By
all accounts of my relatives, it was a good speech, maybe even my finest five
minutes. The topic was the importance of
education. I quoted the favorite saying
of a juvenile delinquent friend of my brother:
“Everybody has their smarts, and everybody has their dumbs.” Therefore, something can be learned from
everyone encountered in life. And no
matter what career path is chosen, your education must never end. Ever. Yada,
yada, yada.
In
April, Jolene noticed that her nine year old goat, Toggie, was not quite
right. Her appetite was off and her
usual, steadfast milk production was down.
A treatment of vitamin B helped, but Toggie’s symptoms soon
returned. Over the next four months, her
condition waxed and waned. Various
medications were tried---antibiotics, probiotics, more vitamins, and
anti-inflammatories. All gave relief,
but only for a short while. Blood tests
showed no sign of infection or organ failure.
Toggie
sometimes had difficulty swallowing, and a couple times choked when she did
feel like eating. Could this be related
to a previous dog attack injury to her throat and neck? She was an old goat. Could it be cancer? I wanted to know, but I knew Jolene wanted to
know more. On at least two occasions, I
heard her say,” I just want to know what’s wrong.”
During a visit in August, Jolene and I were in Toggie’s small pasture looking for clues. “Could she have liver flukes?” Jolene queried. Liver flukes, an internal parasite, were not likely to be found in rural Elida, but how did Jolene even know about them?
Back
in the barn, I noticed three or four Mason jars on a table next to Toggie’s pen. Each contained a milkweed branch with a
different stage of the Monarch butterfly life cycle. I watched with fascination, a newly emerged
butterfly with still glistening wings, flutter them for the first time. Jolene
and her sister, June, explained the whole process, and it seemed they knew
almost down to the hour, everything that happens inside the chrysalis. Greatly
impressed, I finally had to ask, “How do you know all this stuff?”
I’m
not sure which sister answered, and it may have been in unison, but the
response was: “We read!!!” That simple
statement was said with an enthusiasm I don’t think I ever had, at least not
for a very long time, and I felt pretty humbled.
Previously,
I have written about the students who “shadow” in our office. Many of them ask about the importance of high
school grades. I tell the kids their
grades need to be good enough to be accepted into college; and, of course, if
they want to try for scholarships, the better the grades, the better. But whether they get an “A” or “C” in a
particular class is irrelevant. The
important thing is to “learn how to learn.”
Until that moment with the sisters, I thought that was a good answer.
Now,
I realize that something was missing from my mantra. A “C” in fifth grade science class spurred me
to become a little study geek, and I studied way too much. By the time I was a freshman undergraduate, I
knew I was burned out. The road to
becoming a veterinarian was still a long one, however, and I plodded forward,
begrudgingly. Oh, I learned how to
learn---to study and take tests, but I didn’t learn how to learn with joy. Learning is such a great opportunity,
enjoyment has to play a role. The
sisters “got” that. I did not.
I
wish I could tell you that Toggie’s story had a happy ending, but she continued
to fail. Two weeks later, there was a
message on my desk from Jolene regarding euthanasia. She didn’t want to just put Toggie to sleep,
though, she wanted to take her somewhere to find out exactly what was wrong.
A
phone call later, Jolene and Toggie had an appointment at the Ohio Department
of Agriculture Diagnostic Laboratory.
The diagnostician had never seen a goat with anything like this in his
20 year career. Toggie had an aneurysm,
a ballooning of the aorta, that put pressure on her trachea and esophagus, causing
her symptoms. Nothing could have been
done to help her, but Jolene had her answer and some closure for her fine goat.
I
thanked Jolene for her quest for knowledge.
Those two ladies should be teachers.
Heck, they already are.
Author: Dr. John Jones
No comments:
Post a Comment