some of it lives in my email folders: kind or funny notes from friends, compliments on articles, thank yous from school or other organizations.  Some of it lives on my refrigerator, dresser, and bulletin boards in the form of art and gifts from my children.  Some of it lives in boxes of old letters (remember those?) and cards.  Some of it lives in the objects about me – my Alice in Wonderland teapot from my husband.  Some of it lives in my mind – in the memories of conversations, small triumphs, and unbelievable joys.  But, I’m learning, on the days when the bone pile seems unmanageably high, to go to the IDS file in whatever form is handy and to find the things that tell me that “I don’t suck” or to find the people who will let me know in their own ways that they “have great faith” in me.

Yes, our pains and failures have to be moved on from, but they must also be learned from.  And we need to learn from and embrace our triumphs and joys to the same degree.  Ultimately, we are the only ones who truly create both our bone piles and our IDS files, and it is up to us to decide how to use them.

Awareness -- Blog crossover week

The week is getting a bit crazy around here, so for today, I'm going to direct you to this excellent post by a good friend on AWARENESS.  Steve is a marriage and family therapist in Sacramento and has recently re-started his blog.  He's kicked it off with great posts, and this one has some particularly good insights.  If you want to look a bit more closely at yourself and your interactions with others, I recommend checking out what Steve has to say.

In the meantime, what does awareness mean to you?  How and when do you 'check out?'  Tune in?

After years in large animal medicine, I'm pretty aware of my physical surroundings -- sort of a survival trait.  But, if I'm uncomfortable or upset, I can lose entire conversations.  For me, awareness translates into understanding my own responses to a situation and helping myself to take action rather than to react.  How about you?

Goldie

This wasn't the post I'd intended for today, but I was inspired by TheHorse.com where they are asking readers to post pictures of their geriatric horses on the  Facebook page.  Seeing the pictures and stories of these beloved friends made me realize that I haven't really posted much about the horse who epitomized the title of this blog.  This is excerpted from an early draft of an attempted memoir now gathering dust on my hard-drive.  It's a little long for a blog post; think of it as a love story.

 

Horsemanship in the central San Joaquin Valley of the 1980’s was utilitarian.  Matching tack trunks, handmade boots, monogrammed blankets: the vast array of equine paraphernalia now ubiquitous in tack stores and on the internet were, for us, props for movie sets and novels about fancy boarding schools.  Our horses were not specialists – if we wanted to jump, they jumped; if we put them in front of trail obstacles, they maneuvered the course; a Western saddle meant drop your head and jog slow; an English saddle told our horses ‘tuck your head and extend that trot.’  We were cowboys, Olympians, circus-style bareback riders, rodeo queens, and daredevils.  Breeches were expensive and consigned by our purse-watching mothers for use only in the show ring.  We did our riding in blue jeans.

True horsemanship is determined not by money, time, equipment, style or supposed expertise, but by a mindset – a gritty practicality, a determination to finish the job, to solve the problem, to use all of the resources at one’s disposal.  The first lesson is persistence.

“Mom!  We have to call them right now.  They’ll sell her to someone else.  Please!”  Standard pre-adolescent demand, except, I wasn’t that sort of teenager.  I was the quiet girl, the A student and pathological people pleaser.  In a family where the last cookie is courteously halved to the last molecule, demands for anything, let alone luxuries like horses, were not standard, nor tolerated.

“Are you sure she’s the horse you want?  You haven’t even looked at any others.”

“Yes.”  I would die if I didn’t have this horse.  Squirrels ran indifferently across the telephone wire that hung at table height along the tops of the pines outside of my grandparent’s breakfast room.  The fog rolling toward the room-length window from the distant bay was alien and eerie to eyes adapted to searing August sun.  I was trapped in the Oakland hills, and back in Merced, other people were trying to buy MY horse.  To my thirteen-year old brain the very fact that they wanted to turn her into a parade horse demonstrated the criminal incompetence and inhumanity of my arch-rivals.

Looking back through a mother’s eyes, I realize that my parents showed remarkable tolerance and courage in the face of their new adolescent’s foray into insanity.  When we had gone with my riding instructor to “check out” this prospect for my first horse, Goldie had not interviewed well.

The irrigated pasture was the only square of green in the buff, oak-blotted landscape.  One horse-shaped body grazed amid the rectangular forms of the cattle.  The ranch owner looked at Suzie.  “She’s pretty green.  They’ve had a saddle on her a few times, but she’s mostly been a broodmare.  You’d better try her.”

She was going to be my horse.  I wanted to be the one to ride her.  And I didn’t.  An electric jelly traveled up my legs and into my stomach.  My glasses slid down my nose; I pushed them up with my right index finger and tried to be invisible.  I had a theory that if I stood sideways, at the edge of a wall somewhere, and avoided eye contact, that no one would notice me.  I was later to learn that this is a great technique if you want cattle to move past you.  Everything rested on this moment.  With all of the intensity of adolescence, I felt that this was the only chance:  the only horse, my only opportunity to live something other than the stories in my beloved books.

My instructor swung her leg across the saddle.  The horse shifted her weight and froze.  As the faded denim of Suzie’s legs closed around her barrel, the horse shuddered: ears went back, head went down, hind legs kicked out in a buck.  The out of shape broodmare with the still engorged udder was no match for Suzie.  The mare’s last foal had just been weaned less than a week before.  Suzie guided her around the sand arena using spur and direct rein.  She pulled up.  “Yellow horses,” she said in disgust.  “They’re all ornery.  She’s pretty green.  You sure you want her, Chris?”

I nodded.  My throat closed around a tangled knot of hope and fear.

Suzie looked at my mom.  “Well, Jean.  She’ll need a lot of work, and she’s not papered, but I think she’s,” this time she nodded at me, “up to it.  But,” and now the glare hit me full force.  “You’ll have to toughen up.  No dreaming.  If you don’t pay attention on this horse, she’ll hurt you.  Bad.”  Then she spoke the words dear to my mom’s Scottish DNA.  “The price is sure right.”

I didn’t care about price, training, papers, or ornery attitude.  Left to untack and brush the mare while the grownups babbled the meaningless polyglot of adulthood, I wrapped my arms around her neck, tangling my fingers in the white mane and breathing the smell of horse sweat and valley dirt.  “You’re going to be mine.”  My breath was a whisper.  “I’ll train you and take care of you.  We’re going to be best friends.”  As though touching a precious artifact, I reached my hand to the muzzle where the white blaze dropped into velvet pink.  Nothing had ever seemed as soft or perfect.  I was thirteen; I didn’t care about anything else.  She was beautiful.

Palomino: coat the color of a newly minted coin or three shades lighter or darker.  So said my 4-H manual.  The summer before I began eighth grade, Goldie’s coat hovered half a shade to the light of that mythic coin.  Each leg blazed with a white stocking, a white blaze streaked from forehead to nose.  Her main and tail were white, peppered with a few black hairs.  Slight broodmare belly and bad attitude were invisible to my eye.  She was Trigger, Pegasus, and the unicorn.  Every other girl would wilt from envy.  Whoever said that dreams had to be wholly altruistic?

The stucco arches of the house hid behind the immense shrubs, pines, and half-circular drive that in the mid-80’s proclaimed loudly the “upper” in upper-middle class.  Our house had two stories and a deck over the garage, but the driveway was a standard cement slope -- pull in, back out.  Our family hovered just above middle, with an “upper” that was lower-cased, non-italicized.  Creatures flopped against my stomach wall as we waited under the yellow circle of the iron pendant porch light.  Dinner had writhed on my plate, squirming from the tines of my fork as my family dawdled over their meal.

School had just begun; dark had started to fall during dinner, making the time seem later.  I knew that we would get to the seller’s house and find out that my dream was sold to someone else.  I would wake up the next morning, in the same state that I had awoken that morning, an eighth grader with a flat chest, thick glasses, and no horse.  My foot pressed on the non-existent accelerator on the passenger-side floorboards.  Dad had to be missing every light on purpose.

In the house with the immaculate carpets that made me look twice at my Nikes for mud, Dad swooped the illegible, sprawling signature that mine now mimics across the bottom of a check for $800.  Both grownups signed the deed, and that was it.  I rode home in a shining chariot of glory, the owner of a horse.  And nothing was ever the same again. 

When I was in college, a male friend informed me that he doubted I would ever marry.  “You’re married to your horse,” he said.  He was wrong, and he wasn’t.  Like a marriage, a first horse is a complicated thing.  And Goldie was a complicated horse.  After that night, Goldie and I came to an arrangement.  I would work on training her to neck rein, to lope, to circle, to back, and generally to be a civilized riding horse.   She would buck me off at least once a week for the year it took for me to learn to hold my seat long enough to make the effort less worth her while.  At one point the rodeo performances were dramatic enough that my friends began timing my “rides.”  I learned to fall.  I learned to get back on, to start again.  And I learned to sit, to hold my position until we achieved the outcome I desired. 

