A Love Story Written by a Veterinarian

I once sewed up a dog's throat with fishing line in the back of a pickup truck while its owner held a flashlight between his teeth and cried like a child.

It was 1979, maybe 1980. Just outside a small town near the Tennessee border. No clinic, no clean table, no anesthesia except for a little gut-wrenching. But the dog survived. And this man still sends me a Christmas card every year, even though the dog is long dead... and so is his wife.

I have been a veterinarian for forty years. Four decades of blood under fingernails and hair on clothes. Back then, you made do with what you had—not what you could charge. Today, I spend half my days explaining insurance codes and financing plans, while a beagle bleeds to death in the next room.

I thought this job was about saving lives. Now I know: it's mostly about picking up the pieces when everything falls apart.

I started in 1985. Freshly graduated from the University of Georgia. I still had my hair. And hope. My first clinic was a brick building at the end of a gravel road with a roof that leaked in the slightest downpour. The phone was a rotary dial, the fridge made a motor noise, and the heater only worked when it felt like it.

But people came. Farmers, workers, retirees, even truckers with pit bulls sitting in the passenger seat.

They didn't ask for much.

A prick here. A stitch there.

And euthanasia, when it was time - and we always knew when it was time. There was no debate, no social media blame game, no “alternative protocols.” Just this silent understanding between a person and their dog: the suffering had become too great. And they trusted me to carry that weight.

Sometimes I would take my old pickup truck and drive to a barn where a horse had broken its leg.

Or on a porch, where an old dog hadn't eaten anything for three days. I would sit next to the owner, hand him a handkerchief, and wait. I wasn't rushing anything.

Because at that time, we held them in our arms until the end. Today, people sign papers and ask if they can “come back and collect the ashes next week.”

I remember the first time I had to put a dog to sleep. A German Shepherd named Rex. He had been hit by a combine harvester. His master, Walter Jennings, a World War II veteran, tough as barbed wire and twice as sharp. But when I told him Rex was lost, his knees gave out. There, in my examination room.

He didn't say anything. He just nodded. And then—I'll never forget it—he kissed Rex's muzzle and whispered: "You've been a good dog, my boy." Then he turned to me: “Do it quickly. Don’t keep him waiting.”

I did it.

That night I didn't sleep. I sat on my porch with a cigarette, staring at the stars until dawn. That's when I realized: this job isn't just about animals. It's about love.

Of the love that people pour into a being who, they know, will never live as long as they do.

It's 2025 now. My hair is white—what's left of it. My hands don't always cooperate anymore. There's a tremor that wasn't there last spring. The clinic still exists, but now it has pristine white walls, subscription-based software, and a 28-year-old marketing manager who tells me to film TikToks with my patients. I told him I would prefer to castrate myself.

Before, we worked on instinct.

Now it's algorithms and accountability forms.

Last week, a woman came in with a bulldog in respiratory distress.

I told her he needed to be intubated and kept under observation. She took out her phone and asked me if she could get a second opinion from an influencer she follows online. I nodded. What do you want to say to that?

Sometimes I think about retiring.

I almost did it during COVID.

A nightmare. Car drop-offs in the parking lot, barking behind closed doors, masks hiding tears.

Farewells through a window.

No one held them when they left.

Something broke inside me at that moment.

But sometimes a child comes in with a box full of kittens found in his grandfather's barn, and his eyes light up when I let him feed one. Or I sew up a golden retriever who's brushed too closely against a barbed wire fence, and the next day his owner brings me a pecan pie. Or an old gentleman calls me just to say thank you—not for the treatment, but because I sat with him after his dog died, without saying a word, letting the silence do the work.

That's why I keep going.

Because despite all the changes—the apps, the forms, the lawsuits, the Google Diagnostics—one thing hasn't changed:

People always love their pets like their own family.

And when this love is deep, it manifests itself in simple gestures.

A trembling hand placed on a hairy flank. A whispered farewell.

A wallet emptied without hesitation. A grown man breaking down in my office because his dog won't see fall.

No matter the era, the technology, the trends—that doesn't change.

A few months ago, a man came in with a shoe box. He had found a kitten near the tracks. It had a broken paw, was covered in fleas, and its ribs protruded like piano keys. He himself looked like he had just come out of hell. He told me he had just gotten out of prison and that he didn't have a penny. But was there anything I could do?

I looked in the box. The kitten opened its eyes and meowed as if it recognized me. I nodded:

“Leave it here. Come back on Friday.”

We immobilized his leg, gave him warm milk every two hours, and called him Boomer. On Friday, the man returned with a half-eaten pie and tears in his eyes. He told me:

“No one has ever given me anything without first asking me what I had to offer.”

I replied to him: “Animals don't care what you've done. They only look at how you hold them in your arms."

Forty years.

Thousands of lives.

Some saved. Others not.

But they all counted.

I have a drawer in my office.

Locked. Nobody touches it.

Inside there are old photos, thank you notes, necklaces, medals.

A marrow bone from a border collie named Scout who saved a child from drowning. A clay imprint of a cat sleeping on a gas station counter. A crayon drawing of a little girl who wrote to me that I was her hero because I helped her hamster breathe again.

I open it sometimes, late at night, when the clinic is empty and my hands are finally calm.

And I remember.

I remember the time before.

Before screens. Before apps.

Before the buzz remedies and credit checks.

When being a vet meant rolling around in the mud at midnight because a cow was giving birth and you were the only one they trusted.

When we sewed with fishing line... and a lot of hope.

When we held them in our arms until the end—and we held their humans too.

If there is one thing I have learned in this life, it is this:

We can't save them all.

But we must do everything to try.

And when the time comes to say goodbye…

we stay.

We are not going back.

There's no rush.

We kneel down, we look them in the eyes, and we stay until their last breath leaves the room.

You are not taught that.

Neither at college. Nor in books.

But that's what makes you human.

And I wouldn't trade it for the world.