An Uncommonly Bad Day

Winner, Life as a Vet Student

Holly Burchfield, University of Georgia

She was astoundingly tiny.  Cupped in the palm of his hand, she gazed up at us, bewildered. 

“Free kitten!”, he announced, as my classmates and I shuffled from our seats to have a closer look.  “A resident found her – er, well, his dog found her – under a bush this morning.  She is probably three weeks old.  Free to a good home!”  The senior student had brought her up to our classroom during his lunch break, knowing that one of us would cave and take home  yet another creature.  After several minutes of people clambering to see her and take a turn holding her, it became clear that no one was actually going to take her home. 

“I’ll foster her”, I heard myself saying.  The words came out before my rational brain could stop them.  Whoops.

“Great, she’s yours!  Come by after class and we’ll give you some formula and a carrier for her.”

Whoops, whoops. 

So I took her home that afternoon; the tiniest kitten I had ever cared for.  I had rehabilitated numerous small mammals for our Wildlife Treatment Crew, so I thought I would be competent enough to take care of this tiny, orphaned kitten.  It would certainly be a learning experience. 

During the first few days, I carried her around in a satchel slung across my shoulder.  She would sleep for hours in her nest of blankets inside the bag, swinging as I walked, perfectly content and quiet.  I drove with her.  I took her on errands.  She was surprisingly convenient.  

She readily suckled formula from a dropper, and would urinate when gently rubbed with a warm cloth.  Everything was textbook.  Easy.  Within a few weeks, she was ready to be weaned.  She was eating canned food mixed in with her formula, and she had learned to use a “litter box” – a pie pan filled with shredded paper.  She would cry and scramble for her food, tracking it across the bathroom floor and smearing it across her body.  It wasn’t easy anymore.  She had accidents, too.  After a weekend visit to my boyfriend’s apartment, he later discovered “presents” on his couch, beside the bookshelf, and near the door.  She was learning, but making plenty of mistakes.  

Until this point, I had been feeling fairly confident in my abilities as a foster mom.  My plan was to wean her, get her litter box trained, and then find her a wonderful home that wasn’t my own.  As she grew, my older cat, Catniss, decided she was no longer prey to stalk but rather an interesting playtoy.  Catniss pawed at her, chased her, scolded her, groomed her.  During one of these play sessions, Catniss picked up the kitten, now squirrel-sized, by her scruff and deposited her on a favorite cushion by the window.  Catniss had made her decision – the kitten was hers, and it was staying. 

Of course, I happily obliged.  A pair of cats!  What an idea!  A few more dollars a month on food, a few more scoops of the litter box, and I’d hardly notice a difference!  She was staying.  I named her Rue. 

A few nights after making this decision, I was reading in bed with Rue asleep on my lap.  Rue was still too small to jump on and off of my bed, but she enjoyed the times I’d hoist her up for a nap.  It was late, I was tired, and we were both too comfortable to rearrange.  It had been an uncommonly bad day.  After getting a 45 on a radiology quiz (!), I had trudged to my illegally parked car (I was late for class, what else was I supposed to do?) only to find a $50 parking ticket.  Really?  The numerical value of my ticket was higher than my quiz grade, as well as my entire weekly food budget.  I had given up for the day, convinced that it couldn’t possibly get crappier.  I was relieved to finally be in my clean, cozy bed.  I fell asleep.

This is where my life as a vet student becomes embarrassing; disgusting, even.  We’ve all seen and experienced things that would make the average person lose their lunch.  We can look at lesions and dissections over meals, can clean slobber and vomit and diarrhea, and can drain abscesses.  We can handle the necropsy floor without being scarred for life.  We are pretty tough.  But we do these things at the comfortable distance of school or at work.  Our homes are sacred places – sanctuaries.  We don’t worry about the filth that may accumulate on our scrubs because we know at home we have a change of clothes and a hot shower and clean sheets to slip into.  That’s one of the best parts of the day – coming home, dumping my dirty scrubs in the washer with a ton of bleach, and showering off the evidence of whatever gross matter and odors had decided to cling to me that day. 

So that night, asleep in my clean bed in my clean clothes with my clean hair (which, I have to add, had formed into miraculously smooth curls that I was excited to show off the next morning). Part way through the night, I half woke from my sleep smelling something… off.  I was too tired to process it, and definitely too tired to open my eyes or turn on a light, so I rolled over onto my shoulder and forgot all about it. 

A few hours later, still before dawn, I awoke again.  The smell was real this time.  It was foul, and it was close.  Very, very close.  I reached my hand up to brush the hair back from my shoulder and was met with something sticky. 

Crap.  Crap!  Really, crap! 

I jumped out of bed, trying to keep my upper body perfectly still so that whatever was in my hair wouldn’t touch the rest of my body and my bed, which I desperately wished were still as clean as they had been when I fell asleep a few hours earlier.  I turned on the light and slowly turned to face the wreckage.  It was worse than I had imagined.

Tiny Rue, unable to jump down off of my bed to her pie pan full of neatly shredded newspaper, had emptied every last corner of her bowels onto my pillow.  My hair, my shirt, my pillowcase, my sheets – they were all smeared in a homogenous brown layer of crap.  I didn’t know a squirrel-sized animal could contain so much crap. 

I artfully peeled off my shirt and put it straight into the washer.  I stripped my sheets and did the same with them.  I poured a cup of straight bleach in after them, not caring if I ever saw them again. 

I headed immediately for the shower, where I watched clump after clump of crap ooze off of my now matted hair.  My once-in-a-lifetime curls were gone.  I used an entire palmful of shampoo.  I have a lot of hair, and had an equally impressive load of crap pasted into it.  Clump after clump.  Where was it still coming from?!  I shampooed again.  And again.  Still, the strands felt dense and sticky.  I still smelled it.  It was inescapable.  I should probably mention that this wasn’t normal cat crap.  This was the pastey goo that results from the transition from mother’s milk to formula to canned food in the period of a few weeks – weaning crap.  The worst kind.   

I finally gave up and exited the shower.  Instantly, the smell followed me.  It hovered around me.  I dunked my head into the bathroom sink streamed hot water and soap across the now brittle strands.  I thought it couldn’t be done, but here it was – a grand finale to my crappy day as a vet student.  Failing grades and parking tickets larger than my weekly food budget and the unavoidable smell of bleach and crap filling my tiny, 400 square foot apartment.  I wanted to cry.  I wanted to give up.  I really just wanted to sleep. 

Then Rue came around the corner and sat against the frame of the bathroom door.  She cocked her head, looking up at me, and mewed her adoration (and, likely, her hunger).  I was it for her – the pinnacle of her tiny, kitten-squirrel sized world.  I was food and shelter and comfort and love.  That’s the life of a vet student.  Being able to wash away the stressors and heartaches of a really rough day, and seeing, in the eyes of our patients, that it was all worth so much more than we realized.  We are it!