Dr. Grace, DVM

When I first became aware of what was going on, I realized that I was in a veterinary hospital. (Not a huge surprise, I'm an assistant at a vet hospital.) It was one of those situations where I knew it was a familiar place but it was a little off.

I was going about my business as usual when my supervisor, Mary, called me into a room I didn't recognize to train me for something new.

When I walked through the door I found Mary, a tiny little dark-haired lady, restraining a giant brown horse.

Which was startling for many reasons, including but not limited to the fact that I work at a SMALL animal hospital, and the fact that I'm a little skittish around horses. For some reason, nervous or easily startled animals tend to make me increasingly nervous and easily startled, which is something I really need to work on because we usually just end up feeding off of one anothers' anxiety until everything falls apart. The difference is that it's usually an animal that is at the most, 80 or so pounds heavier than me. Not a huge horse.

This picture alone freaks me the hell out.




As close a pic as I could find to the one horse I've ever liked - an old, fat, grey Clydesdale mix who never moved faster than a walk and wasn't phased by anything. (I tried horse camp when I was little. Spent my time cleaning stalls and playing with the stable dog to avoid riding.)


So I stood there for a while, hanging around the doorway and not really listening to anything Mary was saying.

Luckily for me, one of the Dr.s poked his head in and said he needed me in treatment.

When I walked through the double doors into treatment, I was met with an even more startling sight. There were human patients everywhere, on stretchers or operating tables and the like.

I quickly asked a fellow employee what was going on. He looked at me like I was crazy, and reminded me that when there isn't enough room in the people hospital, the veterinary hospital takes on the patient overflow and does the needed treatments and operations. Then one of the techs asked me to operate on a human patient, and I made a second realization, that apparently I was a vet med student already. (Right now I'm just the veterinary version of an orderly.)



I knew that I was a vet med student and I knew how to operate on animals, but I had all the knowledge of my real-life self, which is almost none. Thus, while a request to operate on an animal would've scared me shitless, the fact that it was now a human life was so much more nerve-wracking. (Not that I don't value animal lives. I do.)

I stood there like an idiot for a couple minutes, looking around to try and find another vet student who could assure me that I wasn't a huge loser, that it was a legitimately crazy situation.

Of course, the first person I found was Napoleon*, in surgery scrubs, in the middle of an operation on a human patient's forehead.

I gave him an inquiring glance, and may have said something like, "What's going on?"

He smiled sheepishly and shrugged and said, "I'm just going with it."

That was all I got from him. Around the time I was waking up, I think I had decided to go ahead and operate. God help whatever poor soul was going under my knife.



*My new name for the dude previously known as "Ex-Boyfriend," since I no longer consider it relevant that we once dated.