I first see the garden the summer before my last year at veterinary school when I live in Paoli, Pennsylvania in an apartment on the second floor of a house. Soon, I will start clinical rotations, an exhausting period of study where three years of books and lectures will somehow metamorphose into the management of living, breathing patients. Then, I will graduate and become a veterinarian myself, whirring off into the future formed by my career. The future is what concerns me—I’m no longer certain about being a veterinarian.
That summer, I go running in the heat. I step out of my air-conditioned apartment onto the shimmering asphalt. Inhaling is the same as exhaling, as if I’m breathing the same air, trapped in a large, humid oven. I run westward, out of the suburban sprawl and into the land of country manors.
My normal route passes a hundred-acre estate, the main house and outbuildings of tan, speckled sandstone visible for miles. Farther down the road, I pass an imposing iron gate that leads into an immense garden with exotic trees, sculpted bushes, curving gravel paths and flowering magnolia. The garden gently winds along the hillside before rambling away into the distance, beckoning. In the evening, a faint, ambrosial scent steals from the depths of the garden onto the road.
In August, I’m an intern with an ambulatory equine veterinarian. I mostly gaze out the passenger window of the vet truck wondering when I can go home. I don’t understand how biochemical pathways and anatomy dissections translate into persuading owners the lameness is in the foot (not the shoulder), finding a diagnosis or providing treatment with insufficient funds, or telling a twelve-year-old girl her horse is going to die. I reread All Creatures Great and Small for the tenth time and finally appreciate what I had not paid attention to before—the vast energy and compassion extracted bit by bit from the veterinarian and prescribed to each case. I realize the practice of veterinary medicine moves far beyond the science of the Krebs cycle and the functions of the twelve cranial nerves.
Earlier in my third year, I complete an intensive period of large animal study, including a foray into surgery. Working with two other students, I perform a ligament operation on a small pony under the supervision of a group of surgeons. To prepare for my surgery day, I pore over the procedure, obsessively review anatomy, practice gowning and gloving endlessly and name the most obscure surgical instruments. Meticulous, thorough preparation has always been my antidote to fear.
On my surgery day, I dress in my sterile garb, helped by my fellow student. My arms tremble as I reach into the large blue sleeves of the gown. A surgical resident breaks from the group of supervisors and stalks toward me.
“What are you waiting for? Let’s go! The patient is under—you should already be gowned and gloved,” he barks, staccato. He hovers, staring at me, hands on hips, head bulging forward. The taste of breakfast coats my dry mouth. My careful process becomes even slower and more faltering.
“Never, ever grab for your glove like that. See how you cross the sterile field? No good!” He shakes his head with tired disgust. How did I not think of this particular instance in my study? Suddenly, everything I understand perfectly in my head translates into a garbled, fumbling mess.
Finally, scalpel poised ready to make my incision, I point to the anatomical guides for the surgical approach I can describe in my sleep, looking for some small, condescending reassurance.
“Is this where I should cut?” I ask. He stares at me, arms crossed.
“You’re the surgeon. You tell me.” And he walks away.
After the procedure, the pony wakes up, eats hay and we check on him for the next week. Nothing seems amiss. We move on to other studies. But it turns out, sometime during surgery, I cut the wrong thing. The pony has a lingering lameness. No teacher ever tells me. I find out from a friend.
Clinical rotations pass in a blur of alarm clocks in the darkness, treatments, rounds, cases. I lust after sleep, each day like an endless test I’ve forgotten to study for. I dream of the Paoli garden where I can escape the ticking of the sun as it moves in a relentless, callous passage across the sky. Suddenly, I’ve become a veterinarian.
After graduation, I slide into small animal medicine instead of large animal practice, more turning away from the equine world than toward anything in particular. My first job is at an emergency clinic in central Massachusetts. Above the hospital, a seldom-seen bedroom, bathroom, kitchenette and TV waits for whoever is on call. After several weeks of support, the first weekend on call by myself arrives. I’m the only veterinarian at the hospital from Friday evening at five to Monday morning at seven. A dull, heavy foreboding follows me as I draw myself from the sealed, quiet safety of my car toward the back employee entrance on Friday evening. Blood-soaked towels, a stretcher and other detritus have been flung over the railings, telling of some emergency surgery that must have taken place. I open the door to the fluorescent lights, gray floors and sinus-tingling cleaner. My presence triggers looks of relief from those ending a shift. My sixty-two hours become an undivided terror of ringing phones in the night, desperate faces, wails of grief, purple gums, collapse, disbelieving pleas and angry cries.
An old yellow lab is rushed in gasping for breath attended by a family of six. They lay with me on the floor as I intubate him and perform test after test. I can’t figure out why—maybe a clot? He dies. A cat is found outside at dawn in the mist under a maple tree guarded by a doe, hemorrhaging from the jugular vein. All bleeding stops eventually. He lives. A Yorkie puppy flops, limp and weak. Bloodwork is a puzzle I tease apart—maybe a congenital liver shunt? But a diagnosis and ideas for treatment don’t matter; they have no money. A German Shepard collapses, his chest and abdomen full of clear fluid. He dies too. And then, a young, muscular dog jumps out of a truck window. The truck is going fifty miles per hour. The owners continue, after he jumps, unable to stop, running over their dog with the back wheel. His back is broken in half, spine severed. The dog curls and shakes. They hold each other and wail, unable to hear me tell them there is only one way I can help their dog.
