08/08/2025
We didnât call it âburnoutâ back then. You just kept showing up, even when your hands bled and your back screamed â because animals were waiting, and that was that.
In 1991, I stitched up a cow at 3 a.m. by the light of a Dodge Ramâs headlights and the prayers of a farmer named Earl McKinley.
Earlâs place sat just past the county line, where the pavement gave up and the dirt road made your teeth rattle. The cow had caught her flank on rusted fencing, deep enough to see the muscle twitch. Earl was in tears, holding his cap in both hands like it was a Bible. Said it was the only milk cow his family had left. Said if she didnât make it, neither would they.
I was twenty-eight. My back hurt from hauling hay that morning. Iâd eaten a gas station sandwich for dinner and was running on fumes and stubbornness.
But I got her stitched.
Not perfect. Not pretty. But she lived. And two weeks later, Earl brought me a slab of smoked brisket wrapped in foil and said, âYou saved my wifeâs kitchen table.â
Thatâs what work used to be.
It wasnât about prestige. Or comfort. Or apps. It was about showing up when it mattered â and knowing that doing your job right might just hold a family together one more season.
I grew up around men who worked with their hands.
My father built barns. My grandfather fixed railroad engines. My uncles were mechanics, roofers, truckers, welders â blue collars worn thin and faded like flags over long winters.
None of them went to therapy. They drank black coffee, lit Marlboros, and kept their pain tucked behind the same jokes theyâd been telling since Eisenhower.
They believed in work. Not as an identity, but as a duty. Something you owed to the people who trusted you.
I remember one summer â â74 maybe â I worked for an old vet named Dr. Harmon. I was just a kid then, mostly mucking stalls and cleaning kennels. He paid me in cash and Coca-Cola.
He had a white coat that never stayed clean and a file cabinet full of notes written in his own shorthand. No receptionist, no computer. Just him, a stethoscope, and a pickup with rust eating through the tailgate.
One day, a man came in with a coonhound wheezing so hard you could hear it from the parking lot. The dog had gotten into some rat poison.
Dr. Harmon didnât ask for insurance. Didnât pull out a clipboard. He looked the man in the eye and said, âYou love him?â
The man nodded, already crying.
âThen help me hold him,â Harmon said.
That was it.
We pumped his stomach. Gave him charcoal. Prayed harder than any church service ever required.
The dog lived.
The man came back two weeks later with a bushel of apples and said, âYou saved my boy.â
I asked Dr. Harmon later, âWhyâd you do it for free?â
He looked at me, wiped his glasses on his shirt, and said, âBecause that man didnât come here for a transaction. He came here for help. You help where you can, son. Always.â
When I opened my first clinic in the mid-â80s, I tried to carry that with me.
Didnât matter if it was a barn cat or a prized stud. If they needed care, I did my best to give it. Even if the check bounced. Even if the thank-you never came.
Because back then, work had weight. It wasnât about productivity metrics or quarterly goals. It was about whether the person across from you could sleep a little easier that night because of something you did.
And that was enough.
Now?
Now Iâve got corporate reps telling me to upsell dietary plans and bundle preventive packages like Iâm a damn car salesman. Got folks asking for second opinions from TikTok before I can even get the stethoscope around their dogâs neck.
Last month, a woman asked if I could email her the euthanasia procedure in advance so she could âemotionally prepare.â
I said no.
Because some things should never be done through a screen.
But sometimes, late at night, when the clinicâs dark and the only sound is the hum of the old fridge in the break room, I take out my ledger.
Not the billing one. The real one.
The one with names, not numbers.
Itâs an old spiral notebook with grease stains and dog hair pressed between the pages.
Itâs got scribbled entries like:
âJake â hound mix â found tied to a tractor tire â healed.â
âMissy â farm cat â fractured pelvis â owner brought eggs every Saturday for a year.â
âEarl McKinley â milk cow â brisket.â
Thereâs no algorithm for that.
No metric.
Just memory.
And meaning.
They call it nostalgia now, like itâs some weakness. Like remembering the good old days is clinging to a world thatâs gone.
Maybe it is.
But I donât miss the pain. Or the poverty. Or the endless hours without sleep.
I miss what work meant.
I miss the look in a manâs eyes when you handed him back his dog alive, and he didnât have the words, so he just shook your hand with everything he had.
I miss kids drawing crayon thank-you notes and taping them to the fridge.
I miss smokehouse payments and late-night calls that ended with coffee on a tailgate and silence shared like scripture.
You donât get that kind of work from behind a desk.
You get it when your knees hit the dirt.
When your fingers fumble in the dark for a pulse.
When your breath fogs up a barn window in February and you keep going anyway.
Chet â or Soldier, as I learned â still waits on the porch most mornings.
He watches the young techs come and go. Watches the delivery guys drop off their sterile boxes of pre-filled vials.
Sometimes I swear heâs judging them.
Sometimes I swear heâs judging me.
And maybe he should.
Because I used to work with my gut, not a tablet.
Used to feel a heartbeat and know what was coming before the machines ever beeped.
Used to trust my hands.
One of my young assistants asked me last week why I still use that dented exam table.
I told her, âBecause it remembers things I donât.â
She didnât get it.
Maybe someday she will.
Work used to mean something.
It wasnât who you were â it was how you showed up.
Not for praise. Not for perks.
But because someone needed you.
And that was reason enough to stay.
