Work Text:
Statement begins.
“It was a Friday, not too long ago. I am working as an apprentice at a vet’s office for four months now. I am sure there are worse things to see, and maybe I will see them if I continue to work, but I feel like I have already had a fair share of things other might find … gruesome.
I remember how on my first days, the blood from the removal of teeth had freaked me out. The dog had had bad teeth for a while, and the gum around it had gotten weak and sensitive and when the vet probed around it it started to bleed immediately and the blood continued to flow and drip into the catch basin underneath, mixing with the dental fluid to a pink that got darker and darker.
I was also not this fazed when I witnessed the first operation. How they cut through the skin, slow and deliberate. It hardly bleeds. But then the stomach is open, exposed, and you can see how the organs are just squished inside, packed but still free to move around, to pull them out and stuff them back in together.
We once had a cat come in, she looked bad. You get a sense of these things after a while, of course some animals are good at hiding but sometimes one comes in and you just can see how sick they are, or how exhausted they are from continuing to live.
The owner said the cat had had been hit by a car. They’d found her in the night, and gone to a different vet who had looked at her and only given them some pain medicine.
We took a look at the cat. The cat’s hind leg was just … open, as if it had been torn off from the body, only attached by some muscles who didn’t work anymore. You could see some of the muscle tissue hanging out … and you could see the bone. The vet talked to the owner for a while and agreed to try to operate it, it would be complicated but there was a chance he could still stitch it up.
At least until we had a chance to properly look at the cat when it was sedated and saw that part of her bone stuck out around the knee. The cat didn’t wake up again.
Looking back I’m more creeped out than I was back then. You get kind of numb to these things, especially when you’re working and it’s busy. It seems cruel but I’ve always felt that in order to actually help those you can, you need to shut yourself out emotionally. There no place to be scared, or empathetic, when you are trying to revive a rabbit that just stopped breathing during narcosis.
And yet it took me by surprise and chilled me to the bone.
They were a family of five, mother, father, three children from twelve to five, the oldest walking in crutches. They were worried about their dog, it was smaller than a chihuahua even, smaller than dogs should ever be, in my opinion. Its head was smaller than my fist.
They just wanted a checkup and were worried because they felt like his stomach was a lot larger than usual. The vet couldn’t find anything, nothing was tense, or hard, it didn’t have a fever and seemed perfectly healthy. But they continued to be worried, so we took the small thing to the x-ray and looked at its stomach.
It was fuller than normal, but everything looked perfectly alright. Nothing stuck in there, no tumor, just probably had eaten something from the other dogs bowl. The vet laughed and asked if they needed anything else, like remedies against worms or flees, and if it was vaccinated.
"We don’t vaccinate”.
The words of the woman send a shock through my body. We were standing in the still darkened x-ray room and I looked at her, and it felt like I was looking at a different person. Her short, curly hair, her thin lips looked the same, and yet dread started to form in my chest.
There was silence for just a few seconds, but they passed by agonisingly slow. I looked to her daughter, leaned against the wall with her crutches and she said, “they are toxic”.
I can’t really pride myself on keeping my composure because it was mostly shock keeping me still. It felt like the temperature had dropped by a few degrees, as if it wasn’t cold enough outside now that it was November, and the sense of dread, the sense of something just being ..wrong… crept out from my stomach and filled my lungs, tensed my back, filled out my arms and legs and dried my throat.
The vet said something about not being interested in changing someones mind, gave a warning about canine distemper and told them to take their time to think about it. The woman said yes and I knew she would not change her mind.
They finally left, and I managed to shove my thoughts in the far back of my mind while i cleaned the table but still it wouldn’t really leave me.
When I walked home that night, from the train station to where I currently live, it wasn’t the darkness that crept from the bushes and trees that made me shudder, or the cold that crept into my winter jacket that I had no escape from, but the thought of diseases.
I couldn’t care less about this woman and her family, for all I cared they could die from a common flu. But that is not why we vaccinate. I thought about all the people who couldn’t get vaccinated. Newborns. Elderly. People with autoimmune diseases.
You and me can probably take a lot of illnesses, we might feel like crap for a while, but we’ll survive. And there’s the chance, if you’re healthy, that you won’t even get noticably sick yourself, but you are still able to transmit a disease. So many disease that were gone, or nearly gone, and so many people willfully endangering others, if not the whole population, just because.. I mean because of what?
Did they miss in biology how vaccinations work? Did they miss in chemistry that everything is chemistry, that there is no difference to artificial molecules and natural ones? Did they miss how gruesome, how horrible and deadly bacteria and viruses can be, did they miss the part about having a responsibility in a society?
I don’t know, and I’ll never know. Our world is getting deadlier everyday, from climate change to natural disasters, from antivaxxers to epidemics. And I don’t know anything scarier than that.“
Statement ends.