09/23/2026
Thirty-one years ago, I spent a summer working for a veterinarian in central Kentucky named Dr. Lemayne Ellis. I was nineteen years old, a sophomore at Centre College, and already quite certain I was going to become a veterinarian. At nineteen, certainty comes pretty cheap. I knew where I thought I was headed. I had considerably less understanding of the kind of veterinarian, or person, I hoped to become.
Dr. Ellis helped answer some of that for me.
He practiced mixed-animal medicine out of Bluegrass Animal Hospital near Harrodsburg, and I spent that summer riding with him, carrying things, restraining animals, fetching whatever he pointed toward, and trying to be useful enough that he would keep letting me come along. I had grown up around beef cattle in West Virginia, so I knew my way around a farm and could usually tell which end of the cow represented the greater immediate danger. Beyond that, I was mostly a nineteen-year-old trying to absorb everything I could.
Watching Dr. Ellis work had a tremendous influence on me. In fact, the way he practiced mixed-animal medicine is one of the main reasons I eventually chose mixed practice myself. But of all the things I watched him do that summer, there is one day I remember more clearly than the others.
On May 18, 1995, an F2 tornado cut through Mercer and Woodford counties in Kentucky. It stayed on the ground for roughly ten miles, damaging homes and barns, flipping cars, injuring people, and tearing through some of the most beautiful farm country you could imagine.
The official record can tell you the distance, the wind, and the number of injuries. What it cannot really tell you is what a place looks like when the sky picks it up, shakes it hard, and puts it back down without much concern for where anything lands.
Central Kentucky ordinarily looks almost unfairly pretty. Rolling green pasture, horse farms, cattle fields, old barns sitting on ridgelines, and stone fences along roads that seem to have been there forever. The morning after the tornado, parts of that country looked as though somebody had emptied a toolbox across it.
Metal roofing was wrapped around trees. Barns were gone or left half standing. Fences were scattered through fields. Posts had been pulled clean out of the ground. Having grown up repairing fence, I knew those posts did not surrender easily. Whatever had gone through there had meant business.
Dr. Ellis loaded the veterinary truck, and we spent the day going from farm to farm. We saw horses, cattle, goats, dairy animals, just about everything being raised in that part of Kentucky. Some animals could be treated, and we treated them. Others were hurt badly enough that the humane thing was to euthanize them.
That is difficult work on an ordinary day. It is considerably harder while standing next to someone whose barn may be lying in the neighbor’s field and who is already trying to understand how much of the life they knew yesterday is still there today.
What struck me was that people were already working when we arrived. Of course they were. Animals still needed fed. Cattle had to be found. Fences had to be put back up. A tornado may rearrange your whole world, but apparently nobody tells the livestock that chores have been canceled.
Some people were crying. Others had gone into that particular kind of quiet I grew up seeing in farm people when things got bad. There was work in front of them, so they worked.
And Dr. Ellis worked right alongside them.
He did not make speeches. He did not tell people how resilient they were. He did not try to turn anybody’s worst day into a lesson. He looked at the animal in front of him, figured out what needed to be done, and did it. Then he climbed back into the truck and headed to the next farm.
Somewhere around the third or fourth stop, I noticed something.
He was not charging anybody.
On an ordinary farm call, the business part was straightforward. You did the work, wrote up the bill, handed it over, and went to the next call. That was how a veterinary practice stayed open.
But not that day.
There was no announcement. Nobody pulled out a checkbook so he could dramatically push it away. He did not tell anybody what a generous thing he was doing. As far as I know, he did not think there was anything particularly remarkable about it.
He just kept getting out of the truck.
Farm after farm, animal after animal, family after family, he helped people who had just had one of the worst days of their lives and never sent them a bill.
I have thought about that many times in the thirty-one years since.
Where I grew up in West Virginia, people did things like that without giving them much of a name. Somebody’s roof blew off, neighbors appeared. Somebody died, food started showing up before the funeral arrangements were finished. A tree fell across the road and, before long, three men with chainsaws somehow materialized, at least one insisting he had been meaning to cut wood that day anyway. If you thanked them too much, they would usually tell you, “Aw, hell, it wasn’t nothing,” after spending six hours doing something that was very much something.
I am certainly not suggesting veterinarians, or anyone else, should routinely give away their work. People deserve to be paid for what they do. Businesses have employees, bills, families, and responsibilities. Compassion has never made payroll.
But every once in a while, life puts something in front of you that is bigger than the invoice.
Dr. Ellis recognized one of those days.
At nineteen, I am not sure I understood exactly what I was watching. I knew I admired him. I knew I wanted to practice medicine the way he did. I knew there was something about the calm way he moved from one family to the next that stayed with me.
It took getting older to understand the rest of it.
We tend to think our reputations are built on our good days. The days when we perform well, hit the numbers, earn the degree, get the promotion, receive the award, or have somebody tell us we did a good job. Those things matter, and there is nothing wrong with being proud of them.
But I suspect the days that tell people the most about us are usually very different.
They are the days when someone else is having the worst day of their life.
Eventually, every profession gives you some version of that veterinary truck. It might be a colleague carrying something you knew nothing about, a student whose life is falling apart, a client who needs a human being more than an expert, an employee who gets a phone call nobody wants, or a neighbor who suddenly needs more from you than you had planned to give that day.
Those moments rarely arrive when the calendar is empty and we are feeling especially generous. They tend to show up when we are busy, tired, late, and already thinking about whatever comes next.
That is when it becomes easy to ask whether this is really our problem, whether somebody else should handle it, or whether we have enough time.
Most days, those are perfectly reasonable questions. But occasionally the person standing in front of us is not asking for the institution, the department, the company, the policy, or the title on our door.
They are asking for us.
I cannot tell you how many animals Dr. Ellis and I treated that day. I do not remember how many farms we visited or how many miles we put on the truck. And I cannot give you some memorable piece of wisdom he offered along the way, because best I remember, he did not say much.
He taught the lesson by what he did.
Thirty-one years later, after becoming a veterinarian myself, spending years in mixed-animal practice, owning practices, teaching students, and eventually leading people and organizations, I can see just how much that day influenced the way I think about this profession and about leadership.
Dr. Lemayne Ellis probably had no idea that the nineteen-year-old riding beside him was paying such close attention. I doubt he imagined I would still be telling the story more than three decades later.
But that may be the most important thing about influence. We rarely know when we are having it.
Sometimes somebody younger is sitting in the passenger seat, watching what we do when there is no applause, no recognition, and nothing in it for us.
And sometimes, thirty-one years later, they still remember that you kept getting out of the truck.
