NC State Student Creates Coloring Book to Help Children Picture Possibilities in Veterinary Medicine

To be a thriving third-year veterinary student at NC State today, Azariah Spurlock first had to have a high school friend tell her that North Carolina A&T State University existed. The Charleston, West Virginia, native had never heard of it.

Then she had to have met people at the Greensboro, North Carolina, university who were majoring in animal science. The declared biology major at A&T, vaguely interested in doing something medical, didn’t know that was a possibility.

When her love of the hands-on animal labs at A&T spurred her to apply to veterinary school, Spurlock then had to take a leap of faith that the financials would somehow work out. The woman who grew up with only a dog at home had no idea that the US Department of Agriculture offers scholarships to students who agree to become mixed-animal veterinarians with the Food Safety Inspection Service — the job she will have when she graduates in 2027 with her DVM.

Never could an elementary school-age Spurlock have pictured where she’d be today. That realization is what moved her to self-publish her own interactive coloring book to help other children color outside the limits of circumstances.

“I created this veterinarian who goes out on ride-along calls to care for farm animals because most kids, especially in West Virginia, don’t have the opportunity to learn about these things,” says Spurlock, explaining the book’s title, “Ride Along with Dr. Ag.” “I wanted to expose a younger audience to the different opportunities within vet medicine — without them having to go out of state and wait till they’re older or all of the other things that may get in the way.”

The interactive coloring book, available to purchase online, invites children to help decide whether Banjo the goat looks ill and what the problem might be. Banjo isn’t eating and ain’t looking right. “Use your stethoscope to listen to Banjo’s heart,” the coloring book says. “Oh, no. Dr. Ag says Banjo’s heart is beating really fast. Is this good or bad?”

The book also introduces children to the Famacha score, which veterinarians use to see whether a goat is anemic by looking at the color of its eyelids. Red is good. White is bad. Banjo’s are white, likely because of barber pole worms, so the coloring book also includes references to goat poop, microscopes and treatment.

“And the farmer’s like, ‘Thank you so much. He’s doing so much better.’ So kids get that gratitude, ‘Oh, I helped actually fix a problem,’” Spurlock says. “Then they get a certificate at the end, and it’s nice. It’s getting them exposed to being a veterinarian.”

Particularly a veterinarian who doesn’t treat just companion animals.

“Every time I tell somebody I’m in vet school, they’re like, ‘Oh, you want to help my dog?’ and I think I’m not even going to work with dogs, so sorry,” says Spurlock, who also specialized in lab animal medicine at A&T. “I have to explain there are so many aspects of vet medicine. There are vets who go out on farms, vets who work in research facilities. That’s another goal for this, too, is to introduce the different avenues of vet medicine.”

Relax? No Way

Paying homage to her parents, avid readers who shared their passions and whimsy with their daughter, Spurlock says she simply craves learning and creating. Her mother, Ann Spurlock, is a medical assistant and fostered her love of science. Her dad, Marc Johnson, is the arty one and showed her how to draw.

“They just always kept my head on straight when it came to education and the creative outlets,” she says. “I feel like both of them, for the most part, are very in touch with their inner child. They love to have fun but at the same time know how to keep it serious.”

Like his father and grandfather before him, Spurlock’s father was born with a genetic condition that has left him blind since he was in his 40s.

“His losing the ability to do the things that he loves kind of propelled me,” Spurlock says. “My mom was the first person I told I was working on this book, and she said, ‘Oh, my gosh. You probably didn’t even know, but your dad wanted to write books, to be a publisher.’ It just really, really came home for me, because I’m doing something that he wanted to do.”

During her veterinary school breaks, Spurlock works with the USDA, but she had a few weeks on her hands this summer between semester’s end and her internship beginning, and she was bored. Boredom is what led her to create the coloring book, she says, though she learned how much she loved to draw during anatomy labs when she sketched organs and pathways just to help herself learn.

“As I was drawing one day, I thought that I kind of wanted to do children’s books, not coloring books yet, because I had grown up reading books,” Spurlock says. “My parents always made it a very important thing in my life. They always said it’s a red flag when you go into somebody’s house and there’s not one single book in there.”

Her parents often volunteer at West Virginia schools and have ordered and donated scores of their daughter’s coloring books to schoolchildren and bookbag-filling nonprofits in Charleston. West Virginia has fewer than 16 veterinarians per 100,000 people; North Carolina has more than 25. South Dakota has the highest number of veterinarians per 100,000 residents with 48.

Spurlock says she plans to create more veterinary medicine coloring books, with the next one maybe focusing on animal shelter veterinarians and following what happens when a child finds a box of puppies on the side of the road. 

A Big Impact

Puppies, however, likely won’t be on the agenda for Spurlock once she has received her doctor’s hood and taken the veterinarian’s oath at the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine commencement in 2027.

And she’s just fine with that. 

Serving as an emergency room veterinary assistant for two years was all the exposure to pets she needed, she says, and with more than 71% of veterinary students choosing companion animal medicine, she’s happy to be in the 3.4% caring for food animals.

“I just love the farm, I love being out in nature, and I love the herd-health type thing,” she says. “I’m going to be doing food animal regulatory medicine, and I’m very excited about that. Doing something public-service-wise is important to me. I want to have a big impact on the world.”

Starting with expanding horizons for children with limited possibilities.

Author: Burgetta Eplin Wheeler 

Source: https://news.cvm.ncsu.edu/