Amanda Ogea
Stories (3/0)
Fishkeeping and Herpetoculture as Meditation
I’ve lived parallel lives. Or maybe it’s that I constantly sense the alternate reality that runs parallel to ours. To mine. Until my last year of high school, I thought that I would be join the sciences. I thought that I would earn my own neon orange beanie and join the likes of Jacques Cousteau in oceanic expeditions. My sense for interior design revolved around National Geographic cut-outs plastered along my bedroom walls. I went to sleep to cassettes playing whale songs or wolf calls. But I also knew, even then, that the dream of becoming a legendary biologist or conservationist would be a hard one to achieve. As I matured, I turned my sights to going to veterinary school with the hopes of eventually working at a zoo. For half of my senior year, I was an intern at a veterinary practice that worked with both cats and dogs as well as farm animals. It was a dream come to life in a lot of ways. I enjoyed the hustle and bustle, the problem-solving. My first day I worked with a 150lbs sulcata tortoise with deep and infected lacerations in its neck from a fight for dominance with yet a larger tortoise. My second day was mostly spent assisting in the euthanasia of a family pet. Between what seemed to be hourly rituals of spaying and neutering dogs and cats, there were plenty of little dramas at play that kept my interest. Complications would arise. A rare disease would pop up. A traumatic break, a difficult surgery. Strange and exotic animals would come to be seen. Wild animals like raccoons and opossums would routinely turn up, but working with something like a wallaby or a spider monkey was always a fun surprise. All these years later, I still remember Slinky, a 15ft Burmese Python that was as sweet as could be even though he had come to us with a bit of a tummy ache. Even still, I began to get bored. As much as I loved the work I was doing, it felt that most of the job relied on rote memorization. A set of symptoms got a specific treatment and that was it. This sort of disillusionment coincided with my writing and research projects built into the internship. As I was writing papers about the nature of the veterinary profession as well as reflections of my own experiences, I came to realize that I really enjoyed that process more. The critical thinking involved became more rewarding than helping to perform up to 8 neuterings a day.
By Amanda Ogea3 years ago in Motivation