Vet Tech Tales: The Early Years (7 page)

“What about me?” I asked quietly.

“So you don’t go to college. You’re a girl anyway. What difference would it make?” Shoulder-length hair did not automatically make my brother a fan of women’s lib. Not when
his own
future was on the line.

“Do you think you have some sort of entitlement, just because you happened to be born first and be born male?”

He shrugged. “That’s how things are.” Then, with a pointed stare he hit home. “And you know Mom and Dad believe that too.”
 

I hung my head. It was no use arguing or staying angry with him. He wasn’t to blame. The generations that had come before were. It was the misguided dogma and brutal catechism learned at a paternal ancestor’s knee that kept the myth alive. It was 40 years and more ingrained in my parents’ very being. In my mom who quit her secretarial job the day she married and who held proudly to the fact that she had never learned to pump her own gas. In my dad who worked finger to the bone to provide for his family. In the way they responded to my oft-voiced complaints that Dan had been allowed to do something at whatever age I happened to be with a simple phrase that held for them all the wisdom of the world encapsulated in five small words: “That’s because he’s a boy.”

But this … I couldn’t let college and my dream of being a veterinarian fall through simply because of my gender.
Or for the lack of a few dollars.
If there was a way to get into college I would.

~~~

For me, schoolwork always came easy. I absorbed without having to study, not understanding why the classes had to be paced so slow. Resentful that my classmates were holding
me
back.

I breezed through accelerated courses – science, math, English. I crammed four years of advanced high school work into three and, with visions of scholarships dancing through my head, tested high on college entrance exams. All the schools I didn’t want to attend courted me handsomely. But I had my eye on Texas
A&M
, with its College of Veterinary Medicine just an easy transition away. The scholarship offer seemed excruciatingly slow to come, but come it did. Textbooks, classes and fees would be covered. I only had my off-campus living expenses to take care of. Two summers of savings coupled with a few hours of part-time work a week and my freshman year would be a done deal. My life plan was back on track.

Two days after I turned 17 I graduated high school – a full year early. The summer sped by as I worked hard to amass a few extra dollars. It was an exciting time, with my focus
needlesharp
on the courses I would be signing up for, the apartment I would be renting, and the job I would have to get hired for to keep the plan going.

Biomedical science would, of course, be my major. With any luck, I would be able to get into my first animal husbandry class in the fall. Since my scholarship also came with credit for a handful of freshman courses, I didn’t have to fill my schedule with many of the normally required classes, leaving me free to pursue courses that often weren’t offered till the sophomore year. I was quite smug in the knowledge that I had an advantage over many of my freshman counterparts competing for the few seats available in the pre-vet classes. Getting an earlier start meant I had a very good chance of getting all my prerequisite classes out of the way by the end of my junior year. And that ultimately meant I wouldn’t have to wait till I’d completed my senior year to apply to vet school. I’d gotten through high school in just three years; I’d do the same in undergrad school too.

With my easy success in academics to this point, there was no question I would be accepted into vet school on my first try, no matter the daunting statistics of the number of applicant hopefuls for each open seat in the college. I had heard the stories of students who were in masters programs still waiting to be accepted into
vet college
after two, three or more applications in as many years. That, of course, could not happen to me. And why were some of those folk being accepted anyway? I shuddered to think that any student could be accepted into or be graduated out of
vet college
with anything below a 3.5 average. Did I want someone who may have failed a class or even made a C in one treating one of my animals? A pity, I thought, that all graduates got the same degree. How could an animal owner ever tell what quality of education lay behind the diploma hanging on the office wall?

So it was in mid-August I waved good-bye to my childhood and marched confidently toward the beckoning light of Texas
A&M
.

How Long Is Four Months in Teenager Years?

College Station, Texas, in August is hot. Three weeks before school started I moved into my new apartment with the bare minimum in tow. Security deposit, first and last month rent, and the sundry fees the scholarship failed to cover ate deep into my bank account. First order of business before school started was to look for a part-time job. For transportation, I had a bicycle and a bus pass, limiting my options of where I could work. I pedaled far and wide, fortunately finding a position less than a mile from my apartment at a fast-food establishment – honest work with a flexible schedule. I signed on for 20 hours per week. That seemed reasonable given the 18-hour course load I had scheduled.

Only, somehow, the 20 hours quickly grew to 30 as the workforce shifted.

“Good help is hard to keep,” my manager told me philosophically as he scratched through yet another name on the schedule and penciled “Phoenix” in its place.

I was arriving either early in the morning or staying late into the night. When I wasn’t at school, I was at work. I remembered my brother’s despair at having to find a job mid-semester in a college town, and I knew how desperately I needed to keep this one. Thirty hours turned into 35,
then
slipped into 40. I was afraid to say no.
