The Envelope Please

As in, "Oh God, please please please let this be the envelope." Yes, that envelope.

It's May of 1986 and I'm standing in Dr Bruce Murphy's laboratory on the second floor of the biology building at the University of Saskatchewan and I'm pipetting mink serum into tiny vials when the phone on the far wall rings.

"Philipp, it's your mom!"
My mom never phones me at work. Never. Either dad died or the envelope arrived.

"Yes mom?" (Cautiously, in German.)

"There's a letter for you from the veterinary college!" (Excited, in German.)
It's the envelope! Or, more accurately, it's an envelope.

"Is it thick or thin?" I ask.

"Thin. Is that good or bad?"
Bad bad bad I think. Shit, it's thin.

"Um, neither I guess. Go ahead, open it"

Ripping sounds at her end of the line. Panicky breathing sounds at my end. Long pause and then...

"You got in!"

I got it! It was the envelope!! It's hard to describe how this feels. Like winning the lottery (although I have never done that). Like getting an Oscar (never done that either). Like having your marriage proposal accepted (did that one!). Elation. Validation. Magic. In one instant your previously murky future suddenly comes into crystalline focus. And this coming from someone who only decided to become a veterinarian a few years prior (see: http://vetography.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-accidental-veterinarian.html). Imagine how this feels for all the people who have wanted to become a veterinarian from before they even knew the word.

This coming spring fifteen Manitobans will have that feeling. In 2020 possibly only ten will. The Manitoba government is considering a plan to drastically reduce the number of students permitted to study veterinary medicine. And this is an extraordinarily bad idea.

Let me explain.

First of all I should clarify what I mean by "permitted to study veterinary medicine". Manitoba is far too small to have it's own veterinary college. Prior to 1965 all Canadians who wanted to study veterinary medicine went to Guelph, Ontario, but the profession was expanding so rapidly that this was no longer tenable, so a regional system was set up. The four western provinces banded together to select a reasonably central site for a joint Western College of Veterinary Medicine. Lloydminster not having a university, Edmonton and Saskatoon were considered, with the latter ultimately getting the nod. After 1965 Guelph would only take students from Ontario east and all western students would go to WCVM at the University of Saskatchewan. Each participating province funded a set number of seats. Manitoba currently has 15.

There are a handful of veterinary colleges in North America and the Caribbean that permit non-residents to study there, but at full price, which is five to ten times what one pays at WCVM. As a nation we decided that post-secondary education is essential to our future, so we subsidize it. We recognize that it is better to keep the system open to talent than just open to deep pockets. So if Manitoba cuts the seats it funds, the five prospective students who could have gone to WCVM - to our college that we built - will have to move much further away and go even far more absurdly into debt to follow their dream. Very very few will be able to do this.

This is a problem. A big problem. The demand for veterinarians continues to grow. Animal welfare, biosecurity and food safety are all hot topics that are not going away any time soon. In Manitoba especially we have a hard enough time attracting people from out of province (due to weird and unfounded biases, but that's another subject...), so we count on Manitobans coming back. Yes, some students who go to vet school don't come back to Manitoba, and by the same token many med and law and dental and engineering students who study here leave Manitoba - that's life and it is after all a free country - but if we send less, even less will come back. It's a downward spiral.

I get it, the government wants to balance the books. Let's assume for a moment that you don't give a rat's hindquarters about young people's dreams or pet doctoring or prudent antibiotic use on farms or exotic diseases jumping to humans. Let's assume that. Let's assume that you just care about the economy in the most narrow sense of the word. Well, guess what? Veterinarians are also small business people. This government is supposed to love small business people. In very rough figures we contribute 180 million dollars to the economy every year and that's growing at about 5% a year. We employ large numbers of skilled people and pay taxes, lots and lots of taxes.

And then there's the question of fairness. If you really feel you need to balance the books by cutting postsecondary education funding, then cut evenly across all programs. Is the law faculty funding being cut by 1/3? Dentistry? I doubt it very much. The cost of those five vet school spots represents a rounding error in the government's budget, but for our small profession it has a huge impact.

In survey after survey children list veterinarian as one of their top ten dream jobs. And not just children feel that way. So many people want to become veterinarians at the supply end and so many jobs are open for veterinarians at the demand end, but there is a very tight bottleneck jammed between that supply and that demand. This bottleneck is your government. And this is a democracy, so your government is you. Do something about this.

The Life and Times of George Ramirez

George Ramirez lived a long full life punctuated by adventure and surrounded by love. Given the relative nature of time and how subjectively its speed of passage is felt, I'm sure that in his admittedly minuscule mind he lived the equivalent of a hundred human years. We don't know where or exactly when he was born and we don't know who his parents were, but every aspect of his subsequent life was lavishly documented by his companion and guardian, a ten year old girl. It is astonishing that something weighing only 45 grams could live such a rich life. And it is perhaps astonishing to some that something weighing only 45 grams could be loved so deeply and loved so truly.

