Typical Day
Chris Kindheart wakes to the drone of his 5:00AM alarm clock. He can hear his mom snoring in the next room. He swears that one of these days he will definitely, someday, probably move out of his parents' house. He grabs his customary instant-noodle lunch, chokes down three cups of coffee, and hustles out the door.
As Chris drives to work in his used Kia Forte, his cell phone buzzes. He waits until a red light to check the message: "Cage fiasco. Roscoe again." Great. Roscoe, the irascible raccoon with the broken leg, is up to his shenanigans again. Chris sighs—this won't be easy.
Chris arrives at the shelter and Annie, the lead vet, hands him a box of latex gloves. "Buckle up," she says. Chris nervously eyes Roscoe's cage and discovers that Roscoe has pooped everywhere. His cage floor is covered with the stuff, while Roscoe himself is sitting in his food bowl—and boy does he look smug. When he sees that Chris is coming in to clean up, he starts hissing and tries to scratch Chris.
Chris puts on some tough gloves, bundles the raccoon away into a spare cage, puts on a pair of latex gloves, and starts cleaning.
After thirty minutes of undoing the dung shui, Chris emerges, smelling of angry raccoon and Pine-Sol. It's not what you'd call the best start to the day, but Chris has had worse. He throws out his gloves, gives his hands a good wash to get the latex smell off them, and starts the morning rounds.
Morning rounds involve all the daily care-giving chores that don't require a vet's license...or merit a vet's salary. Chris works with one of the volunteers, Becky, a college-age bio major with a big heart and a soft spot for wounded critters.
Together, Chris and Becky feed the many animals. A fox with a broken jaw gets breakfast through a feeding tube; an injured hawk get chopped rat liver delivered via forceps; a baby squirrel is fed with a synthetic rubber nipple. Chris feeds himself with Doritos from the vending machine.
At 10:00AM, a call comes in: A wild fox is trapped in a volleyball net. "It's go time," Chris thinks. He and Becky hop into their cool animal rescue van and blaze to the rescue.
At a suburban house, a confused teenager is pacing in circles. He points to an angry fuzzy thing trapped in a net. It is definitely not a volleyball—unless volleyballs are supposed to make weird screaming noises. At least now everyone knows what the fox says.
Chris and Becky, in long-sleeved shirts and gloves, stoop over the trapped fox. Chris enjoys a blazing burst of pain as the fox chomps into his hand, biting right through the gloves. After about three minutes, they manage to restrain the fox and cut it loose with a pair of wire cutters. It runs off and Chris accepts his searing pain as a tacit form of thanks.
Their next call, which comes in about forty minutes later, is about a trapped deer. It's stuck in an office parking lot and clearly in pain. Chris and Becky move in, catch it with a net, and sedate it with a hypodermic needle. They quickly discover that the deer has badly split its lip. Chris sutures the lip, and then he and Becky load the deer into the back of the van.
An hour later, they release it back to the wild, full of antibiotics, sutures, and resentment.
Chris enjoys lunch back at the shelter. He savors the fine, subtle flavors of shrimp ramen and Mountain Dew.
Mid-afternoon, Chris and Becky get their final call of the day. A squirrel has gotten stuck in a chimney. They free the squirrel but find that it's broken its legs badly. They carry it back to the shelter, and Annie gives it an examination, but it's obvious they're too late. Annie has to put the squirrel to sleep.
Chris sighs and turns away. This is the part of the job he likes least—even less than the poop-scrubbing. He'd rather scrub a hundred of Roscoe's cages than have to see one animal put down.
The final stop of Chris' day is a bit of a change of pace. He heads outside to lead the shelter's community outreach program. It's an educational program for elementary school students, so it involves slightly less peeing and biting than the wild animals. Chris spends an hour introducing third-graders to a hawk, a turtle, and a fox. The kids ask questions about rocket ships.
At 6:00PM, Chris drives home, exhausted but satisfied.
Over dinner, his mother asks him when he's going to get a real job. Chris says that he saved two animals' lives today. His mother retorts that she watched two episodes of Real Housewives, so they both had rich, full days. Chris just smiles and nods.
Chris falls asleep. At 2:00AM, he's woken up by his phone buzzing. It's Roscoe again.
Time to get up.