Lessons for Life

By: Tiffany Beck

Mississippi State University, Class of 2013

I stood off to the side, feeling very out-of-place.  I wished I could melt into the floor, or at least surreptitiously run out the door and vanish for a couple hours.  The still form of a dog lay on the radiography table, surrounded by the almost equally still forms of the technicians and doctors.  After a sudden illness and a frustrating diagnosis, this pet had finally lost the fight.  I can still see as clear as day in my mind's eye the doctor who had worked the case, my internship mentor, leaning against the wall, his eyes bright with tears, frustration hardening the lines of his face.  He had just lost a patient...and he did not know why.

You may be wondering how this could be considered a "positive summer experience".  At the time, I wondered the same thing.  This was the first of six weeks at my summer internship at the Banfield Emergency Hospital in North Denver, Colorado, and I had already witnessed more death than during the whole 3 years of working at my hometown animal clinic during high school.  "I left my amazing staffing job at summer camp...for this?" I asked myself.  I had come out to Colorado for the sole purpose of forgetting the stresses of school for the summer, but it seemed those stressors had merely followed me the 900 miles west. 

In veterinary school we are sheltered from death.  Inundated with statistics and survival rates, the tendency can be to start seeing each patient as a case number.  Our practice of medicine becomes a crapshoot of statistics.  The impact of individual death and life is numbed as we learn the most "economical" way to practice medicine.  We are warned not to become too attached to our patients or else we run the risk of "burning out".  But what I witnessed at Banfield that summer ran contrary to this "conventional wisdom".  Rather, it was in those instances of death, when victory had slipped through our desperate fingers and we were left struggling with the "why?" questions, that I became revitalized and empowered to work harder, to search deeper and to think more outside the box than ever before. 

At the Banfield Hospital, I became reacquainted with death, but also with life.  One case in particular exemplified the satisfaction that comes when all your study, stress and hard work helps bring one patient back from death's door.  A female chihuahua had found its way to our emergency hospital late one night for dystocia.  After the initial physical exam, the pet suddenly began to crash.  Without a moment's pause or hesitation, the doctor directed the technicians in a cursory surgery scrub and performed the life-saving Cesearean section right there on the exam table.  Because of his preparedness and composure in the face of a crisis, the bitch and her puppy survived. 

Veterinary medicine may have its base in science, but its practice is an art.  And each new experience, especially the failures, adds to our repertoire with which we can later succeed in saving lives.  If every patient walked out of our clinic healed and whole, we would feel no drive or motivation to grow and our work would quickly become stagnant and routine.  The struggles are what lead to higher successes, and that means not only celebrating our patients' good health with our clients, but also sharing in their sorrows when things do not turn out as we hoped or planned.  That summer, witnessing my mentor veterinarian weep over his lost patients, and celebrate with those that rejoined their owners, not only restored my healthy respect for the balance between death and life, but also demonstrated the vitality of emotion and passion that is possible in the work of the veterinarian.