by Brent Fergusson (’16)
TW: animal abuse, drug abuse, graphic description of surgery.
Names and identifying details in this piece have been fictionalized.
Getting to work a half hour before opening had its benefits, but picking up frozen dog shit wasn’t one of them. Some workplaces have serene little perks in the morning: the quiet hum of an empty office; the feel of a pristine workspace after professional cleaners come in the night; the sleepy haze of just sitting, listening to the gurgling of the first pot of coffee brewing.
A successful animal hospital isn’t quiet in the morning. The dogs and cats have been alone in cages for hours, usually in pain, and our arrival makes them scream and scream. The back isn’t clean—more often than not one of the sick dogs has defiled his cage with something terrible, or one of the more intelligent cats has trashed her cage in an act of defiance. The front is clean; if clients could see what was going on in the back, there would be a problem.
People say that about restaurants, that you don’t want to see how the sausage gets made. Please. It’s organ meat put through a grinder and stuffed into intestinal lining. What you don’t want to see is the back of an animal hospital. While bags of food are being delivered in the front, bags of bloody diarrhea are being taken out the back. The picture of a cute puppy in the front is mirrored in the back by an abandoned 4-week old being euthanized because no one cares. Does it get messy making the sausage? Try cutting off a 70 pound dog’s head with an inch-long blade. Try rampant drug addiction, depression, and the slow degradation of empathy.
By any normal measure, there was no reason to get to my job more than a few seconds before the doors were unlocked. Any extra time would be spent chiseling frozen feces off the curb in front of the building to stay warm. But there was one little perk. If I showed up a little early, I got to watch the Boss arrive.
You could tell how much Doctor Wolf had had to drink the night before based on how long it took her to park. Car problems were somehow more common for her than for the average person; we were regularly told about madmen on the roads in the morning who sideswiped her car, and every couple months she would leave work to have mechanics fix her side mirrors, which had a strange tendency to be hit “while the car was parked”.
It was not uncommon for the doctor to come to work with red eyes, headaches, nausea. I didn’t get concerned unless she needed more than three attempts at a perpendicular parking spot, or spent time looking for her dog who was in the same cage he was always in, or, less conspicuously, if she was vomiting in the pharmacy sink. Those were the days when I had to double-check the math.
Dr. Wolf never wore a doctor’s classic white lab coat, although she had donned one for the photo on the website. She wore a scrub top with short sleeves that allowed glimpses of her “Truth will set you free” tattoo. She was the last person any of us would bother telling the truth to. Oddly, I fit right in with Dr. Wolf at first. I dug her breezy attitude, her bad taste in 80’s punk. It was nothing like my own taste in 60’s and 70’s folk rock, but it gave her an air of authenticity. We got on well, but with time I started to see how fake she was. I also realized she was a mirror.
Now, every doctor has their own injectable cocktail of premeds to gently ease animals into unconsciousness. Almost universally, this cocktail causes vomiting, defecation, loss of muscle control, and the look of fear that accompanies not knowing why what’s happening is happening. Dr. Wolf’s recipe always included hydrocodone. She once told me that she never felt bad for the animals who were vomiting after getting hydro, because she had gotten it when she was in labor and it felt so great she didn’t mind the vomiting. On a separate occasion, she told me she used to shoot up hydro in the bathroom of her high school. The problem with looking down at her was that I was her, plus a false sense of superiority and fewer letters after my name.
Dr. Wolf was dysfunctional, but we all were. I began to wonder if we made the work dysfunctional or if the work made us dysfunctional. The problem with having Wolf around, besides the obvious—drunken medical practice—is that animal hospitals are dysfunctional enough as it is. It’s not hard to believe that one in six veterinarians have contemplated suicide since getting their license. There are the clients, of course, but clients are the worst in every profession. Our dysfunction ran deeper. I was working long hours for the privilege of getting attacked by wild animals, cleaning up offal, viscera, and discharge, and occasionally decapitating beloved pets. I wasn’t well-balanced even on my best days, and my best days were days off.
Today, she needed four tries to park. As the morning got going a few routine surgeries arrived. Clients brought their loved ones in to be stabbed with needles, anesthetized, castrated. Wolf was unsteady on her feet, and even in her chair, so I double-checked the drugs: each dose, each route, each patient. I jotted down calculations for emergency drugs and kept them ready just in case. A quick and quiet meeting in the back and us techs determined that we wouldn’t stop the boss from cutting because the surgeries were basic. Every tech in the surgery suite could finish and close up the surgery if Dr. Wolf was too far gone. Oddly, there was almost an air of holiday, like today the performance was going on without a net underneath.
