White Fang

By Oneal Peters

Colorado State University

Class of 2013 

Human medicine makes me uneasy. It always has. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what I dislike about it, so I have just accepted that I dislike the lot of it. It may have sprung from the movie “White Fang,” which came to theatres when I was six years old. Being a tale about a dog, my mother deemed it the sort of movie I would like. We happened to be visiting family over in England at the time the movie came out, and my Dad had already flown home. Being such, I felt as though my protector has abandoned me and my mother in a foreign, dangerous land, so I was already feeling a bit sorry for myself at the point when my mom decided we should go see the movie. It was all going along fine, a lovely story about a young man, his sled dog and his grandpa. And then, all of a sudden, grandpa decides to croak way out in the middle of the Alaskan (or maybe it was Canadian) wilderness and the hero of the story is stuck with a body that needs to be buried, and ground that is layered like an unthawed ice cream cake, impossible to crack into. So obviously, he decides it would be a pleasant experience for him and White Fang to dog sled with the body across Alaska and bring grandpa to the proper place for the funeral. It was this point that my six year old anxiety began to surface.

Things just got worse from that point, the climax occurring when grandpa’s body escaped from the dog sled and careened down a slope, landing in a deep, icy mountain lake. This was followed by the young man…literally…he dove into the lake and rescued the body and that was the point when I cracked. I don’t remember the rest of the movie but I remember the next few months and the nightmares I had. These generally involved anything from heaps of corpses to still-live bodies being dissected, you name it. And thus, my disgust for the human body, and then for human medicine began. I can’t even help people out when they are bleeding…my stomach flips and I become the useless vet med student in the corner covering my eyes. This is why I chose veterinary medicine for a career pursuit. Animal medicine fascinates me. Scrubbing in to assist with surgery for any type of animal doesn’t bug me in the least, but I turn away when they start operating on House to spare myself the nausea. Being a vet tech never made me wince, and when I began vet school I figured the last thing I would have to worry about was human medicine…but I was wrong.

It was about half way through first year when I realized this terrible fact. First year anatomy, as you all know, demands a lot of your extra time, and so I had decided to go into the anatomy lab and study one day during lunch. I opened the door of the lab to find the entire room filled with lab coat clad students…but no one from my class. Ignoring them, I began my route to the storage room to root up some helpful plastinated specimens for my study purposes. I was about half way through the room when I realized what it was that these students were dissecting. Horrified, I turned on my heel and jolted out of the room as quickly as possible, doing my best to stay as far away from the lab tables as I possibly could. Safely back in my cube, I began to process my thoughts. Where did they keep these specimens? They were not part of our lab cooler and they were too big to be in a smaller cooler. And why did I always see these students rolling covered lab tables down the halls on the upstairs floor? Finally, it all made sense. They were storing their specimens upstairs! And what was worse…they were riding down the elevators with them to study them in the anatomy lab on the days the veterinary students were not in there.  I was dumbstruck and shocked. Why hadn’t this occurred to me before? Do I really live that much in my own little vet school bubble? Apparently so.

Not too long after that incident (well, a few weeks later), I got over my shock and began to realize how important it was for these pre-med students to study human anatomy. I also realized how generous it was for people to be able to make that kind of decision to aid anatomical education. But every now and then, especially when I am in the first year building, all I can think about is those human cadavers, riding up and down in the elevators and my heart rate begins to spike. Thanks a lot, White Fang.