            Ours was a strange relationship, that yellow horse’s and mine.  Flying through the air, hitting the sand with a roll and a grunt, I would look up to see a blaze face peering down at mine. ‘Oh crap!  Did I kill her,’ the brown eyes would say.  The ears would flicker as I hauled myself to my feet. ‘Oh crap! I didn’t kill her,” the hindquarters would say as she turned to run from my outrage.  Halters became irrelevant; Goldie and I were inseparable.  “Come on,” I would say, and my big yellow dog would follow, lead rope or no.  We played tag in the manner of The Black Stallion. I would lean against her legs, sitting in the shade of her neck as her copper coat dried in the summer sun.  And she never let me forget to pay attention.

            Goldie last bucked beneath a rider at age 34.  The rider in question was my then 3 year old daughter, and the buck was just a crow hop, but as I snapped. “Whoa.  Quit it!” the ears flicked forward and the neck arched even as she stood.  ‘I’ve still got it,’ my horse told me.

            Goldie was 36 years old when she took her last bite of grass in our orchard.  When I helped my best friend from this life, I ended a part of my own.  I have children of my own, including a daughter now who is nearly as old as, and far more self-assured than, that skinny teenager with the thick glasses, but some part of me will always be that girl with the golden horse.

 

 

 

Turn Loose

“Now if it starts to go to pot out there, just turn loose.  Turn loose of everything.  You’ll be fine.”  That was the sum of my pre-solo sail advice from my grandfather.  Turn loose of everything, and then regroup, that and, as he and my dad glanced over their shoulders at the empty gravel parking lot, “I guess you’d better wear a life jacket in case your mother gets back.”

I was ten.  The boat in question was an El Toro, a two-man (or one girl) dinghy.  The body of water was a man-made lake on the outskirts of Merced.  Lake Yosemite must create its own weather, for even on stagnant August days, winds can whip white caps in the middle of the lake.  My mother had driven Grandma to Mass, taking my little sister with her.  As the oldest daughter in a boy-deprived family, I got to stay “with the men.”  I had sailed before, but always with an adult crammed alongside the centre-board.  However, Dad and Grandpa, apparently tired of the boom-induced cranial lumps from my unpredictable jibes, had seized upon the absence of female interference to teach me to solo.

Shivering under the 90 degree sun in a damp bathing suit and clammy “Mae West” life preserver, I slid into the stern.  Lake water lapped at the bottoms of my thighs as I clutched the tiller and sheet.  “Ok, I’m ready.”  My knuckles were white.

“Turn loose.”  Over 30 years later it amazes me that Grandpa Bligh could give that advice with a straight face.  Ask anyone who knows me well to describe me in three adjectives, and chances are, “stubborn” will be one of them.  I am not good at letting go.  Ropes, people, relationships, ideas, jobs, paragraphs, clutter, bad habits – I hold on.  I come by my tenacity honestly.  He who said, “turn loose” was the master of pig-headedness.  Yet, he knew what all too often eludes me still.  Sometimes, it will all go to pot out there, and the only thing to do is to turn loose, to let go of everything, and to hope that once the waters still, you can regroup, pick up, and begin the voyage again.

“Why didn’t you let go?”  My riding instructor stared at me as I handed over the once white cotton lead rope of my sister’s horse.  Mud caked my boots and splattered my jeans, shirt, and hair.  The calluses along the palms of my hands flared red, soon to blister.  My legs felt like jelly and my shoulders as though giants had been tearing at my arms.  Waterskiing through a muddy pasture behind a runaway horse will do that to you.  Suzie shook her head in disgust.  “Come on, Chris, you know better than that.  The gate was locked.  She couldn’t have got away.  You’re gonna get hurt doing stuff like that.  You should have let go.”

I was older in that February pasture than I had been on the summer lake, 15 or 16, but no wiser.  I did know better: if you are holding something you can’t control, let go.  I knew the rule, but had not integrated the wisdom.  When Noel, my sister’s Morgan, pulled away from me in hopes of rejoining her pasture mates in their wind-whipped freedom, I clung to the rope, stubbornness telling me that my 100 lb body could stop a 1200 lb force of nature.  Logic, reason, and common sense died beneath the wheels of the tank that is my fear of loss and failure.

I’m not good at letting go.  Hold on a little longer.  Try something different.  Try one more time.  Say the right thing.  Just keep going.  Don’t give up. 

The last one is the kicker – no one wants to be a quitter, no one wants to give up if there is a chance, just a chance that it might work.  But, the reality, the one that my Grandfather, veteran of war and widowhood, and Suzie, with two divorces behind her, knew, is that sometimes it won’t work.  Sometimes the forces pushing against us or pulling us in our wake are more powerful than we.  Sometimes it is broken and can’t be fixed.  Sometimes it will go to hell, and then it is time to let go.

A few years ago, I went on a call to vaccinate a group of semi-feral ponies.  The stallion had recently encountered some barbed-wire, and while his lacerations looked superficial from a distance, I wanted a closer look.  He wore a halter, but no lead.  “You’re going to have a hard time catching him,” said the owner.

I looked at the pony, the halter and the size of the pasture.  “No problem.  I’ll go out there by myself, and once I have him by the halter, you can bring me the rope.”  Bull-shitting through a situation is a professional specialty.

Sure enough, the pony was curious enough to come say ‘hello.’  I scritched his neck, and slid my hand down, grabbing the halter.  Just as I called, “Ok…” my patient pulled away.  No problem – he was only about double my body weight.  I centered myself and jerked on the halter.  “Whoa.”  He stopped, then pulled again.  Same response from me.  Now, this is where I went wrong – in my head this was a horse.  For a normal horse, one or two failed attempts at misbehavior is usually enough to correct the behavior.  Not so for a pony stallion – ponies are short, and have much to prove.  He jerked back a third time, and took off running.

Enclosed pasture --  no problem, right?   After all, I learned my lesson 25 years ago, didn’t I?  Sadly, not so much.  My fingers remained clenched around the cheek piece of the halter, and unable to hold my ground, my feet trotted along with the pony.  As he broke into a canter, my brain finally returned from the sandy beaches of denial, looked at my feet which had turned into cartoon wheels and the speeding ground below, and said, “This looks bad.  Maybe you should let go.”  Oops.  The brain had apparently left its knowledge of physics beneath a palm tree.  My four-legged partner and I had been travelling at his speed, not mine.  As my fingers released the halter, my body fell victim to inertia.  My feet, unable to sustain their free-wheeling momentum alone, slowed, but my upper body continued to travel at pony-speed.  Like Wile E. Coyote plunging from a cliff, I had a split-second of “Uh-oh” before the ground rushed toward my face.

Back in the office, as I held an ice-pack to my knee (in a last ditch effort to ‘save face’ I had broken my fall with my left patella) and tried to make an incident report sound logical (How will you avoid this incident in the future?  Turn loose of the damn pony.), my technician Mel and a client stared at me and shook their heads.  “Why didn’t you just let go?”

The only answer I can give is that some of us need more lessons than others.  For some, through faith, reason, or emotional balance, letting go seems to come fairly easily.  The rest of us need the rope burns, the bruises, the heartache, and the spectacular failures to learn the balance between giving up and accepting the inevitable.  The house has been gone from us since September.  I have finally stopped planning projects or trying to drive too far up I-5.  The practice where I worked closed a week and a half ago.  I still run through cases in my head in the evenings, thinking, “When I get to work, I need to…”  “Kill your darlings,” goes the writing advice.  I am editing the first draft of the novel now, and bleeding just a little as I force the ink across any paragraph that doesn’t work, doesn’t contribute, or is trying to get away.

More things exist outside of my control than within it. 

“God grant me the serenity

 to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference...”  Reinhold Niebuhr

And God grant me the ability to turn loose when it all goes to pot.  Oh, and can I have a life jacket, please? 

The Last Day

“Wake up!  Support your wife.  It’s her last day of work!”  Mike is not a morning person.  At 6:30 every weekday, I get up from my computer, walk into our bedroom, and spend the next 15-30 minutes convincing my husband that he must overcome gravity in order to contribute to his corner of the world.  As I chirped out this morning’s greeting, a sense of déjà ecoute wacked me on the head.  This sounded hideously familiar.  My hummingbird brain tracked the sense to the source.  Lethal Weapon (III?  IV?).  Great.  At 6:30 A. M., I channel Danny Glover.  ‘This is it,’ I thought.  ‘I’ve jinxed myself.  This is going to be the day my job finally kills me.’

Since I’m sitting here typing, it’s not exactly a spoiler to point out that I was wrong.  I escaped the last day alive, and with all limbs attached. 

The last day.  My last day as a practicing veterinarian (for the foreseeable future) and the last day for Bradshaw Vet’s Large Animal Clinic – forever.  It was a good day, pretty damn close to a perfect day.

It was the sort of day that makes you wonder why everyone doesn’t become an ambulatory vet:  St. Patrick’s Day green, chalk-pastel-impossible grass; white, puffy trees, azure skies, distant, snow-capped mountains; country roads rolling endlessly across hills; and grazing cattle.  It might have been easier to say goodbye had the hills been baked brown, or had chill rain soaked my windshield, but this was the sort of day that says, “You are alive.  Every end has a beginning.  Nothing is permanent.  This will all change, and therein lies the beauty.”

