One of the biggest struggles I see most people in vet school dealing with is Adapting to Change. I get it. We’re all the walking personification of type A traits. We like to be in control, we are active and like to take charge. Basically, any wrench gets thrown into our beautifully constructed plans? Armageddon. How DARE that pitcher throw a curveball at me when I CLEARLY asked for a fastball. UGH!

Newsflash. The Universe is the pitcher. You are the batter. Pitcher’s job is to throw curveballs. … Okay that’s a gross oversimplification of baseball, but you get the idea. Buckle up, I’m about to use more baseball metaphors. You saw the title, you knew what you were getting into. Anyway, life’s not fair, change happens. MOVING ON BEFORE I WRITE ANOTHER CONFUSING METAPHOR.

Now if you were a baseball player, you need to learn that not every pitcher is going to throw JUST fastballs. There’s curveballs. There’s sliders…. That’s literally all the pitches I know without googling. The point is, life is not going to come up to you and say “Hey everything is going to work out exactly as you envisioned.” Life is going to be like, “Hey, is this a bad time? Great! Your dog just cut its paw wide open 1 week before vet school. Also, we have you slated for getting rear ended by someone who forgot which pedal was the break and which was the gas. Your neck is gonna be sore, have fun!” Straight up what happened to me the week before first year (but that’s another story).

The sooner you learn curveballs will inevitably come at you without warning, the better you can learn to adapt to these on the fly. Now I don’t know how actual baseball players adapt to these pitches and I am not about to distract myself on a wild goose chase to determine how baseball players hit a slider vs a fastball. But what you as a vet student should realize is, things happen, its how you respond to these hiccups is what matters.

For example, I sprained my wrist my first year, right before a 4-day service clinic where we were expected to participate in surgeries. Did I panic? Of course. I also cried because- OW. But what could I do? I was a first year and I felt like I was taking an opportunity from another student. So, I did what I thought was responsible and went to the leader of the trip and said I could give up my spot even though I wanted to go. Thankfully, she was an excellent problem solver, and suggested that I could just come watch surgeries, participate to the best of my ability so I didn’t miss the opportunity. I followed her excellent advice and I was able to do more than I thought I could. I even got to participate in my first spay! And if I hadn’t listened to her and her creative solution, I would have missed that opportunity. Learning to go with these curveballs and adapting is just more practice at problem solving and opening your mind to creative solutions.

But what if you can’t problem solve around the curveball? What if it’s the bottom of the 9^th, your down two outs, and your one strike away from saving the game or blowing it? You swear that pitch coming in was a straight fast ball, primed for that winning home run, but you swing aaAAND…. STRIKE. Game over, pitcher threw a slider, and you missed it by a mile. BUMMER. Sometime life’s curveballs can’t be avoided or outsmarted. Then what? You’re just stuck with a lemon of a situation.

Let’s take another example of when I injured myself. I’m very clumsy so we have a lot of those examples. Basically, I was walking my dogs, I hit black ice and sprained my ankle. I will neither confirm nor deny if texting and walking was involved. It was actually microfractured and I had a high grade tear of one of my ligaments that they didn’t find until 3 weeks later on an MRI. So I had been gimping around with an ace bandage for 3 weeks when all of a sudden, doctor goes “Yeah you can’t walk on that anymore for at least 3 weeks.” NEAT. This was 2 weeks before I started rotations.

YEAH. #BUMMER

I was REALLY mad about all of this. I basically mentally spiraled and thought I had wasted my youth, my ankle will never be the same, and oh my God crutches are just the worst. I ended up buying a $150 hands free crutch because, have you tried working with horses on crutches? IT DOESN’T WORK. HANDS ARE SOMEWHAT REQUIRED FOR HORSES. This was tough. Because I literally couldn’t do ANYTHING, but rest and heal. It was tough. But sometimes all you can do to make the best of a hard situation is to just get through it. You just, deal. It’s not a fun solution, but everyone deals with hard times at some point in their life, where the only way out is to get through.

Changes aren’t easy. They often come at you fast, they hit hard, and they often expertly derail whatever plans we had initially. But don’t forget, these moments are opportunities to change your perspective. Learn to think on your feet. And sometimes, these moments teach you how to sit with a tough situation with grace. They can’t all be homerun hits, sometimes we strikeout. But the game goes on, and oftentimes we all get another chance to swing.