Bella Coola gets its first resident veterinarian
Until this month, the nearest vet was a ferry ride or a four-hundred-kilometre drive over the Hill.
The valley has a veterinarian. Dr. Marisol Vega opened a two-room practice behind the farm supply Tuesday, ending an era in which every animal emergency in Bella Coola began with the same calculation: the ferry schedule, or the Hill.
The recruitment took the valley four years and a structure borrowed from rural medicine: a guaranteed-income agreement funded jointly by the two local governments, the cattlemen's association, and a community fund seeded — the organizers are happy to specify — by eleven years of the fall fair's pie table.
The caseload waiting for her ran the valley's full range: herd work for the cattle operations, a backlog of spays the humane society has been ferrying out two at a time, and one goose, of local renown, with a limp.
Dr. Vega, asked why she took a posting three hundred practices turned down, gave the answer the valley has already put on a t-shirt: "Everywhere needs a vet. Here, they built the clinic first."