Seven years ago, on a February day much like this, a palomino mare stood beneath the fragrant almond blossoms of our orchard, munching stems of cartoon grass.  My friend, my horse.  Goldie died that day.  She was 36 years old, arthritic, and in liver failure.  I euthanized her and friends buried her in that orchard.  It sounds bare doesn’t it, matter-of-fact.  It isn’t.

Points in life stand out, stars that shine through the continuous fog of daily existence: places, events, people, animals, experiences.   These are the things that shape us.  I still love spring, but I do not see grass in that extraordinary shade of luminous, tender, green without remembering it passing the lips of my best friend, my best teacher just before I ended her life.  I felt relief that day too. 

Spring – humans celebrate new life, new beginnings in the spring.  However, in our most primitive places, we know that nothing begins anew without an end.   In the Christian tradition, Easter celebrates the Resurrection, but first you must have the Passion and the Death.  The legend of the Phoenix speaks of a bird reborn – from the ashes of failure.

Goldie was in my head today, because in many ways, she was the beginning.  My first horse: ornery, beautiful, challenging, dangerous, and loving – she taught me to accept pain and persist, that stubbornness could be a virtue, and that I was worth following – almost anywhere.  That spring that I let my mare and her aching joints and failing organs sink into the ground, I was also  letting the things of my childhood pass away, exchanging memories for motherhood, shifting friendships into adult status, working through old hurts and insecurities, finding my footing in a job that had been a bold adventure.

As that job ends, and as I let its bones sink into the soil, it is easy to forget how new and scary clinical medicine was, easy to forget the huge leap of returning to a field that I hadn’t touched since graduating vet school five years before.  The terror of cutting living tissue for the first time in years, and doing so without a protective net of residents and clinicians hovering over my shoulders, has receded.  The humiliating, soul-crushing pain of the first angry phone call from a client has dimmed with time and familiarity.  As clients called, hugged, and left tearful cards yesterday, it was strange to remember my first months in the practice, months when people asked “Isn’t there anyone else?” when they discovered that their appointment was with the new, woman vet, months when I heard, “You’re not Tom!” every time I stepped out of my truck.  As Lana and I headed out on our last ambulatory call last night, the last time a truck would leave that parking lot to treat an animal, memory hit.

It was late spring, blossoms on trees had given way to unfurled leaves, emerald grasses were streaking gold along the tips.  Cattle lowed in the corral behind us, and the smell of dust, oiled metal, and anxiety blew across the gravel drive.  The wife of the rancher looked at me, “I suppose you’re only going to treat horses.”  It wasn’t a question.

“Nope.  I’ll treat anything with hooves!”  I forced myself not to cross my arms or straighten my shoulders, shoved my body back into the sideways slouch of those who wear boots for a living.

She looked at Lana – poor Lana, torn between the automatic defense of “The Doctor,” a defense tattooed upon her brain in technician school, and the reality of her experience of a revolving door of associates – “So, how long is this,” the chin bobbed toward me, “one going to last?”

Lana hesitated, “I give every one of them a year.  Then we’ll see.”

I had originally given myself a year, but these words committed me to making this job work, to staying longer, to prove that I could do it.  That was May, 2001.

Yesterday, as Lana and I pulled out of the parking lot, I giggled and looked over at her, “Should we call Kathy and tell her I went down with the ship?”

A grin shoved its way past Lana’s tears.  “You sure made it past that year.”

I made it through that first year and through each of the subsequent nine largely because of Lana.  I haven’t written enough about our technician, my friend.  And I’m not sure how to.  Lana taught me the parts of my job that the university never mentioned.  How to drive a stick shift; how to remove a lariat rope from the neck of a rank steer without breaking fingers; that it is possible to finish gelding a horse as he recovers prematurely from anesthesia (“Just cut faster!”); that someone who has never been able to hear my voice could spend a decade reading my lips, and when she couldn’t see them, would read my mind.  Lana is the one person who, no matter how bad the situation (and some have been very bad indeed), would say to me quietly, “You can do it.  I have great faith in you.”  And because she did, I did.

The closure of the large animal clinic is removing the only job Lana has known in 25 years.  And so, she is going into the small animal practice, to be a surgery technician, using skills largely untapped in that quarter century.  She will be working in surgery – in a room full of people whose faces are covered by blue paper masks.  Lana reads lips.  But, I know that she will find a way to read their minds.  I know she can do it.  I have great faith in her.

Spring – new life, renewal, transition.  Death precedes new life.  Yesterday, I was Dr. Corp, the vet.  Today I am a writer.  I remain a veterinarian, and I have always been a writer, but there is a palpable shift into the unknown.  The writer sees pages of complete, edited text behind me, and reams of blank white ahead.  The trick is to remember that the chapters of the past decade were once empty paper. 

Transition: The Last Weekend

The last weekend.  For ten years, I have spend anywhere from a quarter to half of my weekends “on call”: working and often away from home.  As a family, we learned early the folly of making plans on those weekends.  The best illustration of the sort of comedy of errors that could erupt came one Sunday morning at brunch.  We were scraping the last bites of French toast through syrup; I was wiping the foam of my latte from my lip when the phone rang.  A neurologic, rabies- suspect patient of mine had just died.  I closed the phone and said to Mike, “The donkey died.  I need to go.”

Not missing a beat, my husband hailed the waitress, and spoke the words that live in infamy to this day.  “Can we get the check?  My wife has to go decapitate a donkey.”

This is the last of those weekends, the last ‘we can’t make any plans, Christy is on call’ weekend.  After 5:00pm Monday, our clinic doors will close, and we will each walk away to different lives.  That’s the strange part for me, not my transition into a new career, but the knowledge that the whole thing will be gone.  In the past, when I have left a job, the business, the entity, remained behind, replacing me and continuing its daily work.  I find this sense of complete annihilation unnerving.

Recently, I was talking about this concept of transition vs. ending with a friend.  I tried to explain that while I’m generally pro-transition, I hate endings.  Not unreasonably, my friend asked, “How are they different for you?”

I couldn’t explain myself then, and I’m still not sure that I can.  I think it has to do with the difference between an individual and a concept.  I accept that for me, the individual, this is a transition.  I will move from veterinary medicine into writing, struggle, and grow.  But the concept, the entity that was my job, will vanish. 

This is the part of the discussion where my friend pointed out that all of the pieces remain: clients, animals, co-workers.  None of them are being wiped from the face of the earth – well, not unless I have any euthanasias scheduled in the next four days.  The individuals involved in this entity that has been our clinic are not ending, they are transitioning.  True.

For me, though, a composite relationship like this becomes its own entity, a synergistic being – more than the sum of those parts.  When the parts are detached, each reverts to its natural state, and something, the synergy is lost. 

So many pieces have made up this whole: stumbling to my truck half-asleep beneath the cold stars; foals slithering onto fresh straw; a decomposing calf delivered by pieces into a blackberry thicket as my second-trimester stomach threatened to rebel; our technician saying, “Do we want a little more sedation, maybe?” in the tone of voice that really means, “If you don’t stick some more drugs in this crazy-ass horse, this time I will walk away and let you die”; the same technician saying, “I have great faith in you,” because she never would walk away; our office manager calling with a “situation”, but rearranging my schedule by some mysterious alchemy to accommodate the situation; clients asking, “should I be worried yet?”; the folded invoices clipped to my message board telling me that someone is very unhappy with the bill, unhappy with my work, or just hates my sense of humor; the inevitable midnight pygmy goat C-sections where entire families unload from the pickup, parents wearing the expression that tells their sullen kids, ‘this stupid goat is your 4-H project and if I have to be here, so do you’; the client who brings me bags of alpaca fleece; the cowboy who can’t comprehend that I won’t finish our appointment by joining him in a beer (Sorry, but the secret truth, is that I hate Coors light!); the client who, after listening, watching carefully, and making me write detailed instructions, goes home and applies the layers of the horse’s bandage in exactly the wrong order;  the “good” clients who have called us out once in three years, but who solicit advice over the phone every few months; the clients who would sacrifice everything  (including house, spouse, and children) to care for their animals; people waiting to give detailed histories until I have my stethoscope jammed in my ears; farriers who show up by uncanny magic exactly when needed…

The pieces are myriad and, in some part of my mind, inextricable.  A family is more than the sum of its component members.  It is a web of interactions: good, bad, ugly, humorous, tragic, and uncertain.  In my mind, at least, this workplace, this practice has been a family.  Each of us will transition into a new phase, but those interactions will be lost. 

Yet, that isn’t entirely true, and I see the flaw as I type.  Memory.  Humans learn and grow from memory and experiences, and none of those are undone.  Maybe my friend was right, maybe the difference between end and transition is less than I would think.  Damn!  I hate it when I’m wrong…

Madness. Sense. Expectations.

