« Previous Page

The student gently brushes the horse’s eyelashes with the edge of his gloved hand. The horse registers a half-hearted flicker, indicating to the doctors that she’s got the right amount of anesthesia. “Yeah, she’s cool,” the anesthesiologist says. “When you monitor the horse, and not just the machines, you use less drugs.” A month earlier, this doctor had hauled a handful of respirators and monitors up to the Portland Zoo to anesthetize the zoo’s elephant when its tusk required dental surgery. Today, he is bopping between large and the small-animal surgeries, adjusting drugs for cats, dogs, and a racehorse.

“It’s math,” the anesthesiologist says. “Math and magic and paying attention.” And with that, he bounces out with his student in tow.

Meanwhile, the two surgeons’ hands work like a practiced duet with scalpels and clamps. They snip, tie off, and cauterize each tiny blood vessel as they cut deeper into the horse’s leg to extract the lump. Rob’s job is to snip threads while Julie dabs gauze into puddles of blood and Dianna monitors the flow of sleep-inducing drugs into the vein in the thoroughbred’s neck. The tech maneuvers the overhead camera to get a better view; this surgery, like most procedures in the teaching hospital, will be used later for classroom instruction.

After more than an hour, the surgeons finally remove the lump, a yellowish growth that they place in a plastic tray that Julie will deliver to the hospital’s pathology lab. The surgeons continue to snip away at smaller growths that look like clumps of tadpole eggs strung through the muscles of the horse’s leg. Another snip and blood fountains in a graceful 18-inch arc that splatters crimson teardrops over the blue surgical drapes.

“Artery,” the third-year whispers. Within a second, the resident surgeon staunches the fountain.

“Julie,” the chief surgeon instructs through her mask without looking up, “cut that open and tell me what it looks like.” Julie slices into the lump that floats disembodied in the plastic dish. “It’s yellow, non-glandular,” she reports. “It looks like, well, like lymphoma.”

For a moment, the four hands are motionless. Dianna reaches down and strokes the horse’s jaw. A third-year student inches along the wall to peer over Julie’s shoulder. Rob waits for a cue to continue. Then, the doctors resume their surgical duet as four hands pull out another string of lumpy pearls from the racehorse’s leg. Hidden behind surgical masks and professional intensity, their reactions are hard to gauge.

“Send it on to pathology,” the chief surgeon instructs.

She douses the wound with a chemotherapy drug and motions Rob to suture the 10-inch wound. She guides the student through a series of elegant moves with the clamp and curved needle: pinch, pull, and twirl. “Leave plenty of thread dangling,” she advises. “Somebody’s going to have to crawl under this horse next week and remove these stitches, so you want to be able to get a hold of them without getting kicked in the head.”

“Ten minutes,” the resident announces, cueing Dianna to begin adjusting the drugs to slowly bring the horse back to consciousness. From this point, the movie runs in reverse. The two surgeons exit. Julie removes the blue, now blood-splattered, drapes from the horse’s caved in belly. Rob wipes antiseptic over the wound. Dianna unhooks the vacuum cleaner tube and removes monitors from the horse’s chest and mouth. Vet techs unhook the skyhooks and attach the leg pads to cables on the U-shaped track. The second set of garage doors open. The horse is lifted feet first into the air. Rob cradles the horse’s head as several blue scrubs push the racehorse’s body, upside down, along the track and into the padded stall. They lower her onto her side while a group of masked blue scrubs unhook the cables. Rob and Julie fit the horse with a giant plastic hockey mask and four heavy fleece-lined shin guards. Then they close the garage door. Rob pulls up two folding chairs where he and Julie can watch the TV monitor as the racehorse thrashes out of her anesthesia.

The horse will undergo a week-long course of chemotherapy and then return to her owners. The surgeons and anesthesiologists will meet again in a few hours to deal with the reproductive complaints of an alpaca stud. Rob and Julie will finish their large-animal rotations in a few weeks and move on to study current disease outbreaks — bird flu, West Nile virus, Black Plague — in the next chapter of their becoming 21st century veterinarians.

PEG HERRING, a science writer and editor who specializes in environmental and natural resource issues, graduated from the University of Oregon’s literary nonfiction graduate program in June 2007.  She is working on a book about veterinary medicine in the 21st century.