If you think you're too old to do something, maybe you can think again. From the local newspaper:
On Tuesday morning, Dr. Jim Grillo makes his rounds. First he goes to the South American Pampas to examine two tapirs. "They've got chronic foot problems," he says. "They're both old."
Then it's on to the Asian Domain where a babirusa named Wrigley is "making weird sounds," according to zookeeper Alison Randel. And Panya, the 47-year-old Asian elephant, needs to have her feet checked.
"She's doing wonderfully," Grillo says, when she lifts one enormous foot after another and lets him take a look.
Next, it's off to visit Stella, a friendly black and white ruffed lemur, who has skin and other problems, but is doing well considering she's a very old lemur at 28. (I think he goes to see her just because he's fond of her.) Then he's off to do an ultrasound on a Fiji Island iguana, a critically-endangered kind of lizard. She's half of a breeding pair, and he's looking to see if she's producing eggs.
"I think she's ovulating. She's eating like crazy," senior zookeeper Kim Boyer tells him.
As he crisscrosses the grounds in a golf cart, Grillo takes calls on his radio: Can he come over and take a look at the limping giraffe's front leg? Can he stop and see the rooster?
It's a typical morning for a veterinarian at the Audubon Zoo.
"I love seeing and taking care of the animals -- the hands-on dealing with the day-to-day problems," Grillo says.
The hands-on clinical work was what Grillo loved about his previous career, too. Before he went to vet school, he spent more than 25 years taking care of human patients. He was a head and neck surgeon in Manhattan, working with cancer patients and doing reconstructive surgery.
"The road I've taken has been different, but that's always been my way of doing things," he says.
That road began at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, N. H., which led to his internship at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan.
"I went south to New York," says the New Hampshire native, laughing at the thought of how much further south he is now.
Grillo had always loved animals and thought about becoming a zoo vet even while he was in medical school. On his first day off during his hospital internship, he headed to the Bronx Zoo, where, by chance, he met Dr. Emil Dolensek, the chief veterinarian there.
"He was the best person I ever knew and kind of the most profound influence in my life," Grillo says.
He helped Dolensek set up a health program for the zookeepers and sometimes consulted when the veterinarians were doing complicated surgical procedures.
"I would spend about two days a week at the zoo, and Emil always told me, 'The zoo is a great field. Just think about it,'" Grillo says.
When he went into private practice, Grillo continued to work with Dolensek and remained close friends with him until he died of cancer in 1990.
"That was a hard thing to go through with him," he says. "Emil was an amazing man and even now is one of the most respected names in the zoo world."
As time passed, Grillo thought it was probably too late to go to vet school. And he was well-established in his practice and enjoyed human surgery.
"Because it was cancer, I made close, close bonds with patients and their families," he says. "And I was still doing the consultations at the Bronx Zoo."
Then, in 1999, he came down with Hodgkin's disease.
"I spent New Year's Eve in the hospital," he says.
For Grillo, the new year and the new century started with chemotherapy.
"When you're forced to take time off and you're going through something that intense, you think of all kinds of things," he says. "And I thought, 'If I get through this, I'm going back to vet school.'"
In 2001, he closed his office and entered the veterinary school at Tufts University in North Grafton, Mass., to follow his decades-old dream.
"I was 53," he says. "Not only was I the oldest kid in the class, I think I was the oldest kid they'd ever had."
He wondered if after med school and 25 years of practice he would be bored by his basic anatomy and physiology classes, but it was just the opposite.
"My teachers were some of the best teachers in science I'd ever had," he says. "I was glued to them, and they loved having someone in class gung ho about learning all this stuff."
He was actually relearning it, and he was able to put it in a kind of context he didn't have during medical school.
"I understood the significance of what I was learning and the universality of it," he says. "I had a new appreciation of it."
He also liked having the chance to sit in a classroom and listen to lectures.
"That was really cool," he says. "I'd tell the other students, 'You don't know how nice this is after you've been working all your life.'"
Grillo didn't try to opt out of any classes. For his electives, he took every zoo and wildlife course offered and also studied ambulatory medicine.
"That's the traveling vet who loads up the truck and goes around and sees horses and cow herds and sheep on the farm," he says. "The James Herriot kind of vet."
After he graduated, he started applying at zoos.
"It was going to be zoos or nothing for me," he says.
Grillo was hired in October 2006 and is one of three full-time vets working at the zoo, the Aquarium of the Americas and the Endangered Species Center in Algiers. He spends most of his time at the zoo, working with mammals, birds and reptiles. He likes the challenge of working with zoo animals because it involves not only diagnosing an illness or injury and coming up with the proper treatment, but also figuring out what is really feasible with a wild animal.
"You have to temper your treatment to see what can be accomplished with the least stress on the patient," he says.
In the five years he has been at Audubon, he has never regretted his decision to become a vet.
"I just love to do the zoo stuff," he says. "I love the keepers, and I love the wondrousness of it."
The "wondrousness" is because of the amazing array of animals he sees: the babirusa from Indonesia with his terrific tusks; the tapirs with their long rubbery noses; the orange-eyed lemurs from Madagascar; the gorgeous white tigers; the howler monkeys with their noisy bellows.
"I can't say I have favorites, the variety being so endless," Grillo says. "They all have something special about them."
And underneath all those differences, when you get down to the level of anatomy and physiology, there's a beautiful kind of symmetry from species to species.
"It's variations on a theme in terms of the music of it," he says.
Grillo thinks this is a great time to be zoo vet. It used to be that zoos were for the spectators, but now they're all about the animals.
"The most important thing is making the exhibit animal-friendly," he says. "If the exhibit provides enrichment for the animals, it's good for their health."
For people, the most valuable lessons we can take from the zoo are about conservation.
"The educational part is so important," Grillo says. "The zoo asks, 'How are we going to preserve these animals?' If we don't have love and respect for all of life, I don't think we have a chance."
