Dr. Nora Callahan grew up in Harlan, Kentucky, in a house with a rotating cast of strays, barn cats, and one very old beagle named Pepper who lived to be nineteen. She studied at the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine, graduated in 2009, and spent her first five years at a busy multi-doctor practice in suburban Nashville. The work was good, but the pace was relentless. Fifteen-minute appointments, a different doctor every visit, animals in and out before anyone had time to think. She kept telling herself it was just how it worked.
In the spring of 2013, a client brought in a thirteen-year-old shepherd mix named Biscuit. Biscuit had been seen by four different vets at the practice over the previous year, and nobody had caught that his weight loss was connected to a slow-growing abdominal mass. By the time Nora found it, it was too late to do much. She went home that night and started writing a business plan on a legal pad. A year later, in the summer of 2014, she signed a lease on a converted farmhouse on Route 9 outside Ashfield and opened Marble Pine Cross Veterinary with one exam room, a used autoclave, and a hand-lettered sign her neighbor painted.