By Sarah Montague

“Here I stand at the crossroads of life” is what Anthony Newley crooned in Doctor Doolittle.

Crossroads is where you take one path, and not another; where, if you are Robert Frost, you take “the road less traveled by,” and if you are Robert Johnson you meet the devil and learn to play the guitar.

But, if you’re most of us, it’s the moment when you opted for investment banker, instead of rock star, library school, instead of competitive swimming, or even writer, rather than painter.

My own arrival at the crossroads came when I was 17. I had completed my school exams and qualified for a place at Cambridge University, as an English student, but I had a yen to become a veterinarian. For several months I debated kicking over the
traces of my preordained life as a bookish girl and following instead a path leading to lab coats and large animals. After all, I had been virtually brought up by standard poodles, was horse mad, and was drawn irresistibly to anything with four legs and a tail. My relations with what a horse friend of mine calls “the uprights” was not nearly so tranquil. However, in the end I decided that I was a) too weak in the sciences to be any sort of doctor, and b) too tenderhearted to face the more difficult scenarios of veterinary life.

Hollywood loves crossroads. A score of films — I Know Where I’m Going; It’s a Wonderful Life; Brigadoon; Groundhog Day, to name a few — are devoted to those epiphanal moments and what happens if you alter them, realistically or fantastically:

In real life we aren’t usually given the opportunity to go back and change our destinies, but recently I was offered a chance to get a glimpse of a life I might have led. At a charity luncheon, mine was the winning bid on a silent auction item, “Spend a Day with a Veterinarian.”

The vet who crafted this offer is Dr. Paul Schwartz, who has recently built an ambitious facility in Millbrook, New York. I arranged to spend the day after Thanksgiving observing the practice.

The idea would be to compare my current and former expectations against the realities of the profession. How would I have fared if I had gone into this field? What does it really entail? And how would I measure up?

This makes the venture sound like some sort of mandatory life-assessment exercise, but of course I also anticipated the enjoyment that comes from entering a new milieu — with all its challenges and excitements, but without any of the attendant long-term responsibilities, commitments, or ethical dilemmas. Sort of like staging one’s own reality show (“So You Want to Be a Veterinarian”) or playing fantasy football. I could enter the drama of this day in the guise of what in documentary circles is known as a “social actor.” Or to put it another way, I was about to become an adventure tourist in the country of my heart.

The spacious building I drove up to was a striking contrast to the cluttered vets’ offices of New York City, with contentious dog and cat owners sitting virtually on top of one another like characters in a George Price cartoon for The New Yorker. And while it was sleek inside, it was also snug, in contrast to the bitter cold without.

One of the practice’s veterinary technicians, Eleanor, took me on a tour of the labs and roomy treatment areas, which include a stunning space designed to prepare horses for surgery, with a floating cable and an automated platform. This side of the practice also treats premature foals, for whom there is often a daunting prognosis, and just hearing about them brought back the dread that I remembered from my youth — of hurt that would be too much to bear.

Once I had completed the tour, I met Schwartz himself, a youthful, intense, and confident man, and we waited in one of the examining rooms for his clients. The day proved to be a busy one, probably because more people than usual had time off to bring in their animals. The morning brought a parade of dogs — and an opportunity to watch bedside manner, veterinary style.

There is a Starbucks recruitment poster that reads: “Do What You Love,” but experience teaches that professional life is only partly about finding work that intersects with your passions and attributes. You are also choosing a culture, with its codes and constraints and social dynamics. I knew I could love animals any day of the week; the question was how difficult it would be to love them in this context. My younger (much, much younger) self thought of veterinary practice as a safe and romantic retreat from people for whom I did not care, but a long day at the clinic makes clear that any vet is treating an animal’s owner and family as much as he is the afflicted pet.

Dr. Schwartz reinforces this, not only in the careful way he walks each pet/handler configuration through the process, but in describing his own expectations about contrast between his New York City and his country practices. He assumed that country people were an unsentimental lot, willing to go so far but no farther for a pet in difficulties. Affluent urbanites, on the other hand, would empty their stock portfolios for a cherished friend. Not so, apparently, so Schwartz learned to take each new “family” on its own terms.

The patient roster proved to be a catalogue of canine ills: a German short-haired pointer with a resigned look and a cough, accompanied by another with an eye discharge. Schwartz lets me look through the ocular lens, explaining the structure of the eye. It’s thrilling to watch the optic nerve signal pass from the brain around the rim of the retina, like a planet in a solar system. To me, the retina just looks like an iridescent blur, but Schwartz can detect scar tissue from an old injury.

An elegant but nervous boxer, with the tensile good looks of Hilary Swank in Pretty Baby, might have pancreatitis, and the staff is concerned; it is clear they feel she deserves a little good luck.

An Australian shepherd cross has a skin irritation, and a cocker spaniel has a hernia. Schwartz carefully runs through a range of treatment options, and I realize that he spends a lot of time making owners feel invested and empowered. This is an aspect of the job I wouldn’t have imagined, although it parallels trends in human medicine. While treating the patient, the vet is educating the owner. I find myself wondering if I would have been as deft a patient advocate.