Much Madness is divinest Sense --

To a discerning Eye --

Much Sense -- the starkest Madness --

'Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail --

Assent -- and you are sane --

Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --

And handled with a Chain --

--Emily Dickinson

 

Shhh….I’m going to tell you a secret.   Try not to be too shocked.  Ok, are you ready?  Here it is: Our society has different expectations for women than for men.  Oh, goodness, are you okay?  I didn’t mean to just spring it on you like that.  I’m sorry.  I know what you’re thinking: ‘Really?  We haven’t figured it out by now?  Suffrage?  Women’s lib?’  No, sorry, the car has not pulled into the parking place.  The ignition hasn’t been turned off.  We’re not there yet.

I realize that you’re still reeling from the first blow, but sit down -- I have another one for you.  Art, of any kind, is a hobby, not a career.  Adults are supposed to have a practical plan, a secure career.  Then, in a well regulated fashion, they may indulge these dangerous whims.

The preceding paragraphs do have a unifying element – other than sarcasm.  Emily Dickinson had it right.  Humans take comfort in conformity.  We like the expected.  We label, identify, and categorize.  If we can label a thing, we must therefore know its nature, and thus, it is safe. 

Children are permitted to dream.  We tell our children, “You can grow up to be anything you want.”  We encourage them to ‘reach for the stars,’ to have heroes, to pursue their passions.  And, then we expect the dream to stop. 

Somewhere, 4^th, 5^th grade, perhaps, we begin to shift our children’s focus from the stars to more serious pursuits.  We no longer encourage them to believe that they can become astronauts, dancers, actors, painters, and star athletes.  After all, those shining spots in the firmament belong to a select few.  The rest of us toil in the earth.

We tell our girls, “You can have it all.  You can grow up to do anything a boy can do.”  We tell them the lie we want to believe.  While letting our daughters play with Barbies and discouraging them from joining the boys in their climbing, muddy war games, we tell them that they can compete with men on an equal footing – so long as they look pretty, and don’t act too pushy.  We tell them, “You can have a career, family, or both.  You are lucky.  Your generation can have whatever it wants.”  We don’t throw the switch until later, until a woman enters her 30s.  Then we begin the delicate (and not so delicate) probing into her reproductive plans.  I have yet to meet a childless woman over the age of 30 who has not been subjected to a battery of questions and comments regarding her lack of motherhood.  We tell our daughters that they can have a successful career and be good mothers.  At least, we tell them that until the baby crowns.  Once the sheets flood with amniotic fluid, the conversation shifts to the importance of maternal bonding, to the risks of working mothers to every facet of a child’s physical, emotional, and mental well-being. 

In the late 1980s-early90s, science was the career choice.  Those lucky enough to possess a decent aptitude for the sciences or for finance were assured the golden ticket – a safe, lucrative, permanent career.  Those who chose a liberal arts degree were guaranteed a position in food-services as a fried-potato engineer.  Being a good girl, and being blessed with an adequate, if only barely adequate, scientific mind, I chose the sensible path.  Writing was for dreamers, but veterinary medicine was a career.  Don’t get me wrong: I love animals, I love working with people, and I have been blessed to have a magnificently challenging and rewarding career for a number of years.  However, I have come to believe that while nothing worthwhile is easy, fighting to squish oneself into a shape that fits a mold is a sure sign that the mold is not the correct one.

Like the stepsisters in Cinderella, throughout vet school, I bound, stretched, and lopped off parts of myself in order to make the role of ‘vet student’ fit.  My stories and poems retreated from paper back into my skull while I memorized nerve pathways and formulae I have never used in practice.  Yet, like the blood seeping out of the glass slipper, the writer in my head had a way of oozing into my life.  Need a flyer?  I’ll write it.  Newsletter?  Ask Christy.  Educational handout?  I’m on it. 

When I began working in large animal medicine 10 years ago, the questions from clients said everything one needed to know about gender expectation.  “How long is this one going to last,” the ranch wife asked my technician after pointedly appraising me.  “Oh, is that the woman?  There’s no one else available?” was always my favorite telephone call.  “They sent you to pull that calf?”  The elderly dairyman wasn’t about to pull any punches.  As I proved myself willing to dig in, working through first one, then a second pregnancy, the gender comments diminished over the years.  Diminished, but didn’t evaporate completely.  

I think the award for all-time best I-can’t-believe-he-actually-said-that goes to a horse breeder of a certain age.  He and I were discussing an associate that had just started with the practice.  The man looked thoughtful after I assured him that the new doctor was a wonderful vet, and said, “Well, at least Tom hired a man this time.” (!)

Gender image is generally a bit more subtle than this.  I saw it most commonly when returning from maternity leave.  “Oh, we’re so glad to have you back!”  Then, in almost the same breath, “Wait.  Where’s your baby?”  Paradox: a veterinarian should be practicing; a new mother belonged with her baby.  The fact that both occupied the same body seemed to create a quandary.  Note that not one person ever asked my husband following the birth of any of our children, “why aren’t you with your baby?”

These sets of societal expectations have converged in my mind recently as I bid farewell to long term clients.  Naturally, the clients whose animals I have treated for so many years want to know where I will be going, what I will be doing once the practice closes.  My admission that I lack the resources to set out in practice for myself tends to be met with understanding nods.  Any delusions people once had about the wealth of veterinarians have cracked in the past year or two.  But the nods turn to looks of condescension or consternation when I explain that I have been freelance writing part time and intend to turn that into a full-time career.  Writing is an oddball ‘hobby’ for a vet, and it seems incomprehensible that someone would jettison a “practical” career for a risky venture like writing.  Then I say the magic words and relief sweeps across the other person’s face.  “Well, I’ve spent a huge chunk of my children’s lives on call and away from home, and as they get older, they probably deserve to have me around more.”  One sentence shifted me from flighty dreamer to good mother.

Madness: I am changing careers.  I am quitting private practice and starting a freelance writing business.  Sense: I am losing my job due to the economy, taking some time to be with my children, and doing some writing. 

Madness.  Sense.  I guess it all depends upon the discernment of one’s eye.  But, I know this:  the other day when Aidan said something about his future as a pro-football player, I opened my mouth to remark on the slim odds for becoming a professional athlete.  Then, I looked into a mirror.  My sensible path has turned out to be as much illusion as any dream.  I closed my mouth, smiled, and said, “That’s great, Bud!”

Hannibal ante portus

Broken boards dangle from the fence.  Gaps, like missing teeth, lie among the rows of bottles on the shelves.  My work boots went into the trash last week, uppers yawning away from the sole, swallowing mud over the tongue of my foot.  It feels like the last days of Rome as we finish out these final few weeks at the clinic in the knowledge that our era has ended, that we have lost, and the invaders have conquered the city.  Hannibal ante portus.  “Hannibal is at our gates.”

There are no elephants.  Elephants would be cool.  Instead, we simply opened the gates to “pink-slip” e-mails stating what was already known: essentially, ‘Large Animal is closing, and since you were unique, there is no place for you in the company.  We wish you the best.’  I wonder if this is what happens to politicians in the lame-duck period.  Do things begin to fall apart?  Does no one refill the stapler?  Is it hard to sort through the in-box or to go to ribbon-cuttings that are so ill-timed as to require the presence of the walking dead?  My truck could stand to be cleaned.  But there seems to be so little point.  Of our fleet of three, only one truck is operational at this point, and a colleague and I rotate it between us on our alternating days.  I could pull everything out, scrub and organize it, but by the next day that I work, it will again be “all humble-jumbled” as Sierra would say.  And so I content myself with taking out the trash, scooping up the syringe case that has rolled and jammed beneath the pull out drawers, and periodically scrubbing the instruments and buckets.

The pillaging and looting have begun as well.  The phone calls are changing tone.  Now, there is less mourning and more people looking to “stock up on supplies” or refill prescriptions, “before you close.”  ‘Where were you six months ago,’ we want to ask.  I received a card yesterday from a sometime client, telling me what an asset I have been to the community and how much I will be missed.  It would have been heartwarming, but for the fact that this particular person, by her own admission, routinely used other practitioners and only called us in emergencies, when none of her cronies were available.  We have had angry phone calls from people wanting to know who they are supposed to call now in the middle of the night since we were the only practice they could reach at those hours.   Clients who scorn routine work and pride themselves on only calling a vet “when it’s really bad” are crushed that we will no longer be available.  Again, I want to say, “Where were you?  How did you think we would earn a living?” 

I don’t ask.  It’s not their fault.  We bent over backwards trying to accommodate everyone: answered every phone call, squeezed in clients at all hours, complicating our own schedules even for cases that could have waited for the next open appointment.  We hadn’t raised prices in nearly five years, assuming that we were doing our clients a favor.  We dispensed hours of free advice over the phone.  We didn’t show that we valued ourselves.  In retrospect, how could we have thought that this attitude would make others value us?

And yet… All of this makes me sound bitter.  And some part of me is; I think bitterness is part of the process, part of the grief.  And yet, sometimes, there are moments like yesterday.  Moments in which, while being appreciated, I realize that appreciation was never my job.  It’s easy to forget, in the midst of anger, sorrow, and loss, that my job was never to be appreciated, nor to be loved or lauded.  My job was to make things better.  

