The Accidental Veterinarian Read online

  Making the Call

  I sometimes have difficulty distinguishing which of my distant memories are directly of an event versus which are of seeing photos of that event. For better or worse, however, this is not as much of a problem for the most of the 1980s, when my parents no longer took photos of me or what I was doing, and before I started taking photos myself. My childhood and my adulthood are both lavishly documented, but that in-between period, when I was in high school and university, is largely a gauzy blur from which only a few memories stand out crisply enough that I have been able to hang on to them and cultivate them as way-posts from the era. One of these memories is of me sitting at the tan-coloured rotary dial telephone on the little desk in the front hall of our house in Saskatoon. I was dialling the number of a local veterinary clinic. Or at least I was trying to.

  I was in the second year of my pre-veterinary program through the Department of Biology at the University of Saskatchewan. I was still waffling about applying to the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, but I wanted to keep all my options open. Admission to vet school was mostly based on marks, but they did insist that you have at least some experience working or volunteering in a vet clinic, so that you would have some idea of what you were getting yourself into. I had never been inside of one. Not even briefly. Even if I did go to vet school, it was my intent to use it as a springboard for a career in teaching and research in some aspect of veterinary medicine. But clinical exposure was mandatory regardless, so I made a list of the local clinics and their phone numbers, prioritized by convenience of location. I took this list to the phone and stared at it and stared at the phone. I was terrified. I would begin to dial and then hang up, swear at myself, and then begin to dial again. This was all made worse by the fact that I was extremely self-conscious, so I would only attempt to make the call when none of the rest of my family was home. My mother was almost always home.

  It’s bizarre to think back on that given how often I have to speak to strangers on the phone now, but at the time the fear absolutely paralyzed me. I doubted that anyone would be interested in having someone with no experience whatsoever hang around their clinic. I imagined these clinics to be full of serious people in starched white lab coats and green surgical scrubs doing serious things. I would only be in the way. I was comfortable in the biology lab. I was happy in the biology lab. I was really beginning to doubt whether this was a good idea.

  But I tried again, and eventually I made it through all seven turns of the dial, literally sweating and shaking. A cheerful voice answered right away. “Of course,” she said. “No problem. Come down any time. Rosemary loves students and could use a hand.”

  “Rosemary?” I thought. “The receptionist calls the veterinarian by her first name?” This was my first clue that my expectations were mostly out to lunch.

  It was a sunny late spring day. I had the afternoon off from classes and labs and decided to go straight down. I was still very nervous, but the phone call had been the worst part, and once past it I felt a sense of elation that tempered my nervousness. It was a very small clinic with just two seats in the waiting room. There was nobody there. Not only were there no clients, but there was nobody behind the front desk. I stood there for several long moments, unsure of what to do, my anxiety beginning to rise again. Then there was a loud noise from the back, like something metal falling, followed by an emphatic “Bugger!”

  I was on the verge of slipping back out the door when a young woman appeared in the hall leading back from the front desk.

  “Hi, you must be Philipp!”

  “Yes, I am.” I extended my hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “I’m Wendy. Your timing is perfect. Come right on back.” She grabbed some sort of instrument from a cupboard in the hall and led me to the back, where there was a room with a metal table in the middle. There were crowded shelves along the walls and two doors leading out. A middle-aged woman in a t-shirt, cargo pants and flip-flops stood at the table, holding a long-haired orange cat.

  “Rosemary, this is Philipp, our new student.”

  This was the vet??

  The woman at the table smiled broadly and shook my hand. “Welcome, Philipp! Rosemary Miller.” She had a strong Australian accent. “Now please come around over here. This is Tiger. Wendy’s going to hold him while I get the sample. What I would like you to do is tickle his ears to distract him.”

  I had never tickled a cat’s ears before, so I was concerned that I wasn’t doing it correctly, but nobody commented, and Tiger seemed content enough.

  When the procedure was done, Wendy took Tiger through one of the doors, which appeared to lead to a small kennel and storage area. Dr. Miller (I couldn’t yet bring myself to think of her as Rosemary) kicked off one of her flip-flops, hoisted her foot onto the exam table and proceeded to cut her toenails while she chatted with me. “So next we’re going to fix a cat’s broken leg. You can watch the surgery and then help with the recovery.”

  “OK.” The pace of surprises here, and the nature of those surprises, was making me lightheaded. Then I remembered to add, “Thank you.”

  Dr. Miller was intent on her other foot and laughed. “No worries!”

  I soon learned that her husband lectured in human medicine at the university and that she had opened this clinic just for fun and for what she referred to as “pin money.” The hours were erratic and eccentric, and often it was quiet, and we just sat around and chatted, but when animals did come in, the diversity of cases was astonishing. I came into Rosemary’s clinic knowing absolutely nothing about small animal practice and left with the beginning of a sense that something was shifting inside me.