Those who spar with addiction know addicts. An alcoholic brought her pup in for an emergency surgery to remove a ruptured, cancerous tumor growing on the dog’s spleen. She confided in me that she actually hoped the doctor was under the influence when she operated on her Fanny, “because then her hands wouldn’t be shaking while she cut”.
Dr. Wolf’s hospital is actually the closest to the gold standard I’ve seen. The first place I worked at, I remember a time when the doctor did six neuters in a half hour– a breakneck pace that left no time for proper monitoring or sterility. The doctor was an old man with thick glasses, completely covered in thick bristly white hair, like a near-sighted yeti. He bit a dog once, hard. It was him that first told me I shouldn’t be a vet. As a tech, I was in charge of ripping all the hair off of these cat scrotums, and as fast as I could rip they were putting new cats in front of me. Once the scrotum was sliced open, the doctor yanked on the actual testicles to tear away the flesh around the two blood vessels. Then, he just cut the vessels and tied them together like shoelaces. The cat got thrown into a cage and the next one hit the table. I stood in some semblance of horror for a half hour, watching this grizzled old man ripping and tugging on these cat nuts while he talked to some lady about the weather on her vacation.
Dr. Wolf would never pull that shit. Routine surgeries at her hospital always followed the gold standard. Except for the drunk surgeon, of course. That was the hard thing about Dr. Wolf for me. Did she go into surgery under the influence of alcohol and pills? Yes. Did she do good work? Also yes. By all accounts this depressed addict was a business-owning, life-saving mother: highly successful in the heart of Chicago. And I was her depressed technician, counting down the hours until I could go home to my garage and get high.
I chose to become a vet tech because life hadn’t shown me a path like I had expected it to. The bachelor’s degree in philosophy led only to the coffee shop, which led only to the getting high all day playing video games. My wife had become a successful teacher, a mentor, and a valued member of her school’s south-side neighborhood. She had quit getting high, and a little later put out her last cigarette. I clung to both, and acted as her cheerleader whenever we met new people.
I used to drive her to work. I did it for years, in two states for three jobs. It was a comfort to us both: she was scared to drive in dangerous neighborhoods and I was scared of having nothing in my life I was proud of. I stopped smoking an hour or so before I left to pick her up so I wouldn’t be too high driving her home. I would find a spot in the school’s parking lot and sit in her car, playing games on my phone or dozing off while parents arrived and kids started to pour out of the building. She always wanted me to come inside; there was always work to be done in her classroom and parents or other teachers would stop in to chat. She wanted to introduce me, engage me. I always stayed in the car.
. . .
Euthanasia solution is called Pentobarbitol, but it’s most commonly marketed under the clever nick-name Euthasol. It’s thick, and bright pink. When a cat threw a clot that paralyzed its hind legs, it would come in screaming, and one of us would immediately reach for 3 cc’s of the pink juice—no matter who the doctor was. When a pet was beginning to decline and had an appointment with Dr. Wolf, we would sigh and reach for the pink juice. A dog named Lacy didn’t even get an appointment; Wolf OK’d the pink juice over the phone and she was dropped off a few minutes later. Drop-off euthanasia is uncommon and, in the back, we disapproved of any client who didn’t want to face this final result of owning another life.
It had already been a long day by the time we got to Lacy. I had spent the last half hour shaving the back half of an ancient German Shepherd, and wherever I shaved there were maggots feasting on urine-scalded skin– which wouldn’t be so bad if my coworker was not eagerly grabbing the bigger ones and squishing them between her thumb and forefinger, squealing with delight and disgust.
Lacy had bit a kid, and the state of Illinois says that if a dog bites someone you have to confirm that the dog doesn’t have rabies. You can quarantine them and see if they go crazy, but if they die during the quarantine period—like if they get pink juice injected into their heart, which is what we did to Lacy—there’s only one way to prove she doesn’t have rabies. Standard procedure is to decapitate the animal and put the head in a box with some ice packs. US Mail to the state of Illinois.
I got Lacy up on the wet table on her side. She was easily forty-five or fifty pounds of Pitbull, with blonde hair and dark spots around her ears. Some hospitals use garrote or a bone saw, but we didn’t want more bloody instruments to clean. Our custom was to use an inch-long disposable ten-blade.
