dovate

Sometimes my colleagues over at the mUr4L 4r72 pro9R4M ask me how I’m able to react so well in a sometimes-hectic environment. Priorities change by the second. There’s always more than 1 thing going on. Usually there are 4 or 5 things going on. My answer generally goes along the lines of: you have no idea where I came from.

The chaos in the story below just touches on the hell that was my previous job. Actually it was the chaos described in this story that I considered to be one of the best parts of that job.

To give a little context, during college I worked full-time at a 24-hour animal emergency room. I went to school part-time and was there for 6 long years. This evening I was leafing through an old journal and found a short story I wrote about something that happened one day at work. Sorry for the excessively dramatic prose, the story is a little old. All of it is true.

——————–

May 20, 2003

The fluorescent lights gave me energy. I felt like I was on acid, or just in some sort of trance. Like stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night, half asleep.

There was the chaos of the ER, the people and the dying animals under buzzing shadowless fluorescent light. To the left of me was a pit bull being restrained by 3 beautiful women. He had a muzzle on his face, a delicate gloved finger up his ass. Behind the dog was a squirrel in a small plastic box. It was recovering from a dose of ketamine, stiff and catatonic. I stared for a second. A squirrel in a k-hole. I noticed a sliver of black underwear peaking out from the scrubs of the doctor who held her finger in the dog’s ass. I saw it and I looked away.

I came back here for something, I thought. To relay a message to a doctor. But where was she? The room was small, but there were people everywhere. They were on the floor giving injections; one was crammed into an oxygen cage with a cancer-ridden schnauzer. Another doctor muzzled a constipated rat, but she was the wrong one. Then I spotted her in the back of the room, behind a seizuring beagle. She was on a computer browsing the Tiffany’s website. When I got to her, I saw that she was covered in bloody diarrhea.

I had to deliver the message.

“The owner of the Rottweiler wants to know if you need a sample of his vomit.” I said. The energy of the room made me feel completely insane, but the words came out solid. “He said his personal vet threw away his dog’s vomit.” I paused for a second. “He’s willing to dig through the dumpster behind his vet’s office to look for a sample.”

I shared a moment with the doctor as we considered the reality of the offer. We imagined the man – a Pennsylvania State Trooper in full uniform – crouching inside a dumpster and rummaging through bio-medical waste in search of his poor sick dog’s vomit and bile.

The doctor thought for a moment and responded. “I don’t think it would be of much help. You can tell him he doesn’t have to do that.”

“Don’t tell anyone that people don’t truly love their pets.” I joked. The light didn’t seem so abrasive.

So all in all, nothing I do now holds a candle to that shit. Just for fun, here’s what I wrote in my journal immediately after penning that story:

The proliferation of cell phones is disturbing. Most people just hold them to their heads… listening. They don’t talk. Maybe they’re receiving secret messages.

And that’s all for now.