I had two calls on the book yesterday.  The first looks straightforward in writing.  Three horses to vaccinate.  Dread dragged my feet; I stalled leaving the office as long as I could.  I know these three horses.  One is old, no problem.  And then there are the other two.  Both had been donated to this non-profit by a well meaning owner who had spoiled them until they became dangerous. 

One, the gelding, I have known since he was a foal.  In fact, I gelded him.  I suspect he holds a grudge.  Along the way, he learned to rear and strike when things aren’t going his way.  Apparently his previous owner thought that this was a cute trick.  It may have been cute in a 200 lb foal (personally, I think not), but it is downright lethal in a 1300 lb adult horse.  He isn’t needle shy in the truest sense.  He simply doesn’t like being messed with and doesn’t like the vet.  He and I have reached an arrangement over the years.  Once I take his lead rope from the ranch manager and we go for a walk, it is established that I am the boss mare, and then generally vaccination proceeds without incident.  However, part of his game involves trying to pull away as the handler passes the lead rope to me.  Yesterday, thanks to a 12’ lead, we moved past that stage smoothly.  Our routine then involves me asking him to walk, back, and turn.  I mix up the order and repeat the steps until I feel that his attention is engaged.  Then I pet and play with his face and neck until he allows me to take the roll of skin just in front of the shoulder in a move we refer to as a “neck twitch.”  Neck twitching a horse doesn’t hurt.  It provides a means of control, and in many cases, I have watched horses lower their heads and relax their ears as they are neck twitched.  With this particular gelding, typically, once I have a hold on him, he never even acknowledges the needle.  Unfortunately, since I am right handed, I use my left hand to grasp the roll of skin, and my right hand to inject the vaccine.  My left hand is the one that I broke this summer.  Yesterday, in the chill wind, I could feel my metacarpal ache, seemingly at every screw.  I lost hold of the neck twitch between shots.  Sure enough, my friend the gelding pulled away, and reared.  Repeat process.

With him vaccinated, we turned our attention to his “sibling.”  Now, the mare is barely trained – what we call green-broke.  And she is truly needle-phobic.  Not only does she feel the needle, she reacts violently to the sensation.  And, joy, oh, joy, she has the same escape mechanism as her partner.  Rear, and flail.  We try the usual desensitizing steps.  No go.  The neck twitch does not relax her.  She simply realizes that it is a prelude to the dreaded shot.  Finally, I rub her face, rubbing over her closed eyelid, and with her vision obscured, inject her neck in one quick jab.  She pulls away as I withdraw syringe and needle.  Great.  Vaccine done.  Wonderful, except that she is due for two.  She’s onto me now, and the challenge of giving the second shot is magnified.  Eventually, we get the job done.  The old gelding is a piece of cake.

As I walk back to the truck, the ranch manager and I chat about the closure of the practice.  He seems truly sorry, and there’s this weird sense of something floating between us.  A giant elephant painted with the words “LAST TIME” walks between us, and neither knows how to address it. I’ve seen this elephant a lot lately.  I want some good parting words, something meaningful, but not sappy.  And yet, we aren’t friends, not really, just Dr. and client.  But, Dr./client doesn’t cover the relationship we have had.  And thus, the elephant.  The ranch manager looks at me.  “Do you like Divinity?  The candy?”

I smile and he makes a dash for his truck.  Returning, he presses a plastic wrapped box into my hands.  I give him a slanted hug – awkward for us both, and dive into my truck, biting back tears.

My next call is a sadder one.  A young steer has gone down, as the result of a leg injury sustained some weeks ago.  The owner had been trying to manage on his own, with advice from a nearby vet, but the steer has continued to deteriorate, and the owner, not a “real rancher,” confesses to our office manager that he can’t bear the thought of shooting the animal himself.

Sure enough, when I finally crest the hill of his long driveway – after passing two lurking CHP cars, missing the driveway, and attempting to find a safe place to turn around on the rolling, two-lane highway – the gentleman is almost pathetically relieved to see me.  Given his house, hair, and bearing, I suspect that he is or was a businessman, and sure enough, a few sentences reveal that he has come to ranching late in life.  He shows me the steer, asking without asking, if he is making the right choice.  He is.  The animal has shed at least 150 lbs from the pre-injury weight that the owner describes, and of course he has lain down in the lowest corner of the paddock, in the slickest mud.  I climb over the panel fence, bashing a shin as my clay-slimed boot slips on the rail, and kneel next to the steer as the owner asks questions that he doesn’t want to sound nervous.  Do I have to hit a vein?  Will we need to halter the steer?  What’s the discharge from his eyes?  Do I think he’s started to develop pneumonia? Yes. No. Infection.  Probably.

I climb back over the panels and under the oak branches, retrieving from my truck: a pair of clippers, two IV catheters (if you grab two, the first one will work), a stethoscope (more signs of the fall of Rome – one earpiece is missing), and 60 cc of pentobarbital.  60cc is excessive; 35 would have done the job.  However, when it comes to euthanasia, overkill (pardon the pun) is no bad thing.  I explain the process to the owner, using words that are their own script, slide the catheter into the vein, and inject.  Seconds later, the flanks stop moving; the muscles stiffen and then relax.  I check for heartbeat and corneal response – none and none. 

My client has changed, even as his steer exhaled the last breath.  I can feel the exhale of relief, the sense of pulling together in the man.  He takes the clippers from my hand and offers to assist me over the fence.  His sense of normalcy, of control is returning.  As he asks a few more questions, probing for my thoughts as to what happened to the steer and what he could/should have done differently. 

This is what matters in the end, in these last days.  It doesn’t matter that some of my patients may have been unruly.  It doesn’t matter that the owner of the steer consulted with another practitioner throughout the injury, only calling me in the end.  What matters is that somewhere along the line, someone’s life is returned to normal: horses are vaccinated, suffering is ended.   What matters is the work.

To Be Missed... And Lessons Learned

In Friday’s post, I touched on some of the less, shall we say, savory aspects of veterinary medicine, the things I will not miss (at least not while they happen.)  That was the bitter; today I give you the sweet.  I’ll try to stay to the edge of cloying.

I will miss the colors of the sunset shifting between the naked branches of valley oaks as I head back to the clinic after my last call.  I will miss the egrets rising out of the rice stubble in the wetlands as I head across the causeway in the morning, letting my coffee warm my hand as the heater kicks in.

I will miss the smell of fresh shavings, of golden straw, of slightly dusty horse.  I will miss the smell of silage on the dairies.  And yes, I’ll even miss the manure smells.

I will miss the incredible frustration of waiting for a foal to take its first drink of colostrum.  I’ll miss the urge to grab the wobbly head and stick it onto the mare’s teat.  I’ll miss the softening of a mare’s eyes as she turns to her new baby.

I will miss the endorphin surge from accomplishments gained only after forcing “heart and nerve and sinew to serve their turn long after they have gone.”  The feeling of pulling a calf or foal, of placing the last sutures in the skin after a successful surgery – those are senses of accomplishment that will never leave me.  Nor will the joy of watching a horse that I’ve monitored on fluids through the night eat its first bites of grass with gusto.

I will miss the feel of hair, hide, or wool beneath my palm, the beat of a heart through the tubes of my stethoscope.  I will miss soft lips wibbling my hand, hay-breath blown into my nostrils.

And most of all, I will miss the people.  I will miss the offers to “stop by the house when you’re in the area.”  I have had clients offer the use of kitchen and bathroom while I’m on my rounds.  “Don’t worry if we’re not home,” they say.  “Just come in the back way.”  I’ve never taken anyone up on this; I guess I’m not really a country girl, but I will miss that sense of hospitality.  I will miss the obvious things like the cookies and breads, the ornaments at Christmas, the thank-you cards and pictures.  But, I will also miss the things more obscure: the circled ‘C’ in the upper left hand corner of an appointment that says that the client requested me; the less orthodox gifts such as the packet of lamb chops pressed into my hand after euthanizing a goat, or the children’s book about a pig with the same name as the pig I had just euthanized; the bag of tomatoes and fresh eggs on the front seat of my truck. 

I will miss the delicious and unexpected details of my clients’ lives: the taciturn dairyman I overheard telling his herdsman that his favorite place was the café of a chain bookstore because he liked to watch the people while he drank his coffee and read; or the bear-like, ‘good ol boy’ cowboy talking about playing golf with the grin on his face that said he knew perfectly well our brains were tying themselves in knots picturing him on the links.  I’ll miss the leather-faced, no-nonsense reining trainer who paints and reads fantasy novels in her spare time.  I’ll miss the tiny, bent, apple-faced woman who has spent a lifetime raising kids of both kinds – goats and over a hundred foster children.

