I walked in and my friend Mark, who owns the theater, said, “Oooh, you’re a vet type, come look at this.”

He took me outside to a little drainage ditch and shined a flashlight into the 6″ wide PVC pipe that emptied into the ditch. The entire opening was blocked by a raccoon head.

“We heard screaming earlier,” Mark said,”and when we pulled all the rocks away this is what we found. We poked him, but he didn’t move…maybe there’s another one behind him that was doing the screaming?” Mark ran off to take care of theater business and left me in charge of the raccoon. “Don’t get bit!” he called over his shoulder.

I poked the raccoon’s head and got no response, and its eyes were unresponsive. Looked pretty well dead to me, but I got a pair of gloves (raccoons are a huge vector for rabies) just in case. I reached under his chin and pulled the little guy out.

He was about the size of a house cat, fairly young, and he didn’t move at all when I touched him. “You’re brave,” Mark said, popping back over to watch. I set the raccoon down on the grass and checked the pipe, but didn’t see any other raccoons. Mark and I chatted a bit, and then I glanced down and thought I saw the raccoon take a breath.

“Whoa! Did you see that?”

We waited for what seemed like an eternity, and then we saw the chest rise and fall again, almost imperceptibly.

I sprang into action and straightened the airway, then started massaging the raccoon all over. The raccoon let out a few gasping breaths.

Mark and I both have emergency medical training, and when we saw that, we both thought “agonal breaths.” These are gasping breaths that occur right before death, and they can last anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. I’d never seen them except in a person, but I had a vague recollection that this sometimes happens with pets during euthanasia. Still, where there’s breath, there’s hope.

Mark grabbed a heat lamp and a warm box, and I kept massaging, inventing raccoon CPR on the fly as best I could.

I worked on him for about an hour, but didn’t get any more than a few breaths. The last twenty minutes were surely an exercise in futility, and at some point, I got the distinct feeling that the raccoon was saying, “Let me go.”

I packed the little guy up and took him over to the clinic. I hadn’t felt a pulse, but I wanted to use the stethoscope to be sure. Nothing.

And that’s when I finally needed the Kleenex–alone in the clinic, just me and the most beautiful little raccoon you have ever seen. How lucky was I to be that close to such perfection? The tiny paws, that bandit’s mask, the petal soft fur.

I cried as I thought of his last few hours…he must have crawled up the pipe and been unable to turn around. He would have seen light at the other end, then exhausted himself while screaming and clawing for a way out. Poor little baby.

I also cried because the whole experience was incredibly reassuring. I’m halfway through my thirties, and really, what am I thinking, trying to get into vet school at this stage? Things like this remind me.

I’m doing this because it feels right. I’m doing this because I want to make a difference. I’m doing this so that a little raccoon can feel loved during his last few breaths on this earth.

Good night, raccoon.

That is my hand, inside a giraffe’s mouth at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs.

HOW COOL IS THAT?

The giraffe enclosure is surrounded by a walkway that puts us lowly mortals at eye level with the herd. For a mere $1, you can purchase 3 “giraffe crackers” to hand-feed these guys.

My handsome (and patient) boyfriend is only out seven dollars or so. It could have been much, much, worse.

That’s what I did for my spring break. How ’bout you?

The trouble with birds is that there is an opening into the trachea (the glottis), at the base of the tongue. If the bird happens to have its glottis open when something lands in that spot in its mouth, that something goes straight into their lungs. So, obviously, one doesn’t want to squirt a syringe full of food right onto their glottis, or they will aspirate it and keel over. One has to shove the syringe further back into the throat so as to avoid the glottis.

Finches, being the little bitty birds that they are, are even littler and bittier when they are babies. And a syringe tip is just about as big as their mouth is. This makes it a little tough to get the syringe past the glottis, so you just try the best you can. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work.

Such was the case last week when I pulled up the cover of the finch cage to feed them for the third time during my shift, and after a few minutes I noticed a small brown lump tucked under the foliage at the back of the cage. ACK! A mostly dead finch was lying there, looking miserable. Diagnosis: aspiration. Prognosis: death.

Killing a baby finch is not really my idea of a pleasant evening. Despite the reassurances from other staff members that this kind of thing happens, I still went home feeling like a complete failure.

This past weekend I returned to my post with trepidation, and with a finch phobia. I kept double-checking every few minutes to make sure that I hadn’t offed anyone, even the magpies, with their ginormous mouths and easy-to-avoid glottises.

The good news is that I talked more with other staff members, and found out that almost everyone there has accidentally murdered a bird at one point or other. I guess that’s not good news. But it does make one feel better.

Apparently my finch death was the first in a rash of finch deaths, such that they changed their finch-feeding protocol slightly. We’re now feeding them with tinier syringe tips, and it’s a whole lot easier. Phew.

I kind of like the little guys, despite the fact that they’re almost universally reviled. I’ve never really figured out why this is… I guess they’ve been known to eat garden plants, and their burrowing will mess up a fancy manicured lawn. I don’t plant tasty garden plants (precisely because they’ll get eaten), and my lawn is pretty well wild. So the squirrels and I get along just fine.

The fleas they carry are vectors for bubonic plague, which, I think, makes a pretty strong case for disliking them, but I’ve never heard anyone use that as an excuse for exterminating ground squirrels. I think it has more to do with their gopher-like appearance. Guilty by association.

My neighbor makes a point of laying out poison for the “@*#$ gophers” every year. God forbid that a hapless neighbor dog chase one of those poisonous squirrels and have it for a snack. I tend to keep Cat Mandu inside more this time of year too. She only goes out on a leash, but I still don’t want to risk having her accidentally suck up some squirrel bait.

Maybe my view of things is part of what makes veterinary-types different: I believe that every creature on the planet, not just those of the human variety, has the right to a good life. I take crickets outside, and I say hello to the spider in the corner of my bathroom. Even ticks deserve a good life, and lord knows I hate ticks!

I suppose I shouldn’t say every creature, because I might draw the line at, say, methicillin-resistant staph, but I do care about all creatures, great and small.