Dr. Wixsom believes in state of the art progressive medicine and surgery and typically goes to over 40 hours of continuing education a year. In the area, she is seen as a veterinarian who cares and where you take your pets when they are really sick. Before she was a veterinarian, she was LTJG MJ Wixsom, US Coast Guard. She was in the first class of women to graduate from the US Coast Guard Academy. During her four years at sea, she did extensive law enforcement and narcotics interdiction and search and rescue. But a knee injury on the Cape Horn meant a career at sea was not likely and she decided to go back to her childhood dream to be a veterinarian. The academy and the military experience left Dr Wixsom with a strong attention to duty and a duty to serve. She writes a weekly pet education column in the local Green Beacon and the neighboring Sunday Ironton Tribune. This book is from these articles. It is also why so many of her patients do well. MJ Wixsom is mom to two lab pups, Whiskey and Tango, a yet to be renamed rescue lab, three cats and a rescued Malinois. Whiskey and Tango are half-brothers, ten days apart in age. Their names are from the radio-phone-talker lingo for What Was I Thinkin’? She loves all animals, but especially labs, bats, and hawks. She also enjoys kayaking, caving and rock climbing, but doesn’t get to do much any more. In her spare time, she homeschooled her teenage year old daughter M’Kinzy (now 16 and in college) and works on her 35 year marriage to Matthew Wixsom, attorney (also a former Coast Guard officer). She is writing a book on her time in the first class of women at CGA.