The Christmas Chicken

Some things only make sense if you've survived vet school.

Every Christmas, my family slaughtered a chicken. It was routine. Someone would pluck the feathers, someone else would cut it into pieces, and before long it would be in the pot. I never thought much about what happened between "alive" and "dinner."

Then I went to veterinary school.

After one semester of anatomy practicals, I went home for the holidays carrying something I didn't even know I'd learned. While everyone else wanted to finish preparing Christmas lunch, I found myself slowing down. Instead of pulling the skin away quickly, I carefully reflected it, looking for natural tissue planes we'd spent weeks finding in the anatomy lab. I separated muscles instead of hacking through them. I paused to identify structures I hadn't even noticed existed a year earlier.

Later I realised it wasn't just me. Veterinary students begin seeing the world differently.

After anatomy...

The crunchy end of the chicken bone is not just a delightful end to your meat. It's now a delicious hyaline cartilage covering the epiphysis of the distal end of the tibiotarsus.

After parasitology...

Every itch on your face is mites, and every piece of beef is checked for cysts.

After pathology...

No bruise, bump or pain looks ordinary anymore. Those dark spots on your arms could be purpura...you never know.

After surgery...

"Dr Christina Yang is exaggerating the seriousness of the surgery. I could do that with my eyes closed. Her surgeon's knots are too tight anyway."

After physiology...

A little dehydration means there's definitely an issue with your RAAS.

These are all those little moments that make veterinary students smile because they're so true. Looking back, I wasn't preparing Christmas lunch any differently because someone had told me to. I was doing it differently because vet school had already begun changing the way I saw living things. Somewhere between my first anatomy practical and that Christmas morning, I had stopped seeing "a chicken."

I had started seeing an animal.

Now let's hear from you. When did you realise vet school had changed the way you saw the world?