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A third-year vet student presses up against the wall to get out of the way as two more masked scrubs pull a set of cables along the U-shaped track on the ceiling. The third-year student is there to observe the surgery; she won’t get her hands on a scalpel for real until next year during her fourth-year rotations. She is a captain in the Army, with ambitions of joining the Army Vet Corps when she graduates.

Suddenly one of the garage doors creaks open. There is the racehorse, conked out on the floor of a padded stall. Her long legs are bandaged with heavy padding and her tail is packaged in a tidy mesh bag, like a cafeteria lady’s head. She has what looks like a vacuum cleaner tube in her mouth. Three vet students are in the stall with the horse, attaching the thoroughbred’s leg pads to cables dangling from the overhead track. Someone turns a switch and a crane slowly cranks the horse, legs first, into the air. The cables lift the horse’s body, but Rob—a fourth year student with surgeon’s hands— supports the horse’s head.

“Rob, bring her around,” someone directs and several other masked scrubs put their shoulders against the inverted thoroughbred, pushing the anesthetized horse along the U-shaped course that leads to the Naugahyde bench in the middle of the room.

“Okay, bring her down,” someone orders, and the cables lower the horse onto her back, buglike on the bench. Eight human hands gently guide the horse into place. They disconnect the leg pads from the cables and secure the racehorse’s legs to skyhooks to keep them out of the way during surgery. The horse’s ample belly collapses into her ribcage, which Julie, a fourth-year student in the surgery rotation, drapes with blue surgical linens. The lights, the camera, and all of the action are focused on a lump the size of a walnut on the inside of the horse’s thigh. All the action that is, except for vet tech, Dianna, who is keeping vigil at the horse’s head. Dianna has attached the horse’s vacuum cleaner tube to an accordion-like respirator, its rhythmical whooshing will keep the horse alive and breathing for the next three hours.

Julie has finished shaving the horse’s thigh and Rob is sponging the surgical area with an orange antiseptic when two surgeons enter the room, both moon-suited in blue surgical gowns.

“Wipe away from the wound,” instructs the senior surgeon, a professor of equine surgery at the teaching hospital and an expert in equine oncology. Accompanying her is a resident in large-animal surgeries.

A freckle-faced woman in her mid-twenties, the resident surgeon graduated from vet school last year and is now working toward her specialty in neurological surgery. Her dream is to work with performance horses, repairing injuries to racers and jumpers. As a resident, she outranks the vet student and serves under the veterinary professors, which means she works all day and is on call all night. That can mean a 100-hour week sometimes, especially when there are emergency surgeries coming in on weekends. In fact, just last night, she was here performing an abdominal surgery on a colicky horse.

Now she makes the first incision into the racehorse’s leg. The camera zooms in for a bloody close-up, but the senior surgeon’s hand is there with clamps and a cauterizing gun to stem the blood flow from each sliced vessel. The surgeons’ four hands move together as if connected to one brain in a steady pulse of cut, clamp, and cauterize. The vet students stare up at the TV screen, watching the surgeons peel open the flesh around the lump. The bellows whoosh a rhythm of breath in and out of the horse’s lungs. Dianna adjusts a blood pressure monitor clipped to the horse’s tongue.

Suddenly, the anesthesiologist bounds in. Except for his rumpled scrubs and the surgical mask dangling off his chin, he looks like he might have just jetted in from some very hip, highly caffeinated resort. He’s bouncy, tan, and much more rested-looking than either of the surgeons. He checks in with Dianna, who has her arm curved around the horse’s big head as she monitors the vital signs displayed on a screen above the accordion.

“How’s she look?” the anesthesiologist asks, looking at the numbers on the screen, then looking down at the horse.

“Okay,” Dianna says.

“Awesome,” he says and adjusts some knobs on the monitors. The anesthesiologist has brought along another vet student who is learning the anesthesiology ropes. They mumble to each other through their blue surgical masks.

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