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Lived Through This
My Family’s Tender Language of Blood and Gore
Thanks to my dad’s profession, the unmentionables were part of regular conversation
I had to get used to unmentionable subjects as a kid, because body fluids and odd animal injuries were discussed over dinner the way some people talk about weather or distant relatives.
My dad is a country veterinarian and took emergency calls in the kitchen; pretty much everything was on the proverbial table. I have a distinct memory of my dad cutting his steak while assessing a client’s cow’s prolapsed uterus, the long, twisty phone cord draped around two of his children’s chair backs. We kids kept eating, kept up our chatter, but Mom put her fork down in disgust. And protest. She’d heard it all a million times — they’d been married since before vet school — but she continued to pull faces in hopes that civility would someday reign.
We did talk about the weather, especially as it related to growing crops, and about relatives too, especially their medical maladies. My family is a veterinarian family. My dad’s brother and his wife are vets too, as will be my younger brother when he graduates. The rest of the family on that side are doctors and nurses, but probably they wanted to be vets first. After all, the saying goes, if you don’t get accepted into vet school, you can always just be a doctor.
At my family’s gatherings, there is a lot of inspecting other people’s moles.
Serving three counties of large and small animal owners in Southern Illinois, my dad stayed busy in the ’80s and ’90s. I hold close the memories of riding around in Dad’s pickup truck with boxes of syringes sliding around at my feet. The windows would be rolled down, and a sweet, earthy manure scent clung to the air. I pride myself to this day on knowing what kind of livestock is nearby on smell alone.
My dad had grown up on this land, so he knew not just the livestock but the people. One day, an older man in overalls greeted Dad’s truck barreling through his pasture. The farmer wrung his hands in distress. “Well Doc,” he said, using the name everyone except family calls my dad. “Turns out Ol’ Bitsy’s got the shitsies.”
