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By Sandy Wells She knew almost from kindergarten what she wanted to do with her life. She’s had the name picked out for years. Good Shepherd Veterinary Hospital, Dr. Sarah Stephenson’s dream-come-true, sits along the busy main drag of Kanawha City, a testament to the unwavering will of a positive-thinking Type-A personality. A 35-year-old Parkersburg native, she earned her degrees at WVU and Ohio State. She practiced for nine years, including seven years at Valley West Veterinary Hospital, before opening the facility she started planning as a teen-ager. It’s big and bright and mostly white, accented with her favorite color. She uses purple pens, purple folders for patient charts, even a purple stethoscope. Her diverse practice extends to birds, exotic pets and ophthalmology. She also conducts monthly pet therapy sessions with inmates in the mental health unit at the Mount Olive Correctional Facility. “There’s a golden retriever named Cooper who belongs to a great client. He’s a great dog, drop-dead beautiful, actually show-dog quality. He loves to eat garbage. He wolfs down garbage faster than you can say, ‘Cooper, no!’ They have to watch him like a hawk. “Most recently, he ingested 15 pieces of niblet corn, swallowed whole, and I don’t know how many rotisserie chicken bones and cellophane bags. It was garbage day, and he was at his grandmother’s, and she let him out, and he went right down and ripped up the remnants of someone’s Fourth of July picnic. The surgery table was covered with what I surgically removed from his stomach. Nothing could move out of his stomach because it was packed full of garbage. “Most pet owners will go to the nth degree to solve a problem. It doesn’t matter if the pet was free or cost $3,000. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pet rat or a boa constrictor or a cocker spaniel. Everybody loves their pets because they’re part of their family. Sometimes I think we probably love our pets even more, because they don’t give us grief like family. “I’ve been around animals my whole life. I always knew I wanted to be a veterinarian. In the third grade, I got real serious about it. I’ve worked for veterinarians pretty much full time since I was 15. Every free minute I had, I would go to the veterinarian clinic. I’d even go at lunch. “There’s a write-up in my high school paper about how I was going to be a veterinarian and a picture of me looking at a dog in the veterinary hospital where I worked. I figured if I ever went back to a class reunion, I’d better go back as a veterinarian. One of my sisters was never sure what she wanted to be, and that was always real hard for her, so I was real fortunate in that regard. “From 15 until I was 22, I worked for Jim Davis in Parkersburg. He was my mentor. He got me drawing plans and thinking along construction terms. He would have me do scale drawings of a veterinary hospital floor plan using graph paper, so I’ve been drawing plans for 20 years. “I always wanted to name a clinic Good Shepherd Veterinary Hospital. I had no idea about the mortuary here until recently. My friend is a priest at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church down the street, so I knew of that church after I’d picked the name. I figure, well, we’ll keep God involved and maybe we’ll survive. “I practiced for two years in Gassaway, then came here in 1995 and practiced for the last seven years at Valley West. They’re a fabulous group. It’s just that I wanted to go on my own. They knew that when I started and they were incredibly supportive. “My original thought was that within five years of graduating from veterinary school, I was going to own my own practice. That didn’t happen, but I’m actually glad it took me nine years because it allowed me to practice with several other doctors and learn a lot more than if I’d been on my own. I’ll do better because I waited. “It took five weeks to construct this. It’s shocking how quick it happened. We have a crew that wasn’t doing anything else, the crew that built Pizzeria Uno. My husband, John Skaff, works for an engineering company and he helped me tremendously. “I wanted a hospital that was bright and fresh and eye-appealing and user-friendly. And I wanted to develop the exotic end of what I do. Everybody meets the needs of dogs and cats, but no one has a place where the needs of birds are specifically met. I built an aviary with French doors so parrots who are boarding can watch us working and be entertained. You can’t shut a parrot up in a room and not be home for 12 hours a day. They’ll be miserable and pluck out all their feathers. They actually become quite psychotic. “Cats have their own room with perches so they see other cats and not dogs barking at them and stressing them out. And dogs have a run instead of a cage so they can move around, and they’re walked at least three times a day. “This time of year is generally slower for most smaller practices because when folks buy school supplies and clothes, they don’t have any money left. Between the first of December and the middle of January is a little slower because there’s no money then, either. “Pet insurance is becoming a very real thing, and that’s going to be wonderful. Unfortunately, finances sometimes dictate what we can and can’t do for a pet. “Almost everything comes in threes. If I get a blocked cat that can’t pee, I can expect a couple more in a few days. It’s the same with a certain type of trauma, like fractured bones. And we see an increase in somewhat bizarre activities at full moon. “I had a boa constrictor come in to be examined because they wondered if she was pregnant. She was about 18 feet long and 4 inches in diameter, and she had a big lump about every 12 to 14 inches. I asked if she’d eaten lately. They don’t eat when they’re real pregnant. He said no. I guess she hatched out quite a few babies. “What we most commonly see snakes for is, their dinner bites them and they get an abscess, an infection where they were bitten by a rat. “I love people and animals and medicine. You have to like people because you have to talk to the owner to get any information. So it’s kind of like being a pediatrician, only the patients have hair. “I go once a month to the Mount Olive Correctional Facility to the mental health unit. I started taking two of my dogs and whatever stray clinic cat wasn’t afraid of being handled. It’s very well documented that interaction with pets lowers blood pressure and anxiety and just gives you an overall better feeling of peace and happiness. It’s a good experience for me as much as for them. “I had to go through a lot of channels to get in up there, but we have a blast. The guys have received it so well. A lot of them haven’t had an opportunity to pet a dog or a cat for 20 years. They talk about the pets they had as kids and before they were incarcerated. They started requesting certain dogs. We get a lot of requests for beagles. They want something they had as a kid. They like anything cute and cuddly, like anybody else. “I have two Labrador retrievers and two cats, and I raise African pied crows. If you’ve seen the Windex commercials, they’re the big black and white birds that stand at the window when the cat smashes into the glass door. I have a breeding pair of those and a lot of doves. We have an aviary in the yard, and we have two horses that we board in Pinch. There are miles and miles of trails. So pretty much everything I do is animal oriented. “I feel very blessed. Not many people are fortunate enough to fulfill all their career goals. Yes, I’m a Type A, but I like to think I’m a happy one, not a super-intense one. I talk fast and move fast. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. My dad said the only time I really cried was when he wasn’t able to feed me fast enough. His standard answer when I was little was, ‘You cannot have it 20 minutes ago, and if you ask me again, you cannot have it at all.’ So that’s been my personality my entire life.” To contact staff writer Sandy Wells, call 348-5173 or send e-mail to sandyw@wvgazette.com. Search here for related stories
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