George Ramirez was a teddy bear hamster.

His full name was actually George Ramirez Penner, as he was owned by the precocious Chloe Penner. I say precocious because the first time she brought George Ramirez in she was in the exam room by herself. Her parents had decided that as he was her hamster she should be fully in charge of his medical care, so they sat out in the waiting room. (I think they still paid the bills though.) To be frank, sometimes this type of arrangement is irritating to the veterinarian as it can effectively double some of our work when we have to repeat everything to the parents later. But not in Chloe's case. She was attentive and sharp and clearly capable of following my advice. Such as it was. Really, she was fully on top of things, so on that first visit when George Ramirez was brought in for a check-up my role was primarily to confirm for her that she was doing everything correctly. She showed me pictures of his cage, from which sprouted an elaborate network of clear plastic pipes leading to various chambers, including, if memory serves, one made to look like a little space capsule. George Ramirez was going to have a good life.

At this point I should offer up a confession. I love all types of patients. I do not favour dogs over cats (or vice versa), or rabbits over guinea pigs, or budgies over canaries, nor do I shy away from snakes or rats or hedgehogs or ferrets, to name just a few that sometimes elicit bias. But I was long a secret hamster skeptic. It's funny because my wife had hamsters when she was young whereas I had a gerbil, so we would sometimes engage in hamster versus gerbil debates. I felt I had solid facts on my side. And I had been bitten by more hamsters than all other rodent species put together, so that might have biased me a little as well. But then George Ramirez came along. He did not bite. He was clean. And he was cool. This was a hamster I actually looked forward to seeing.

Normally hamsters do not go to the vet. There are no vaccines for them and we do not need to (or even want to) spay or neuter them. Moreover, they are really pretty rugged, so not all that much tends to go wrong in their short lives. But perhaps the most common reason that they don't go to the vet is that unfortunately many people view spending money on their medical care as silly, putting them more in the goldfish category of pet than in the dog and cat category. I wonder why this is? Is it because hamsters are cheap to acquire? But then so are many dogs and cats (and heck, human children come into the world free). Is it because they are so small? If so, then does that mean that Great Danes deserve more care than Chihuahuas? Is it because they are loved less? I suppose that must be it. But that was happily not the case for George Ramirez.

I think I saw George Ramirez five times in his three years. Once for the initial visit, twice for annual check-ups and twice for medical reasons. The first time was for what is referred to as "wet tail". "Wet tail" is a euphemism. The tail is not wet with water, it is wet with liquid poo. Much like diarrhea in every other species "wet tail" is not a single specific disease but rather a symptom that has a range of causes. These little creatures can dehydrate quickly, so it can be serious, but fortunately George Ramirez revived right away when we sorted out why it was happening.

The second time I saw him sick was when Chloe brought him in with what she thought was a tumour on his face. She was clearly really upset, but trying hard to be brave. George Ramirez had an enormous irregularly shaped lump in his right cheek and he had stopped eating. Hamsters are prone to cancer, but this was not a cancer. When I palpated the lump and pried his tiny mouth open to peer inside I was as surprised by what I found as Chloe was. He had somehow filled his right cheek pouch so full of food that it had become impacted and bulged out to roughly equal the size of the rest of his head. And because he had jammed unshelled sunflower seeds in there it felt very odd and lumpy on the outside. We both knew that hamsters had large cheek pouches, but had no idea that they were this large or that food could get so badly stuck in there. The solution was gratifyingly simple. I simply turned the pouch inside out like the pocket in your jeans. He was weak enough that he let me do this awake.

I know you're expecting a sad ending, but the cheek pouch incident isn't it. George Ramirez bounced back yet again. Just like with wet tail. Just like when he did an EVA* from his capsule and was found three days later in the heating ducts. Just like when the Penners got a cat and the cat knocked over his cage. Eventually Father Time caught up with him and he died peacefully in his bed at the ripe old age of three and one third years. I found this out when Chloe came in with Edna von Trapp, a new young female hamster. Edna von Trapp had an evil glint in her eye and proceeded to bite me savagely at every opportunity, thus proving, in case proof was needed, that hamsters are not interchangeable. There are a lot of stories of parents sneaking out to the pet store without telling their children to get a look-alike replacement when a hamster dies. I suspect that the child almost always knows, even if they don't let on. Sort of like a Santa or Easter Bunny scenario. And Chloe definitely would have known.

*Extra-Vehicular Activity. It's an outer space thing.