That’s, they only take seven people out of, you know, the entire country.” I said, “Oh, that’s interesting.” So I applied, and I got there, and stayed there for about a year, over a year, I did my internship at 15 months, and then stayed on an extra year as junior staff, and that was some of the best training I’ve ever gotten in veterinary medicine. It was just total immersion into medicine, into clinics, surgery, pathology, radiology, and it was just total immersion, it’s the best training I got, and there I saw my first zoo case, they called me from the Franklin Park Zoo there in Boston, said they had an animal that was injured, and so I said, “Okay, well”, they … So I got in the SPCA ambulance, which Angel Memorial was an SPCA hospital. We drove out to the zoo, and here was an impala with a dangling leg fracture. I said, “Well what do you do to anesthetize it?” and say, “Well we have acepromazine”, and that’s all they had. So I had no idea, so I think the curator loaded up a dart gun with acepromazine, which I think he used eight CCs which is a tremendous dose, and they darted it, and of course he didn’t become immobilized, he just got more stumbling, was injuring his leg, so ran in and grabbed him and I’d brought him some ZeroTol, which is an IV barbiturate, and so I got hit a vein and anesthetized him, and then we drove him back to the hospital there in Boston, on 180 Longwood Avenue, which was the old Angel Memorial, and switched him over to gas anesthesia and repaired his leg and went driving back, I had to keep watching, keeping the needle in the vein. I got car sick going to Boston traffic, so got back, fixed the leg up, and of course with that dose of acepromazine, he was sleeping and really drowsy for a day and a half, we kept him, turned him, and so finally they brought somebody from the zoo that thought they knew what they were doing and said, “Oh, he is thirsty.” So they poured some water down his throat and drowned him. So that was my first zoo case.