  Hogwarts on the South Saskatchewan

  It would be a simple matter to fill half this book with stories from my time at vet college, but I’m guessing that’s not what you’re here for. So instead allow me to summarize the experience in the broadest strokes by making a comparison that many of you are likely familiar with.

  Should you ever find yourself in Saskatoon, you must make a point of visiting the University of Saskatchewan. It is widely considered one of Canada’s prettiest universities with its leafy riverside setting and its hundred-year-old neo-Gothic limestone-clad buildings clustered around a lovely central green. And while you’re there, please wander over to the northeast corner of campus, past the Physics building, towards the College of Agriculture, where the more modern buildings squat in exile. There you’ll see it. Just past the grey cement bunker of the College of Engineering you will see a castle. You will have to squint a little, and you will have to use your imagination a little, but take note of the bridge, and of the turrets and of the asymmetrical wings. It is a castle, a modern castle. And, in my view, it is not just any castle. In my view this is what Hogwarts Castle would look like had it been designed by the mid-century modernist architect Le Corbusier.1 This castle is actually the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM).

  At this point in the story I should offer a disclaimer. It doesn’t matter at all if you have no idea who Le Corbusier is, but it probably does matter if you don’t know what Hogwarts is, in which case you should probably stop reading here as the rest of this is not going to make any sense.

  I came to Harry Potter later in life than many people, courtesy of my daughter, so the resemblance between WCVM and Hogwarts only occurred to me recently. In fact, as it happens, J.K. Rowling had her famous inspiration on that delayed train from Manchester to London at almost the exact same time as I was graduating from vet college, so the stories weren’t written yet when I was there. Once I made the connection, though, I realized that it’s not just the vaguely castle-like exterior that evokes Hogwarts. The interior has dungeons (pathology and necropsy labs), a great hall (the cafeteria), dark labs and lecture halls, curious things floating in jars and set on dusty display shelves, skeletons mounted on pedestals, a mazelike layout, several confusing winding staircases, a remote headmaster’
s (dean’s) office in a tower, strange smells and sounds and a library with a separate mezzanine level that resembles the restricted section of the Hogwarts library.

  As soon as I had this epiphany, several other pieces rapidly fell into place. It felt a bit like looking at that optical illusion where, depending on your perspective, it can either be a young woman looking away or an old hag looking down. I had been seeing the old hag all my life, and then suddenly I saw the young woman.

  Pharmacology class was Potions. Animal Science was Care of Magical Creatures (Care of Agricultural Creatures) and I suppose Parasitology was also Care of Magical Creatures. Toxicology was Herbology. Small Animal Medicine was Charms. Anaesthesia was Defence Against the Dark Arts. And Clinical Pathology was Divination. Clearly, we had some classes that weren’t offered at Hogwarts (Large Animal Surgery, Immunology, Histology, etc.) and vice versa (Flying, Transfiguration and History of Magic come to mind), but the parallels are still striking given that one school was turning out veterinarians and the other witches and wizards. In retrospect, even the faculty and staff were eerily similar with their idiosyncrasies and strong personalities. And there were more than few with English or Scottish accents.

  Hogwarts students (and fans) are sorted into four houses,2 while WCVM students come pre-sorted from the four western provinces. I haven’t worked out all the equivalents, but Manitoba is clearly Hufflepuff. Even the fact that the great majority of the students are from elsewhere, often away from home for the first time, sets WCVM apart from the other university colleges and puts it more in line with the Hogwarts experience. In my year only four students were from the city of Saskatoon itself. Although most students didn’t actually sleep in the building (note — I said “most”), we all felt like we essentially lived there, and many did live together nearby, sharing rent.

  And then when you graduate you feel like you belong to an obscure and semi-secret separate society. There is an arcane lore, a special language, specific skills, weird knowledge and, at times, an air of mystery when viewed from the outside. When you meet other veterinarians, there is an immediate feeling of kinship, of sharing something that outsiders will never really understand. And honestly, sometimes the rest of you seem like Muggles to us. But I say that with abundant respect and affection. Most of us are far more Arthur Weasley than Lucius Malfoy.

  That is the very last I will mention of Harry Potter. I promise. You can safely keep reading this book.

  * * *

  1WCVM was not designed by Le Corbusier, but I mention him for those of you who know him so that you have approximately the right mental image.

  2I am apparently in Ravenclaw.

  So You Want To Be a Veterinarian

  Veterinarians love animals. This is a fundamental axiomatic truth, much like pilots loving airplanes, chefs loving food and librarians loving books. Given that the love of animals is widespread, the ambition to become a veterinarian is widespread as well. This spawns tremendous competition for the few spots in the veterinary schools, meaning that very high marks are required to get in. Consequently, and quite logically, it is animal lovers with excellent grades who populate the ranks of future veterinarians. But sometimes a third essential ingredient is missing. In fact, this ingredient is rarely even discussed, but it is the one element that more than any other determines whether these keen and idealistic students ultimately become happy veterinarians who maintain some of that keenness and idealism, or whether they become disillusioned veterinarians who burn out and succumb to cynicism and regret.