Afraid that if I did I would be thrown out on the streets with no income and no hope.
 

Likewise, my 18-hour course load turned into much more than that. Advanced Biology and Animal Science – two sophomore courses I had fought hard to get into in just my freshman year – required long labs. History and Literature required hundreds of pages of reading. And Calculus and Chemistry required hours of meticulous calculations. Suddenly there just weren't enough hours in a day. Never one to accept failure, I refused to drop any of my classes. I slogged through as best I
could,
denying the obvious and convincing myself I still had a firm grip on both work and school.

Even Animal Science, which I had looked forward to all summer, had become painful. Many of the labs were held on university grounds that were off-campus. That meant longer commutes by bike or bus, and my work schedule rarely allowed the additional time off I needed to get to the remote classes. I missed two labs, the most allowed before they forcibly expelled you from the class, and was tardy to several others. Only my grades for the lectures, which I fought for, kept me in class.

Oh, but what a class it was! For a city-raised girl, it was eye-opening and fascinating.
Learning the different breeds of swine.
Judging the conformation of quarter horses.
And for a confirmed vegetarian who didn’t believe in the exploitation of farm animals, it proved a bit unsettling too. We judged live steers during one lab, estimating such things as what their dressed weight would be, the size of their rib eyes and how much marbling they would produce. Next lab, the slaughtered steers were presented to us neatly laid out on little foam trays ready to validate our guesses.

In the cattle barns, I made friends with a black bull calf, only just weaned when I first met him. I made a point to visit him whenever I was by. He’d take bits of hay out of one hand while I scratched him on the head with the other. A playful tyke, he’d sneak up behind me, stick his nose between my shoulder blades and give me a gentle shove that usually staggered me into the stall fence. The more growth he got, the farther I went.

I was picking myself up off the stall floor after one such push when I heard a male voice behind me.

“Know what’s in store for that calf, don’t you?” A first-year vet student sporting a checked cotton shirt, worn denim jeans and scuffed boots that had seen their share of barns spat a wad of tobacco into a dark corner of the stall and climbed down from the fence where he’d been watching. “One of the
students’ll
be castrating him in class next month. And next year he’ll be part of the Animal Science lab.”
 

“So?” I said, trying to sound as nonplussed as possible, though I was plenty
plussed
at thought of the little calf’s future.

He smirked. “Just don’t go getting too attached to anything around here. One way or another, they all wind up dead.” He sauntered off toward the dairy barn without a backwards glance.

And that cowboy’s going to be a
vet? I thought.
I bet he doesn’t even graduate.
I had read the books. Vets weren’t cynical. They were caring, decent people. Even the large-animal vets who worked with money-making meat herds. That’s because the ranchers cared about their animals’ health and wanted them treated as humanely as possible.

At least that’s what I thought until the Animal Science class visited the neighborhood slaughterhouse. The abattoir was a small one, catering mainly to the needs of the university.
The pens outside held only a few dozen head of bawling cows, not the few hundred to be found on any given day at a regular commercial facility.
Inside, carcasses chained by their back legs hung from the ceiling while blood drained from their necks down to the concrete channel below. Swine, cows, goats and the odd sheep waited their turn in the hot building.

The man demonstrating that day was stout with muscles that bulged under his overalls and the heavy rubber apron he wore – an obvious match for any of the animals that might rebel their fate at the last minute. Deftly, he caught a procession of doomed beasts and showed us the proper technique for killing each species. An electric jolt to the forehead seemed to be the favored method of the day.

Another man, built much like the first, hooked up the dead animals and demonstrated how they were bled and made ready for the tanner. The tanner then expertly skinned each animal from nose to tail with a single long stroke that flayed the skin in one continuous piece. In a matter of minutes, a bleating cow or pig had been divested of everything that had made it a unique, living individual and had been hung anonymously on a conveyor line, ready to be processed and shipped to market within the day.

The lab reinforced my decision that large animal medicine was not for me. While a humane endeavor, keeping animals healthy that were destined for the slaughterhouse seemed counter to all I believed. I would, I vowed, never be a part of that particular cycle.
    

That is, if the choice between large and small animal work was even one I would ever get to make.

As the semester drew to a close, it became obvious that between the demands of work and school my grades were perilously close to slipping.
 
Since I was obligated to continue working to pay the bills, my only choice for next semester would be to cut way down on course hours if I were to have any chance of keeping up a high grade point average, meaning it would probably be an extra year or two before I could apply to vet school. It was a catch-22 that I never expected, never planned for.

I was humiliated. How was it I couldn’t successfully juggle a full-time job with a full-time course load and cope with all the baggage of living on my own for the first time? I took it as a personal failure and returned home for the Christmas break with all the confidence of a whipped pup, dejected and beaten. I wouldn’t – couldn’t – go back to school. Not there. Not yet.