Part of my job is deciding, fast, what’s actually an emergency and what just looks like one. A dog that’s limping and whining is scary for the owner standing there, but it’s usually not the thing in the room I’m most worried about, it’s the quiet cat in the corner not moving much that gets my attention first. You learn to sort urgency from noise pretty early in this job or you burn out doing it wrong.

I didn’t expect that instinct to follow me home, but it did, straight to my kitchen table on game nights. I noticed it clearest playing Root for the first time, watching myself try to figure out which threat at the table was actually dangerous versus which one just looked dramatic because someone was talking loud about it. Marcus was playing loud and confident and I kept almost falling for it, treating his noise as the real threat instead of watching what Priya was quietly building in the corner of the board that nobody was paying attention to. That’s exactly the trap at the clinic. The calm one is sometimes the one you should be worried about.

It’s made me a genuinely more patient player, I think, willing to sit and actually read the board instead of reacting to whoever’s making the most noise about their plan. It’s also made me insufferable to play with sometimes, because I’ll pause a session to ask “wait, is that actually the threat, or does it just feel like one,” out loud, unprompted, the way I’d ask it about a patient. Priya says I do the same thing with my face that I do at work, this specific narrowed look, when I’m trying to figure out what’s actually going on under a loud presentation. I didn’t know I had a work face until she pointed it out. Now I can’t unsee myself doing it over a board of wooden pieces on a Tuesday night, which is a strange thing to have in common with a shift at the clinic, but there it is.

The clinic version of this got trained into me hard early on, a vet I worked under my first year had a habit of asking, out loud, in front of the owner, what’s actually happening here versus what looks like it’s happening, until I started asking it automatically in my own head before she even had to. Owners come in scared and describe the loudest symptom first, the limping, the whimpering, and my job is to figure out what the body’s actually telling us underneath that, which is sometimes the quiet thing in the corner of the room rather than whatever’s making the most noise about itself. It took a couple of years before that instinct stopped feeling like a skill I was performing and started feeling like just how I look at a room.

It showed up again playing Dune Imperium Uprising a few months back, watching Marcus build toward something loud and obvious on the conflict track while Priya quietly stacked up an economic engine nobody at the table was paying attention to, myself included at first, until I caught myself doing the exam room thing, stopping to actually ask what the quiet one was building instead of reacting to whoever was talking the most. She won two turns later, by a wide enough margin it should have been obvious sooner. Marcus maintains I only caught it because of the job, and he’s probably right.

I don’t know if it’s made me better at the games themselves in some abstract mechanical sense. But it’s made me a harder person to bluff at that table, and a more careful reader of a room, at work and over a board of wooden pieces both, which is a strange thing to have picked up from six years of deciding what’s actually urgent in a room full of scared animals and scared owners.