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I kind of gave up on becoming a vet for a weird string of reasons. Tennessee didn’t have a vet school at the time. You had to apply to Alabama (Tennessee had a deal with them and no other state) and there were scores and scores of applicants for each of the seven places allotted to Tennessee students. I worked hard to keep up a 4.0 average in high school, but after I met a guy who had got his BS at UT with a perfect 4.0 and had worked as a vet tech for seven years while waiting for a spot at Alabama (!), I almost totally gave up on the idea.

Then I took high school chemistry and the teacher was a complete nut who started at the back of the book and well, he was a total loon. So I told myself I wasn’t cut out to be a vet after all if chemistry was so nutty. I passed okay because he gave thye answers to the exams in Latin on the back of the exam paper, so if you could make out Latin, you could score okay. All the kids who did not know Latin got bad grades, even the really smart ones.

My Dad (who had a PhD in chemical engineering) was livid about the teacher. He had wanted to send me to a private prep school, but I begged him out it of because I knew it would be a hardship on my family and we had just returned from living overseas and I wanted to be with my old friends again. Dad was right, as always, and I should have gone to the prep school.

Wouldn’t you know they opened the UT Vet College just when I finished high school but had already developed an irrational fear of chemistry? Oh well, that’s life. I made some dumb decisions in high school, but it all turned out okay in the end. I was probably better suited for what I ended up majoring in anyway.