I will miss the clients who, when I first drove onto their ranches, looked askance at the new “lady vet” and wondered “how long’s this one going to last,” but who now never fail to ask about my children.  Along the way, my kids became the practice’s kids.  Aidan and Sierra were both born while I was working here.  For a while I was known as “the vet who’s always pregnant.”  Caitlin used to ride with me during school vacations.  She has held a sheep’s prolapsed uterus while I stitched a tear, she has lost boots to the mud, and wiped a newly delivered calf with a towel.  I will miss sharing with my children that sense that real work involves blood, dirt, and sweat, life and death, that work is more than words on a page or numbers in a spreadsheet. 

This has been more than a job; it has been work – grueling, exhausting, frightening, exhilarating work.  My quote earlier in this post comes from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.”  “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve their turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you, except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’…”  Like most of the writing of the era of British colonialism, the poem as a whole is a testament to a bygone time, with a typically male chauvinistic conclusion.  Yet, despite this, or perhaps because of it, “If” is a fitting testament to work that has historically been male in a region where a way of life is fast disappearing.  I will miss those who taught me the lessons of this poem through the lives that they live every day.  There is no effort that goes more unsung in our society than that of those who raise the crops and animals that become our food.  For your reading pleasure, here is the poem in its entirety. 

If

By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

 

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;

If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken

And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

I Will Not Miss...

At the risk of appearing unsympathetic, cold-hearted, etc., I’m going to take the bold step of using this post to reflect upon the things I am unlikely to miss during my hiatus from large animal medicine.  Bear with me, the next post will wallow in sap as I list the things I have loved.  So, if you like a little bite to your morning coffee, stick around for this post, if you are a hot chocolate with whipped cream type, come back in a day or two.

I will not miss the mud.  Winter in the Central Valley can be described with two nouns: mud, and fog.  Winter penetrates with a grey cold that seeps into your bones and sucks you into an endless slime of slick clay.  I doubt that I will miss having my boots sucked from my feet as I struggle to find a vein in the mud-balled, shaggy neck of a down horse, or the futility of exhausting myself trying to extract that horse from the mud.

I will not miss uterine prolapses.  There is nothing fun in trying to replace a uterus that has turned inside out following delivery of a calf, lamb, or foal.  Well nothing fun unless you enjoy trying to shove a sleeping bag filled with blood soaked oatmeal back through a 3” PVC pipe.  Oh, and someone on the other end of the pipe is pushing back, and the sleeping bag is made of really old silk, and you’re lying on your belly in a pool of blood, manure, and fetal fluids.

I will not miss 2 A.M.  Nothing good happens at two o’clock in the morning.  No one calls you out of bed into that black chill when nothing works for something easy.  Those witching hour calls almost always involve blood, death, and a whole lot of physical effort.

I will not miss Bangs vaccination.  The immunization of female cattle against Brucella abortus or “Bangs’ disease” is essential to the protection of human and animal health, and is boring as hell.  Line up a bunch of heifers.  Inject 2 cc of vaccine under the skin.  Tattoo ear.  Tag ear.  Fill out forms.  Repeat.  My hands ache just thinking about it.

I will not miss people who want their animal cured via telephone.  Nor will I miss their cousins, the folks who seem to think that anyone can do what a vet does if they have the right drugs. 

I will not miss pigs.  Have you ever tried to examine a screaming blimp?  Welcome to swine medicine.  And the smell never, ever comes off your shoes.

I will not miss bad foalings.  There are only two types of foal-delivery calls: the kind where we arrive to find that the foal has slithered out of the mare while we were driving, and the kind that descend into a nightmare.  I will not miss the backbreaking labor, the fear in the eyes of my clients, and the feral, white-eyed pain of the mare. 

I will not miss euthanasia.  I won’t miss the vision burned into my brain of blue liquid in a syringe, injected by my hand, of dilating pupils and lip-curled, grey-gummed agonal gasps.

I will miss none of these things, and I will miss every instant, every bruise, cut, black-eye, and strained muscle.  I will miss none of these things and I will so deeply miss the people, animals and stories that go with them that I can barely fathom a life without this work.  We joke that our worst days make the best stories later, and now, in these end days of this job, these are the stories that fill my mind.



Ass-U-Me

Q: “What happens when you assume?”

A: “You make an ass out of u and me.”

Ok, yes, I know, this is an ancient joke, growing mold and pink slimy tentacles, but there is a point.  Yesterday afternoon, I gelded a donkey.  Now, anyone who has spent any time around the ass end of an ass knows that assumption is literally dangerous.  Taking a donkey for granted is a sure way to get one’s brains liberated from one’s skull.  However, even the most prudent of us often forget to extend the same courtesy and caution toward our fellow humans.

Recently, an essay I wrote on the closure of our large animal practice was published on Salon.com.  Now, here’s the thing with me and pieces I publish on-line, particularly essays.  I don’t read comments.  (By the way, that is not true of comments posted on this blog or at my website – those I read.)  I don’t read comments because, to me, essay writing is deeply personal, and while I may be able to make myself walk outside naked (it’s a metaphor, people!), I am not willing to stick around and listen to analysis of my cellulite.  However, by accident, I happened to glance at one of the comments on this essay, and while it was fairly obvious that the commenter is one of those mean-spirited people who crop up on the web, determined to make themselves feel better by haranguing others, something he said stuck with me. 

This commenter began by stating that he found it “interesting” that nowhere in my essay nor on my blog did I write anything about my love of animals.  The conclusion that was apparently reached was that I must not care about animals and thus went into veterinary medicine for all of the wrong reasons and “good riddance” to me.  My first reaction was that this line of reasoning was so preposterous as to be laughable.  After all, this person knows nothing about me, or the path of my life.  But then, I started to ponder the net of assumptions that led to this comment.

He wasn’t wrong.  I haven’t done a careful search of my archives, but it is quite possible that I have never written that I love animals.  For that matter, I’m not sure that I’ve ever explicitly written that I love my husband or my children.  This is assumption number one: I have assumed that these are conditions that are self evident.  It no more would have occurred to me to write any of these statements than it would have to type the phrase “I breathe.”  I assumed that anyone should understand that no sane person would endure the amount of education required to become a veterinarian, or the physical labor, long hours, and punishing weather inherent to large animal medicine without a love of animals.  This is neither glamorous nor particularly lucrative work, and I assumed that everyone knew that. 

My assumptions were in their own way just as callous and self-centered as those of the commenter.  Why should anyone know what I feel or what my motives are if I don’t express them?  It is my right to keep those thoughts to myself, but if I choose that route, I don’t have the right to be outraged when someone misunderstands me.  It may go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, this logic extends to more than passing internet remarks.  How often do we get offended with others for misjudging or misunderstanding us, or for failing to meet our needs when we have not let those people into our minds, when we have never expressed our needs or feelings?

Conversely, how often are we guilty of the same “piece of the elephant” logic as my commenter, assuming that we understand the entire picture from a fragmentary snapshot?  The most obvious contributor to this error in judgment is our abundance of social media.  With Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates, blogs, and texts, it is easy to make the error of assuming that we know the whole story, that we understand everyone from our dearest friends to complete strangers.  How often do we pass judgment based on what we assume that we know?  Even in person, how often do we assume that we understand the motivation for someone else’s comments or actions?  Do we bother to ask that person’s intent?  Do we bother to find out what else is happening in that person’s life, if they are hurt, frightened or stressed?

Assumption is easy.  It allows us to feel knowledgeable without ever having to venture beyond the walls of our own anxieties and concerns.  Reaching past that bubble is terrifying.  We might learn that we aren’t as smart as we think we are.  We might learn secrets about ourselves, or we might discover the humanity of others.  Dropping assumption means that we have to accept the black hole of uncertainty and ignorance.  We might find that the elephant is neither snake, nor fan, nor blade, but a giant and dangerous animal.

I don’t write about some of the things most basic to my life because like breathing, they are complex, deep, and essential to my existence.  And like with breathing, if I analyze them too closely, I might forget how they work.  However, and it does not go without saying, I love the animals that have been my livelihood for over a decade, I love my husband, I love my children, I love my parents, my sister, my brother-in-law, the few dear friends I have let past my barriers…Ok, you get the point.

 

Love Letter Eulogy

It’s been nearly fifteen years since I first saw the practice.  I was working in vaccine industry research. I was tired to death of the cycle of injection, blood sample, observation, and statistical analysis, and the narrow yellow building with its neat little arena, soft lawns, and white veterinary trucks parked alongside, looked like something close to paradise.  I dropped off the milk samples for analysis by the microbiology laboratory tucked into a corner of the large animal clinic, sighed at the trucks with their packs full of everything I had given up, and headed back to my spreadsheets.  “I wish I worked here,” I mumbled as I got into my car.

Five years later, I had left the vaccine company, and was on month 8 of a year-long experiment in stay-at-home motherhood.  I had spent the bulk of that year in a house in the middle of nowhere with a toddler and a mother-in-law with a recent knee replacement.  I needed to go back to work.   When the phone call came, everything clicked into place.  “This is Tom Zehnder of Bradshaw Veterinary Clinic.  I got your name from the AVMA matching service.  Are you still looking for a job?”