Sometime during the morning, an avatar of my youthful self arrives in the form of Schwartz’s daughter, a poised ‘tween with a zestful appreciation for her father’s work. She sits in on several examinations, and I ask her if she’ll go into the field. She’s not sure, she says, but doesn’t seem burdened with my old ambivalence.

Dr. Schwartz goes out to the waiting room for the next patient, Bean, an old Lab with fatty tumors. She is scheduled for minor surgery in the afternoon. I watch Schwartz move his hand gently over the dog’s body. The touch seems both tender and efficient, and this makes me think about empathy: how veterinary work requires a leap of faith into the body and spirit of another. Empathy is more intuitive, more complex, than sympathy. In my self-centered youth — casting myself as the Albert Schweitzer of the barn — I was very conscious of my own stoicism in the face of dying horses; ailing pigs; and porcupine-skewered cattle dogs. Was I too busy monitoring my own responses to pick up on theirs?

Finally, the most sensational client of the day. Wyatt, a chocolate Lab, is recovering from a deep-penetration wound. Schwartz’s examination had revealed that a jagged section of tree branch was actually lodged near the lung, causing the dog’s whole system to go haywire. A prolonged surgery saved Wyatt’s life, and he is in just for routine follow up, looking perfectly spry.

It is clear that Schwartz is proud of his work here, and the reason is made clear when I ask him, in one of the lulls between patients, what attracted him to the profession. He offers the first, obvious, response — he’d been bandaging any animal that would allow it since he was 7 — but then went on to say that the problem-solving aspect was what appealed to him most. I had always thought of veterinary work in terms of rescue, but thinking of it as problem solving is more dynamic, and less likely to weigh the practitioner down with emotions. (I think back to that gaudy Doctor Doolittle movie, in which Rex Harrison admits a) that he can talk to the animals and b) that sometimes he wishes they would shut up.)

I also ask the two vet techs, Eleanor and Amanda, what characteristics they feel are most important for the job. The answers surprise me. I would have guessed “a strong stomach,” but patience was the thing they ranked next, and it occurs to me that, outside of the orchestrated thrills of programs like ER, much of the medical profession involves waiting and watching, especially in this setting, where it’s important to pick up non-verbal cues from clients who cannot tell you how they feel. Both techs also mention the difficulty of emotional investment; without it, you shouldn’t be in the job, but with too much, you can’t function in the job. The antidote? “Optimism and a capacity for joy,” they say, and I wonder how great my supply is.

In the afternoon Schwartz makes the rounds — checking on resident patients, picking up test results, preparing in a leisurely way for Bean’s tumor surgery. This takes place in a small operating theater. I am allowed to stand right by the table, as long as I don’t touch anything. This is the high point of the day for me, and I watch unfazed as Schwartz cuts through webby layers of bloodied skin to chisel out the tumor. I am thrilled the same way I was as a teenager when I got to be involved in any kind of treatment. And like a prize for good behavior, I get to hold the fatty rubbery tumor once it’s out.

The day draws to a close, and I drive away thinking about whether I made the right decision all those years ago, which is a way of asking whether, in the end, one put one’s skill set to the best use, one’s heart and mind on the right course, and whether that course was indeed the path of least resistance or the more interesting road, the one less traveled by.

I wound up as a radio producer and journalist, where my strengths are a kind of clinical intelligence about ideas, and the ability to enact them for the ear. My sort of production is about seeking the unexpected and revelatory, what James Joyce called ‘epiphany.” What, I wondered, was the equivalent for vets? This is ultimately where art and science part: the former ratifies and renews itself by generating hypotheses that are “provable” only within the context of their form, to reflect an imagined view of the world as it is or might be. Diagnosis, on the other hand, looks to align manifestation with a known universe of fact.

I am happier in the former realm, I realize, although if the “para” class of supporting technician had been a more and more clearly defined option when I was in my 20s, I might have chosen it.

And, with the benefit of hindsight, I would have known how to transform my sensibilities into effective healing tools, transmuting tender-heartedness into a respect for each animal’s dignity and each family’s concern and love. I like people better now than I did when I was younger, and that, too, would make me a better vet.

Ironically, my work does sometimes offer scenarios every bit as devastating as those one might encounter in a veterinary clinic. I produce a short-story series, and every once in a while we feature a story involving the pain or death of an animal. Even when beautifully written, I find them almost unendurable — all the more because I cannot reach beyond the page to diagnose, or stroke a head, or offer comfort.

Sarah Montague is a writer and producer for print and public radio. She covers the annual Westminster Kennel Club dog show for WNYC and has written for such publications as Animal Times, Dog Fancy, and Eventing. She is the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Horses, and the author of the forthcoming Riding in Primetime. She has also contributed cultural and animal-related features to nationally distributed public-radio programs such as Morning Edition, On the Media, and Studio 360. She lives in upstate New York, frequently in the company of dogs, cats, horses, cottontails, and field mice.

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