Michelle Goodnight returns to veterinary college as a criticalist and clinical instructor
Michelle Goodnight’s path to veterinary medicine started with a detour through space, or at least the idea of it.
As a high schooler, she spent a summer working at NASA, convinced she was headed for Mars. But the downtime between missions didn’t suit her. “When astronauts aren’t in space, which is the majority of the time, they’re doing things I don’t find interesting,” she said.
Goodnight needed something faster. She just didn’t know what that was yet.
At Marshall University, she finished her bachelor’s degree on a four-year scholarship, double majoring in biology and chemistry, with an added minor, and extra courses, all while searching for the right career.
A summer doing lemur research in Madagascar confirmed that bench science wasn’t it. Then a mentor connected her with a mixed-animal veterinarian in Ohio, Mike Dyer at Proctorville Animal Clinic, and she began volunteering at his practice.
Then came the moment. Standing at the back of a horse trailer in the pouring rain, helping perform an emergency surgery to save a mare’s life, Goodnight knew she had found her calling.
She applied to the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine and didn’t get in. She regrouped, earned her first master’s degree, and applied again, this time to multiple schools. She was accepted at several, and chose Virginia Tech for its strong equine program and in-state tuition.
But veterinary school was only part of the story. Throughout her first master’s and all four years of vet school, Goodnight served in the U.S. Army Reserves, the daughter of a Navy veteran continuing a family tradition. After graduating with her DVM in 2002, she accepted an active duty commission; one her grandmother, a World War II Merchant Marine veteran, had the honor of awarding.
Not an average Tuesday
Over the next 13 years, Goodnight’s military career took her from Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, to Schweinfurt, Germany, to a year-long deployment as the area veterinarian for northern Iraq, based in Mosul.
In Iraq, she worked closely with military working dogs and their handlers.
In one case, she treated a Labrador, an off-leash IED detection dog, that had eaten an entire block of C-4 explosive. With limited resources and no standard protocol, her team scrambled through decades-old technical bulletins and managed to save the dog.
The overseas work confirmed what she’d always felt drawn to.
“Every time I had gotten a job, I said, ‘I want to work at the emergency clinic,’. I was even an EMT on the human side of things,” she said.
After returning from Iraq, she was accepted into the emergency and critical care residency program at Ohio State University, where she was the second resident. She describes it as the favorite stretch of her career to that point.
Following her residency and board certification in 2012, Goodnight was assigned to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where she mentored newly commissioned veterinarians during their first year of practice as an instructor in the First-Year Graduate Veterinary Education program. At 17 years of service, injuries sustained from an improvised explosive device in Iraq led to her medical retirement from the Army.
Back where it started
After the military, Goodnight worked as a criticalist at a private specialty practice near Atlanta, then spent eight years teaching veterinary technology at Gwinnett Technical College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. She loved the work and the flexibility it offered while raising her children, but as they grew older, the pull of emergency medicine returned.
Now Goodnight is back at Virginia Tech as a clinical instructor and small animal criticalist in the Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, teaching and helping build the college’s emergency and critical care service.
Her years teaching veterinary technicians gave her a deep appreciation for the role techs play on a clinical team, a perspective she is eager to share with students.
“They’re not technicians because they couldn’t be vets,” she said. “They’re technicians because they picked a different path.”
Some familiar faces have made the homecoming easier. Several staff members from her student days are still here, and the campus, while it has grown, still feels navigable. “Autopilot still mostly works,” she said.
Off the clock, Goodnight is settling into life in Blacksburg. She builds book nooks, has a collection of Lego bricks waiting to be reassembled once the unpacking is done, enjoys puzzles, and is on the lookout for a local Dungeons & Dragons group.
She shares her home with three and a half cats: Wolverine, an 18-year-old named for his sideways-eared kitten days; Smoke, a gray and white former stray; Squeakers, a dilute calico who earned her name the obvious way; and Cupcake, Squeakers' twin, who splits time between Goodnight's house and her youngest child's college dorm.