I explained that I was still looking, and that I would love to work at his practice, but that I had been away from clinical practice for five years, essentially since graduation, and that I lived over an hour from the clinic, so I wasn’t sure how it could work. 

“Oh, well, we’ll figure something out.  You can ride with me for a month or so, and we’ll figure something out for the on-call situation.  Why don’t you come down, and we’ll talk.”

What I hadn’t realized at the time was that the shortage of large animal practitioners was so acute, and my future boss so desperate for an associate, that he would have taken any warm body with a valid veterinary license.  But, we suited, the practice and I, and I agreed to give it a try, to try the commute -- “for a year or so,” I told my husband.

“A year or so,” the standard run for a new associate, particularly in large animal practice.  Most of us, after that year, purchase a used pack for a used truck and go into practice for ourselves or transfer into the more lucrative and less hazardous world of small animal medicine.  But, there was something no one told me.  At some point, my positions stopped being a job and became membership into a community.

I can’t tell you when the shift happened.  Was it the first time a tearful client pressed a packet of cookies into my hands after I euthanized her horse?  (Over the years, whenever I return home with a gift or food from a client, Mike asks, “So, what did you kill this time?”)  Was it when Lana, our amazing technician finally loosened the technician-doctor boundary enough to tease me about my incompetence with the ancient stick-shift truck?  (The thing was missing 3^rd gear, and 1^st only went to about 5 mph on a good day.)  Was it the first time a rancher called and actually asked for “the lady vet?”  (I am, and I suspect will forever be, ‘The Corriente Queen of the Northern San Joaquin.’)  Was it when a client gave me a handmade baby quilt just before I went on maternity leave?  (Incidentally, the best way for a woman to prove that she can work in a man’s world is not only to do everything the guys do, but to do it while pregnant – see the Corriente Queen title, for example.)

I don’t know when I became a part of the community into which our practice has been so deeply embedded for over 30 years.  There are a lot of landmarks in a decade.  But, I have watched children grow from grade-schoolers to college students.  I have listened to clients as their jobs failed, their marriages disintegrated.  I have consoled them in times of loss and congratulated them on triumphs.  I have cooed over new babies, and offered sympathy to the newly widowed. 

Large animal medicine, particularly the sort of mixed, ambulatory ranch work that we do, creates a deep bond between veterinarian and client.  We do not rotate patients through our exam room at 7-15 minute intervals.  Our average appointment lasts an hour, and we frequently travel to our patients, often visiting our clients’ homes.  I can tell you who the obsessive housekeepers are, whose horses live in greater luxury than the owners, who collects which sort of memorabilia, whose children need extra tutoring, and whose teen recently wrecked the pickup.

This is a love letter of sorts, to a place where I found a job and a home; to people who welcomed me, who put up with my inadequacies and foibles, and gave me space to grow; to Sheila whose voice fills me with dread when she calls to apprise me of a “situation,” but who works her butt off every time to help remedy that situation; to Lana, who carried me through my first few months in clinical practice with her endless tact and boundless knowledge, saving me from more mistakes than I care to contemplate, and who always has “great faith” in me; and to Tom, who gave me that shot nearly ten years ago to “see how it goes.”  It is a love letter to my patients, to the wounds I have sutured, to the newborns I have delivered, to the colics I have treated in the dark and in the rain; to my failures, the ones I was too late, not smart enough, or not lucky enough to save.  It is a love letter to my clients: to Mel, once my tech, always my friend, and the person I call for everything under the sun because she always “knows someone;” to Al, farrier and friend, who loves me because I didn’t sew up his horse, and whose gift for gab is un-thwarted even by a broken jaw; to Marc, who made me what I am “The Corriente Queen of the Northern San Joaquin; to Lynn and Chuck, who never complain, always follow instructions, and who have taught me that the truth usually lies between two viewpoints; to Tina who manages the people and horses of Project R.I.D.E. with perpetual calm and a terrific smile; to another Tina with her “woolly mammoth” cattle, who never lets me out of the driveway without a 15 minute chat, diesel running or no; to Fred, who remembers the lost art of civil debate, and that agreement is never necessary to intelligent discourse; to Joe, who always knows how to find me when there is an emergency, and who will get me the name of the horse and the owner – sooner or later; to Elaine, who has a cure for everything and who never gives up on anything; to so many people, the list wanders into the hundreds as their faces flash into my mind.  This is a love letter to them all, to all of those whose lives have touched mine in so many ways.

The phone calls began on Friday, as people received their letters.  Some tearful, some optimistic, some angry, others frightened, some have rotated through all these emotions and more, as we all process the inevitability of our new reality.  You see, this is also a eulogy.  After February 28, the large animal side of our practice will exist no more.  Our little group, in the office “out back” will be disbanded.  Like any terminal illness, this one has been hard fought, and a long time coming.  But, it turns out that livestock medicine is not recession-proof, and the practice that once supported 5 full-time doctors has been struggling to carry three of us part-time.

“What are you going to do?”  I prepared for this question during the interval week between learning that my job was evaporating and the official notification to the clients.  My answer still feels inadequate.  Of course, after speaking to a few people, I begin to realize that my discomfort lies not with my plans, but with the uneasy sense that I am somehow abandoning those who have come to depend on me.  My answer is not the one they wanted to hear. 

I have neither capital nor credit to purchase my own pack and supplies and begin my own practice.  Nor, at 40, with aching joints, many a night spent waiting for the phone to ring, and many, many hours spent away from my family, do I want to segue into the life of a solo practitioner.  Looking back at my last couple of years, I get the sense that the universe is shoving me in a different direction.  Either that, or I’m the mole in a cosmic game of ‘whack-a-mole.’  Being of an optimistic nature, I prefer to think that the mallet thumps to the psyche, bank account, and body are directive rather than destructive.

So, what am I going to do?  I’m going to start fresh, building on something that I lacked the courage to do twenty years ago.  Apparently I required this roundabout course, especially the last decade, to develop that courage. I am going to expand my freelance writing, pursuing magazine and newspaper pieces more aggressively, and branching into commercial writing.  You can always find me here with my personal musings, or, for a more professional perspective, at my new website, http://www.vet-writer.com.  (Give me a couple of weeks, it’s still under construction.)

Pushing Reset

A couple of months ago, during the endless drive between the fields flanking I-5, I thought, “I just want to push the re-set button on my life.”  What’s the old joke: “when God wants to get even with you, he answers your prayers?”  Or, at least, “be careful what you wish for…”  In my defense, I was sick: literally, Prilosec-popping, stomach-grinding, shoulder-clenching sick at our financial situation; sick of commuting 75 miles each way to work; heart-sick that my career, my avocation, had failed us; sick of farming my kids out to grandparents for childcare through the summer; sick of rejection letters from literary magazines; sick of spending nights on call away from my husband and kids; sick of aching joints; and sick of waking at 4:00 AM in order to eke out an hour of writing time.  I couldn’t see any way off the treadmill; someone had disabled the STOP button.

At the end of June, the week of our 14^th wedding anniversary, phase 1 of the reset was taped to our front door.  As I’ve posted previously, the foreclosure on our house became inevitable.  The universe does nothing by halves.  In the weeks that followed, my iPhone erased itself and my first professional article was published.  An essay I had written about losing our home was accepted by Salon.  That essay changed the way I viewed myself as a writer and switched my writing in the family eye from “hobby” to “side-job.”  And, if it hasn’t exactly broken down walls or opened doors into the literary world for me, it has cracked a door or two ajar.  Whether anything lies behind those doors is unknown, and I suspect much of it depends on me.  The rest is up to luck.  Fate?

Fate – at some point, I become skeptical about coincidence.  Two days ago, I was performing an exam on a horse.  In 30 years of horsemanship, I have lifted thousand of equine legs.  The steps inherent to this task flow through my muscles and nerves.  This particular patient resented manipulation of his hind limb: he pulled away: I held on, wrapping my fingers more tightly around the cannon bone; he kicked toward me; I held on; he jerked the leg away; I heard a SNAP as my little finger was pulled laterally with the leg.  ‘Oh, God, this is gonna …’ On cue, the nauseating ache and instability of a fracture made themselves known.  “Ok, we will now pause the pre-purchase exam while the vet tapes her fingers together.”  I’m still a little proud that I said this with a grin and an even tone, and that I didn’t throw up on anyone’s shoe.  Professionalism is key.

Taping my finger back in place gave enough relief to complete that exam and an ultrasound on a mare that turned out to be the same horse that had run me over 9 years ago.  Coincidence, really?  X-rays taken at the ER gave me the news that the re-set had indeed been pushed.  Rather than the minor broken finger I was expecting, I had managed to break my 5^th metacarpal in what they call a “boxer’s fracture.’  I didn’t hit the horse, I swear!  Today I follow up with the orthopedist, but my understanding is that my left hand is out of commission for about a month.  There has been some discussion of a modified return to work, but in practical terms, a one-armed large animal vet is fairly worthless and at worst, dangerous.

The re-set button has been pushed.  I don’t know what changes, if any will result from this string of events, but I do know one thing: I think I’ve done enough wishing for a while…

Happy Birthday to Me!