  That third essential ingredient is a love of people. The same high marks would easily get any prospective veterinary student into human medical school, but for many this is ruled out not just by the pull of their love for animals but, unfortunately, by the push of their, shall we say, discomfort around people. This is a problem. I tell every prospective veterinary student that comes through our clinic that veterinary medicine is not an animal business that happens to involve people, but a people business that happens to involve animals. I tell them that the sooner they understand this, and accept this and embrace this, the sooner they will come to love their profession.

  And why is that? The answer should be obvious. Until the dogs and cats and guinea pigs and rabbits and all others come marching in on their own equipped with the ability to talk (and pay), we will have to work through their owners and keepers and guardians. You can only help animals by communicating clearly and empathetically with people. Moreover, even when this miraculous Dr. Dolittle day arrives, we will still have staff to deal with. And staff are most assuredly people.

  I have been chair of our professional disciplinary body for a number of years and can attest without a flicker of hesitation that far, far more veterinarians come to grief through an inability to connect with people than through any failings in their surgical skills or medical knowledge.

  And once you “get it,” you see how fabulously interesting people are in all their freakish variety. And you see that we are in a privileged profession as we are permitted to help people who are ironically often at their most human around animals. I remember with startling clarity the specific moment when this dawned on me. I was just about to enter the clinic through the back door. It was a sunny summer morning, and as I opened the door I realized for the first time that I was looking forward to seeing the clients who were starting to become my regulars as much as I was looking forward to seeing their pets. It was at this moment that I decided to stay in practice and not go back to school to pursue research, which had been my original plan.

  But all that said, the love of animals is still at the heart of things. I often think of a card we got many years ago from a young child who boldly wrote, “I want to be a vat!” Yes, I too once aspired to be a large container, but I became an animal doctor instead, and I have never regretted that decision.

  Part 2

  The Art of Veterinary Medicine

  A Mile Wide

  When people say that it must be harder to be a veterinarian than an MD, they often make two observations. The first is that our patients don’t talk. (As an aside, this is actually not always a bad thing. It’s difficult enough to sort through contradictory information from a husband and a wife without the cat talking too.) The second observation is that we have to deal with so many different species. This is correct for the profession as a whole, but in truth there aren’t very many James Herriot All Creatures Great and Small3 types around anymore. More and more of us restrict our practices to a handful of species. Which is of course still more than one.

  However, what people often don’t consider, and what is truly difficult (but fun), is the range of what we can do. Physicians are usually limited to family practice or a specific specialty, whereas as a veterinarian in general practice, I am a “family doctor,” an internist, a general surgeon, a dentist, an anaesthesiologist, a radiologist, a behaviourist, a nutritionist, an oncologist, a cardiologist, an ophthalmologist, a dermatologist, a pharmacist, an obstetrician, a pediatrician, a gerontologist and a bereavement counsellor.

  I am a mile wide.

  And, as the aphorism goes, unfortunately sometimes (often?) just an inch deep. To be fair, the depth does vary. Most of us are deepest in the general medicine, internal medicine and general surgery categories and then have a handful of other areas of interest where our depth exceeds the proverbial inch. Three things save us from malpractice in the shallow zone:

  Colleagues. Veterinarians, as a rule, get along well together, and veterinarians, as a rule, know their own limits. Strengths and weaknesses tend to balance each other out within a group of veterinarians working together, so cases are discussed and shared. And when this is not enough, or for those in solo practice, referral to specialists or to colleagues in other practices with particular training, experience or equipment is common.

  Continuing Education. In order to maintain our licence, we have to attend conferences where new
information is presented and where refresher courses are offered. I was just at a conference in Florida last week for exactly that reason. Sure, Philipp, a “conference” in Florida . . . in February . . . how convenient. OK, we did tack on a holiday after, but honestly, during the conference time the warmth and sunshine outside were an abstraction when considered from the artificially lit, aggressively air-conditioned interior of massive lecture halls. But it was fun! For you youngsters out there, here’s a fact that may surprise you: learning is big fun when there are no exams or assignments or pressures of any sort. One lecture in particular caught my attention and made me laugh: “Hippopotamus Medicine Made Easy.” Sadly I couldn’t justify going to it, but it is an excellent illustration of how broad our profession is.

  The Internet. There, I said it out loud and publicly. Vets look stuff up on the internet. However, I don’t mean the wide-open internet, but specifically the Veterinary Information Network, or as we all call it, “Vin.” Vin is a lifesaver — literally, for some of my patients — and it is something other professions are jealous of. It’s an online subscription service that allows us access to scores of specialists to whom we can post questions on open forums. It also has an impressive array of tools and resource materials and, as it has been running for about 15 years, it now has such a massive searchable database of past questions that I am often hard pressed to think of anything new to ask. Here’s a secret: when your pet has something odd and your veterinarian pops out of the room for any reason or excuse, chances are they are also quickly logging into Vin.