TVMA Spotlight

TVMA SPOTLIGHT

Teacher’s Pets: 2009 TVMA Distinguished Career Achievement Award, Lucie L. Chitwood, DVM
by Shelby Downs

The 2009 TVMA distinguished career Achievement Award gave Dr. Lucie Chitwood an opportunity to look back on her past, a rare occurrence for someone who has spent her entire career focusing on the future. Dr. Chitwood has practiced veterinary medicine for more than three decades, but she also spent a sizeable chunk of that time in the classroom, inspiring and educating generations of veterinary technicians. Because of that work, she has earned the respect of veterinarians and their staffs across the state.

Even today, Dr. Chitwood is still teaching, although in a less formal capacity. As chief of staff and partner in the Banfield hospital in Garland, she oversees a staff of veterinarians that regularly includes recent graduates. Those graduates are mostly women, a significant change from when Dr. Chitwood graduated as one of five women in the class of 1973 from the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University.

“I have two women here today who just graduated, and they were talking about all their experience working here and working there, and I thought I never worked anywhere before I started vet school,” Dr. Chitwood said. “I liked animals, and I was interested in veterinary medicine, but it was difficult when I wanted to go to school because Texas A&M didn’t take women. They had to be either married to a student or a daughter of or married to a professor in their regular school.”

Because of the rules at Texas A&M, the El Paso native got her bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at El Paso and then applied to TAMU’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

“I was married by the time I went to veterinary school so it was great because I was treated like everybody else instead of a young lady that was hunting for a husband,” she recalled. Dr. Chitwood’s husband was a graduate student in psychology. After she received her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, the couple and their young son left College Station for Waco, where her husband continued his education at Baylor University.

“When we first moved to Waco in 1973, I had trouble finding a job because it was a small town, and women veterinarians were a novelty,” Dr. Chitwood said. “In fact, I had one large animal vet who said, ‘My clients won’t even let you on their property.’”

The dearth of full-time opportunities led her to accept two part-time positions, one with a small-animal hospital and the other teaching in the Veterinary Technician Program at Texas State Technical Institute. The latter would change the course of her career.

After one year, Dr. Chitwood began teaching full-time, and the next year yielded the program’s first graduating class. By 1977, Dr. Chitwood was the director of the program.

“With that particular program, it was new and we had just very basic facilities,” she recalled. “We had class at Connally Air Force Base. We had barracks for our classrooms and converted some of them into labs. We didn’t have a clinic, so we used an old automotive garage. The surgery instruments we had were the ones I had in school. We had little equipment. Gradually over time, we accumulated more and better equipment. We finally built a facility in 1987.”

Dr. Chitwood continued as director of the program until 1981. During her tenure at TSTI, she chaired several committees, authored a textbook and received an award for outstanding service. She also had a front row seat for the growth of the veterinary technician profession.

“I just really enjoyed the teaching,” Dr. Chitwood said. “A lot of the technicians that are around now I know because they were my students. I really think that the veterinary technician program has come a long way. A lot of veterinarians realize the importance of having trained help. Now there are a lot of job opportunities for veterinary technicians, and there aren’t enough graduates to fill demand.”

Her passion for the development of that profession spurred her to join the Texas Veterinary Medical Association’s Employee Improvement Committee, which is now the Technician Oversight Committee, in 1975. When the RVT Exam Subcommittee was created in 1994, Dr. Chitwood naturally was appointed chairman, a position she still holds today. Her work with the RVT program drew her to participate in other organizations, including the Texas Academy of Veterinary Practice, the American Veterinary Medical Association, the Women’s Veterinary Medical Association, the Central Texas Zoological Board of Directors and the Association of Animal Technical Educators. She has served as a director for TVMA and as an officer for both the North Central Texas VMA and the El Paso VMA, of which she was president in 1999.

After Dr. Chitwood left TSTI, her family moved to Dallas and later to El Paso. Throughout that time, she worked as a relief veterinarian in different practices.

“I loved doing relief work,” she said. “It’s interesting to see how veterinarians do the same thing different ways. I really enjoyed seeing a lot of the things that the technicians could do. I got along really well with the staff. A lot of times I didn’t even know the veterinarians because they weren’t there when I was there. If they didn’t have a picture on their desk, I didn’t know what they looked like.”

When one long-term relief job ended in 1997, she elected to take a new opportunity with PetSmart, which was in the process of opening its second hospital in El Paso. Soon she was promoted to regional director of their five West Texas and one Albuquerque hospitals while continuing to work in her own clinic. In 2001, Banfield purchased PetSmart’s hospitals and closed down the locations in the region Dr. Chitwood managed. The company then transferred her to Dallas. She worked in three different locations and in 2004 partnered in the Garland location, where she still works.

“I really have liked working with Banfield,” she said. “I was never interested in owning my own clinic. I don’t have to worry about all of the financial aspects. One of the biggest benefits of working here is the freedom of scheduling and all the benefits. And it’s really nice because I can hire my own staff.”

In addition to the hospital personnel, some of whom she has worked with for nearly a decade, Dr. Chitwood serves as an unofficial mentor for the interns and recent graduates Banfield routinely recruits. Even for veterinarians with previous experience, working at Banfield differs from typical clinics because of its location within the PetSmart store. Dr. Chitwood’s clinic is open Saturdays and Sundays and offers special wellness plans and wellness hours.

“The whole reason it’s set up that way is because everyone in the store is a potential client, but you would not believe the number of people who shop here regularly and don’t realize there’s a hospital back here,” she said. “It’s more common than you would think. On slow days we can send some of the help out into the store to talk to potential clients.”

Because of the clinic’s location in the store, it’s not uncommon to find an abandoned box of kittens outside its door. When that happens, Dr. Chitwood and her staff bottle-feed them until they are old enough to be vaccinated, spayed or neutered.

“I just want the kittens to have good homes,” she said. That’s probably why five of the kittens that have come through her clinic have ended up at her home in Murphy. She has seven cats total as well as two dogs and a 17-year-old Thoroughbred gelding.

“I really like working with cats,” she explained. “I always kind of wanted to be just a cat veterinarian because I liked the cats but I never pursued that. When I was in El Paso, I lived in a trailer park and there were a colony of cats that ate out of the garbage every night and like most cat lovers, I was out there feeding them every night. I bought a trap, and the veterinarian I worked for at the time said I could spay them and neuter them for just the cost of the drugs. And I did that.”

Her love for cats, dogs and all animals is evident as she walks around the bustling backroom at Banfield, sneaking in headrubs for the patients staying in cages. Her easy and respectful rapport with her staff also makes an impression.

Outside of her day job, she continues to work to better the technician profession by conducting accreditation site visits around the state as the Texas representative for the AVMA Committee on Veterinary Technician Education and Activities.

With all that she has accomplished in the past and her unrelenting focus on educating future generations of hospital personnel, Dr. Chitwood was proud to be recognized with the TVMA Distinguished Career Achievement Award. So proud, in fact, that she keeps the award in her office.

“I was greatly surprised and honored to have been nominated,” she said. “I have a special desire to help the registered veterinary technicians become a part of every practice, and I have found veterinary medicine to be very rewarding. I was just so surprised about the award. I just thought it was wonderful.”