The shift has no night and day, no breakfast, lunch or dinner. Harried, tongue-burning microwaved meals of Amy’s tamales pass into my stomach with iced Dunkin’ Donuts coffee delivered, unsolicited, by the night shift nurse. I throw myself onto the bed upstairs for short intervals, tossing and turning with murmuring images of dripping needles, drug calculations and beeping machines. I stare at my gray, drooping eye circles in the mirror of the windowless bathroom. The days neither advance nor retreat but catch in a constant reality of reaction. Time becomes unrecognizable. It stretches and dilates in a carnival house of mirrors, cackling at its irrational reflection.
By the end of my shift, images swim across my vision, the light sparkles and I walk as if underwater. The painted lines on the road home consume the last vestige of my focus. I sit outside in a folding chair on the shaded lawn and drink two La Fin du Monde Belgian triples with a plate of cheese and crackers. The sun glints through the amber glass. I stick my nose over the rim to the floral effervescence lacing the inside. As I drink, gazing through the liquid, I ponder the grass waving like the bottom of a sleepy, golden lagoon. The oak leaves wash in hushed, shimmering waves above me. Soon afterward, I fall into a deep, dark sleep. I awake later for dinner, forgetting where I am.
During this period, I also run. In the cold, in the dark, when I haven’t slept the night before, I run. In the spring, I train for a race with an interval session, alternating between jogging easy and running hard. I run as close as I can to my threshold heart rate. A nauseating tingle spreads up my spine as I urge my pumping chest farther and longer. Just two more minutes of this—just two more. My legs wobble and become uncoordinated; my diaphragm burns. This interval must almost be done. I look down at my watch to see that only ten seconds have passed. I take a deep breath and relax my shoulders, straightening my back. Stop counting the time, I think. It doesn’t help. Just run.
A year later, I live in southeastern Massachusetts in one half of a drafty 19th-century house full of dark rafter beams and cat hair that catches on corner cobwebs. I no longer work in emergency and I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t want to admit that being a veterinarian leaves me unfulfilled and wrung out, lest this confession reveal a personal flaw, or worst of all, an irredeemable failure. My regular clinic job gives me Wednesdays off and the apartment is quiet. No one but the old lady who walks by herself stirs in the neighborhood.
I look at the clock, waiting. Ten-thirty is too early. I stare out the window and arrange books. I take out Wuthering Heights, read three pages and replace it, sighing. I open and close the refrigerator. I glance up—eleven. The sun is past the yardarm. I turn again to the fridge, take out a beer and fill a pint glass. I set the glass on the woodblock cutting board on the counter. The delicate, newly forming bubbles grow enthusiastically from the bottom of the glass to join the thick foam at the top, blinking innocently. The energetic, yeasty odor breathes across the kitchen. I lift the glass and swallow a tasteless sip. It’s time to forget. Time to forget all the cases I cannot help, the raw emotions clients throw at me, the exhaustion of talking all day to everyone. Time to forget I work the next day and the next week and month and year and decade.
After four years, I move to Vermont. I work at a small clinic near Lake Champlain filled with kind people and steady appointments. In winter, when the sun sets in late afternoon, it streams in the high rectangular windows of surgery into the treatment area. I walk through treatment on the way from my desk to an appointment––maybe to see a thin Siamese who’s been vomiting for months; or a Pomeranian puppy with a cough; or an old, tail-thumping lab brought in by the whole family, come to talk about quality of life. I pause for a second in the sun. If I step all the way into the shaft of light and look up and up into the surgery window, squinting, all I can see is the sky immersed in brightness. And for a moment, I’m not in this building in a white coat, I never became a vet, I’m somewhere else entirely, far, far away. Maybe the garden in Paoli. Maybe Venus. Every time I take this breath in the sun, I think of “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury. In the story, a young girl lives on Venus where the sun only shines for one hour every seven years. I shift and carry on as time scratches in my ears; the appointments are waiting. They’re planned out, every half hour, laid in front of me. It’s much easier to keep going with what I’ve already begun.
On summer weekends, I cycle for hours. I sign up for a hundred-mile bike event and my long training day increases steadily each week for twelve weeks, working up to five hours. At the beginning of a ride, I am aware of my legs pedaling in circles, the strap of my helmet rubbing on my chin, my pelvis shifting back in the seat, my hand reaching down for the water bottle, but after an hour, sometimes two, I’m no longer aware of my bicycle at all.
My entire sense of being moves down the road, absorbing fields of undulating grass in the wind, dapples of sunlight, a pond next to a house, cracks in the asphalt, barns falling down, a four-wheeler mired in mud in the woods, blue sap lines, a dark cloud bank, someone walking out to the gate around their pool. At dinnertime, I blink, astonished at my immobile house. The world continued to exist beyond the movement of my bicycle. Five hours evaporated into a reel of passing roadside scenes, wind, breath and sun.
Five years flow by at the same rural clinic. I look into thousands of eyes, examine the tender whorls of ears, peer into the dark depths that lie beyond the root of tongues. I listen to thousands of hearts. Some are steady, slow and reassuring; some irregular, pounding and snapping; some fluttering, trailing off, never to begin again. Some second, hour, day and year I let go of who I thought I would be. Soon after the practice is sold, I quit.
On a summer evening, I sit at home on the covered porch with a glass of seltzer. The hay field across the road has just been cut. A year has passed since I worked in clinical practice. Vortexes of bugs pulse in the slanting light. A hermit thrush calls at the edge of the wood. The longing notes draw me out onto the thick lawn. I walk down a small hill to a ragged path mowed through a patch of brambles. At the end of the path is a tall, mesh deer fence with a simple swing gate. I open the gate, balancing the latch that doesn’t align right. Inside is a rich square of dirt that holds a wandering row of kale, gangly tomatoes, a few wispy asparagus, a trellis for climbing beans and a vast array of weeds. I’ve grown them all.
The sun goes down. The moon comes up. I stand still and listen to the quiet tinkling of the rusty tedder turning the hay.