Ok, Christy quick pop quiz this morning.  What have you learned in the past four decades?

Nothing!  I don’t know anything.  I’m not good at being a grownup.  Since I wasn’t entirely successful at childhood either, this worries me a bit.  What’s left?  I don’t know how to do things.  I don’t know the protocols.  Someone was talking about a restraining order the other day – where do you go for that?  Apparently there’s a line with a window.  I’m endlessly grateful to be the resident of a county where it seems that no court cases are ever heard.  I hear people talking about jury duty, and they could be speaking in Tongues for all I can tell.  The simple act of clearing traffic violations or parking tickets twists me into a confused boiling knot of stomach acid.  I had to be handheld throughout the entire process of purchasing our house eleven years ago – it was only during that agonizing period that I learned the definition of “escrow.”

I still don’t understand property taxes or how ours get paid.  I never could balance a checkbook.  Compound interest, annuities, trusts, these are all words that grownups toss around.  I don’t have a clue.  And, don’t even get me started on credit default swaps.

Take a breath.  I didn’t ask what don’t you know; I asked what have you learned.  You haven’t just been sitting in front of the TV for 40 years, have you?  Think.

Ummmm…. I know always to turn my face toward the butt when holding a foal so that it doesn’t break my nose.

Not broadly useful information, but it’s a start.  Go on…

I know that you should never go anywhere with kids without baby wipes and some band-aids.

Good, now you’re getting it.

I know never to hit “reply all” without being sure that I really wanted the whole world to read that particular thought.

Pertinent.

I’ve learned not to say “I’ll never.”  I’ve done way too many of the “nevers.”

I’m better at saying “I don’t know.”  But, God!  There’s just so freaking much that I don’t know!

Don’t panic.  I can hear your heart pounding from here.  Dial it back a bit.  Go for the specifics.

I know that rolling clothes packs a suitcase more efficiently than folding.

There, see, this isn’t that hard.

I know that sentiment is bad for children and for animals.

Would you care to expand on that answer?

It doesn’t do any good to get all sympathetic and gushy when something is going wrong.  Animals are looking for a strong pack leader, and kids panic if they think that the grownups are falling apart.

Ok, good.  Keeping your head, I like that.

I’ve learned that my “comfort zone” is just my brain’s fancy term for prison.

We’re getting a little metaphysical here; don’t want to be too pretentious.

Hey!  Who’s taking this test, anyway?

I’m just trying to keep you on track; looking out for your final score.

Ok, fine.  I’ve learned that clicking the mouse incessantly doesn’t make the computer work faster.  Sometimes things just take time.

Did you just try to slide a metaphor in there?

Maybe.

Ok, what else have you got?

I’ve learned that my mom was wrong.  Wearing a low-cut blouse won’t make people call me cheap.  Or, if they do, it’s far enough behind my back not to worry me.  I’ve also learned that the ability to carry off a low-cut blouse is one of the few physical benefits of having borne children.

You’re a wife and mother.  How can you be indulging your vanity and sexuality?

I’m a wife and mother.  I’m not dead or in a convent.  My existence didn’t cease the day I put on a ring or the moment I first became pregnant.  I’m still a person independent of those ties.  Besides, my husband likes my tops!

Ok, I think that’s all we needed to know there.

Fine.  Here, you want parenting?  I’ve learned that I like my children much better when they haven’t been watching TV, any TV, content is irrelevant.  I also like them better when they haven’t been eating food that comes in bright, individually wrapped packages.

No TV or junk food?  Isn’t that a bit harsh?

I didn’t say I was perfect.  We break that rule way too often.  But, we regret it every time.  The hangover really sucks.

Hangover, huh?  What have you learned about drinking?

Fruit drinks are evil.  Water, lots of water.  Don’t cook with wine you wouldn’t drink.  Port is good – well, good port is good; cheap port is cough syrup.  Pinot noir goes great with salmon.

Sound, practical advice.  Anything else?

Kids won’t die if they go outside without a jacket.  If you let them forget the jacket and refuse to go back home or buy them a new one, they’ll remember it next time.  And, if they say they aren’t cold, they probably aren’t.  I think their molecules move faster than ours do.

Getting old, huh?

Nope!  I have a friend who says “you aren’t allowed to say that you’re old until you’re 108.”  But, Advil is my friend.

See, you’ve learned more than you realize.  Do you have any more, for a bonus point?

Fear is an anchor; cut the rope and see where the current carries you.

Friends and family are forever, but only if you reach out.  Shyness and modesty, not wanting to “bother” are narcissistic traps.

Speak up.  Your thoughts won’t help anyone inside your head.

Always pack a spare pair of nylons.

Put lip balm in every purse.

Never be without a pocket knife.

Life is an open book test; it’s okay to peek over your neighbor’s shoulder, but be aware that they may not be working on the same question.

Ok, I’m done.  I’m forty; my fingers are getting tired.

Under the Blue Tarps

I hate blue tarps.  This may seem like a strange antipathy.  Ask most people what comes to mind when they see a blue tarp, and I’m guessing they will say, “camping,” or “shade,” or “firewood.”  When I unfold a tarp and hear that rusty plastic rattle, my mind sees the stains of fluids of decay; I smell death.  Blue tarps are shrouds.  They cover the corpses of my failures.

            I have touched too many blue tarps already this summer.  Have overheard too many phone calls where one side of the conversation tells the whole story.

            “Oh, I’m sorry.  Is he old, or…?”

            “I see.  Yes, that’s too bad.  Yes, we can take care of that for you.  I’m sorry it’s not working.”

            “Will you bring him here, or do you want the doctor to come to you?”

            “Well, you can call the rendering company, or there is another number that I can give you.”

            “All right, you’re down on the book for tomorrow morning.”

            I know what the appointment will say even before our office manager hangs up the phone with a sigh and says, “I’m sorry.  You’ve got another one tomorrow.”

            I’m sorry, too.  I recognize the necessity of euthanasia, and in an intellectual way, I’m glad to belong to a profession that possesses a legal means of ending suffering.  But those are abstractions.

            At least this caller didn’t appear to be price shopping.  Shopped euthanasias are the worst.  When a client’s first words are, “what will it cost to put my horse to sleep,” it doesn’t really matter what rationale is given.  That first sentence is an all too revealing code for “I can’t afford to keep my horse.”  We’ve had too many of those this summer.  Too many slightly decrepit, but not-quite-suffering horses.  Too many hard pressed owners burning in guilt.  Too many blue tarps.

            People are sometimes horrified that I am willing to kill an animal that is not in extremis.  Sometimes I am horrified, too.  “I went to school to help animals, to fix them,” the idealistic voice in my head cries.  Her voice is fading, worn hoarse by years of reality.  Reality is not always a shiny place with gleaming horses recuperating nicely in tidy stables and fat, retired ponies grazing emerald pastures.

            Today’s reality holds too many unwanted and unusable horses: the old, the intractable, the chronically or expensively lame or ill.  Reality is several years of high hay prices, high fuel costs, lost jobs, foreclosed homes, and low prices for marketable horses.  In modern society, the horse is a luxury, a reflection of discretionary income that for many is dwindling rapidly.  The wanted horse is a luxury, the unwanted horse, a burden. 

            Under pressure from groups both well-meaning and manipulative, equine slaughter has been outlawed in many states and faces a national ban.  Most Americans react with revulsion to the notion of equine slaughter.  The idea doesn’t thrill me, either.  However, banning the slaughter of horses hasn’t changed the ultimate outcome, the scene has simply shifted to one of prolonged neglect or meaningless death. 

            Still, I don’t question clients too closely when they opt for euthanasia.  When appropriate, I try to offer other options for a horse that is not clearly suffering.  These days, however, options are limited.  Rescue organizations are overwhelmed, and I can’t pressure someone to choose between feeding a horse and feeding a child.  In the final analysis, I know that this horse will die.  Faced with this inevitability, I would prefer his death to come at my hands.  This is my job, my responsibility.  The owners always offer explanations and excuses.  I hate the excuses.  Not because I don’t sympathize, but because I do.  I join them in this hideous hemorrhage of guilt, grief, and lost dreams.  I hate the excuses because part of my job is to take the client’s guilt and make it mine. 

So many people ask the same question, regardless of the circumstances of the euthanasia.  “Do you think this is the right thing to do?”

            I know this answer.  There is only one answer to this question.  I don’t care what the circumstances, by the time this question is asked, I have done everything within my power for my patient.  At this point, my duty is to my client.   “Yes, you are making a good choice for him.”  The choice is always right.  By this point, the alternatives are worse.

 “How can you stand to do this?”  More tears have accompanied this question than I care to remember.  My answer never changes.  “This is both the worst and the best thing that I do.  Every one gets to me.  Every one hurts.  The day that it doesn’t hurt anymore will be the day that I have to find a different job.”  Privately, I wonder when that day will come.  Every time that plunger depresses, I feel a bit of my soul slide into the vein with that blue syrup.  How many times until there is nothing left?