The first cuts are just skin cuts that expose the thick muscles of the neck. I remember how, after the first time I did this, I couldn’t eat steak for weeks. I still don’t order them rare. You can get down to the cervical vertebrae pretty quick from above the neck. It’s misleading though—the real work is below. All the jowls pool up. As you cut through the meat there, you hit the jugular veins which deposit whatever remaining blood is in the vessels. On the one hand, it makes sense to wait longer after the pink juice for the blood to congeal, but then you have to deal with rigor mortis.
Tell yourself it’s a lesson in biology, like a high school dissection. The esophagus is just a fleshy tube, and you wouldn’t even notice it if you didn’t know that it’s just behind the trachea. The trachea needs to stay open at all times to deliver air to the lungs, so it’s got cartilaginous structures, like the bendy part of a straw pulled straight. It feels like a big straw and can be tough to cut through. By the time you’re working on it, the blade has started to go dull. For anything after that, the surgical use of your blade is a joke. The neck’s toneless flesh is pooled below. You do what you can. Try not to look in her eyes.
The main goal is to expose the cervical vertebrae. Once you’ve done that all the way around, unfortunately, you just have to break the neck. I’m told that you can use some sort of precise cut in between vertebrae to sever the spinal cord and detach the head, but I’ve probed around a bit, and only ended up breaking my blades off between bones.
The first time I did this on a 70 lb dog, I twisted the head clockwise until it had rotated laterally 360 degrees. There was a pop in the neck but no separation. The doctor came back and said, “Jesus, turned his head all the fucking way around. That’s fucked up.” I rotated it back and we shared an uncomfortable giggle. The second time I did it on a cat and just bent it to the side. It popped right off.
I couldn’t do Lacy. Dr. Wolf and I had both known the dog, and her puppies. I had no trouble with the first part. But I couldn’t finish; I couldn’t do this anymore. Dr. Wolf came and did it, and I politely looked away as she bent the head back until forehead met spine. There was a slow, wet pop and it was over. I had a box ready with ice.
It was eleven by the time I got back to my garage. I had been at the hospital since six in the morning, when Dr. Wolf began to try to park. I got out my old bowl, dug out my baggie. I got high aggressively. How did she do it? I went inside, aimless in my living room.
I drank whiskey on ice. Why should she be successful? Why isn’t her addiction punished? Mixing drugs makes me sick and I vomited, but sobriety and sanity were creeping back so I rooted out my wife’s old prescription meds. Am I supposed to be more like her?
My hands were steady when I opened the bottle.
Dogs and cats are foul creatures, I don’t know why I ever wanted to work with them. I knew a dog, a tiny white fluffy one, who would put his head down and his hips forward and drink urine right from the source. It was horrible and wonderful to watch. He boarded with us regularly and it was great because he didn’t need as many walks and his cage never got dirty. Doctor Wolf’s dog Knobby would pleasure himself, audibly, with his own mouth. It was hard to blame him; as a puppy someone had squirted lighter fluid on him and lit a match. When he came to us, he was just a reeking bundle of blackened skin and exposed muscle. Dr. Wolf, who is disturbingly close to this dog (she calls him her son) once said that he was lucky she wasn’t working the night he came in because she would have put him down without a second thought.
Early on in my career as a vet tech I figured out that I didn’t want to become a doctor. I hadn’t met any happy doctors. I don’t know for sure when I started realizing I needed to get out of veterinary medicine, but it was around the time I started to get over the guilt and paranoia of being high around my daughter. I started learning how to time my sessions in the garage so that I didn’t have to take care of the baby right after getting high. I settled into a routine of sleeping on the couch downstairs.
Dr. Wolf lived alone, divorced from her family. I lived a life apart from my family. She distracted herself with Facebook. I distracted myself with video games. She drank and took pills. I drank and smoked pot. She vomited in the sink in the morning. I vomited in the toilet at night. Sometimes you stop what you’re doing because you see something better, sometimes you stop because you want to see something better. I saw Dr. Wolf; I saw myself in ten years. I wanted to see something better.
Brent Fergusson (’16)
The title of my piece is “Decapitation.” It is a creative nonfiction story, a memoir of my time working in veterinary medicine before I joined MAPH and started working in higher ed. As a student, I focused on Animal Studies; I think the way philosophy is done in regard to animals is deeply problematic, and I see stories like this as a better way of grappling with the lived-experience of our time with animals. While at the time I wrote it, the story undoubtedly functioned as a way for me to unpack and examine the challenges of that time of my life, I hope that others can read it to (a) find a connection with another person struggling with depression, anxiety, and drug abuse, and (b) get a glimpse into the difficult realities of pet ownership and veterinary medicine.