For Dr. Jennifer Lavender, a Dallas-born and raised veterinarian, vet school was kind of funny. She says she only ever dreamed of becoming a vet, operating on stuffed animals in her youth.
Photography by Yuvie Styles
Photography by Yuvie Styles
Lavender grew up attending Lakewood, Armstrong and University Park Elementary schools. She continued at McCullough Intermediate School and graduated from Highland Park High School in three years in 1991. She then completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees in biomedical science at Texas A&M University. Prior to vet school, she took time to work in London in a restaurant and department store with the city sucking her in. She became determined to work at a practice across the pond.
Sending resumes to every street and every single clinic she could find, eventually she received one call back that gave her a shot to break into the industry in London, which she says is difficult to do without technician training as a licensed nurse. But with that one call she was able to work in a London clinic for a summer.
For 25 years, Lavender’s career has led her to her first internship in Houston, working abroad, hesitantly leaving her city lifestyle for College Station yet again to attend vet school (years she says were pretty hard on her, from academics to medical woes). She then moved back to Dallas where she focused on high-volume spay/neuter work at a nonprofit full-time for about three years until she and a classmate opened their first practice.
Today, she continues serving pets at Metro Paws Hospital in Oak Cliff and with a group called Animal Balance that goes all over the world on spay/neuter mission trips. Lavender is all about giving back. She started an externship opportunity within her practice for fourth-year veterinary students, a discounted feral cat package and alternative treatment plans for patients and pet parents to be able to have more accessible care.
I hear vet school is pretty rigorous. How did you manage?
I was really fortunate that I’m a really stubborn person. If I’ve said, “This is the end, this is the finish line,” then I’m going to cross it. And so it was just kind of blind stubborn effort that got me through. It was kind of a crazy time. It’s so funny because I think looking back, I wouldn’t go back and change anything, but I sure don’t want to go back and redo it either. I’m pretty good with where I am today. One nice thing about vet med, too, is just that it can be a flexible career, as far as hours and kids. And so it’s been nice to be able to raise my kids as a single mom and have my job be something that kind of fits in line with that.
Why did you end up opening a clinic in Oak Cliff?
We operated that clinic in East Dallas for several years, and honestly, we planned to buy a building to move that office to because we were having some issues with our landlord. And as we started looking at properties in East Dallas, somehow we really kind of zeroed in on Oak Cliff as being a really underserved area, as far as just preventative animal veterinary care in general. As we kept trying to look in East Dallas, we kept coming back to this just dearth of resources in West Dallas. And so that’s kind of what happened with the Oak Cliff office. Then we found the land, we bought the building and we opened it. And it was kind of funny because once it was open, we both were like, “Well, wait, we still have the original problem.” And we finally did buy a building in East Dallas and opened an office over there. By then, it was kind of 11 years from the first one. But Oak Cliff was never on our radar, except for the fact that it was impossible to look at a map of Dallas and see the little pins where all the veterinary clinics were, and there was just an absolute missing section of the city. And even a lot of the clinics that were over there, like the Vet Stop and Hampton Road and things like that, they were either not taking new patients or on the verge of retiring.
I know you give back and do volunteer services. tell me more about that.
I’m really big on just access to care in general, and that’s kind of the term that we use in the industry about trying to make sure that underserved areas have the care that they need.
So giving back is a big part of what you do — how fulfilling is it for you to be able to help others and help animals?
It’s the whole point of doing it. We can all get a paycheck doing so many things, and so I think everybody has to kind of figure out what fills their heart. And for me, being of service to people, to help them provide for their pets, is what fuels me and fills me. Especially with my surgery patients, I tend to give my personal number to all of my clients that have surgery with me, so that I’m on call for them basically 24 hours a day if their pet has a complication after surgery. But for me, that’s actually the part that I get the most out of, is the connection with the person and then working collaboratively to see that pet get to a better place, whatever that may be, but that’s actually what gets me the most satisfaction of what I’m doing.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
