Thanks for the update, cornflakes! 
The way you selectively edited my quote begs the question: would your rather have the cats or the dogs than pay for you children’s education? How about your bills?
I had a Lab that was prone to getting corneal ulcers. She once had one that took many months to heal, and required the Vet to abrade the surface of her eye with a needle (yikes!). It looked terrible for weeks (like an opaque pink scab on her eye), but eventually healed perfectly.
Hope the dog heals up!
I don’t think they were so much selectively editing as responding to the specific inclusion of vacations in your list. You were mixing wants and needs. It seemed odd to even consider a vacation that cost that much as more important than your pet’s life. You can always do a more local, cheaper vacation, or even just a staycation.
I will update back again in 2 weeks after the next checkup. Hopefully by that time she’s pretty much safe and 100% in the clear.
Very glad to see that; I was hoping the meds would work (as they did on my cat.)
And thanks very much for the update!
First of all, what BigT said:
You were the one who put vacations in your list.
As to bills: depends on the bills. Do I think people should take on that much of a vet. bill if it means they’ll all be out on the street? Of course not. If the bills are, say, for new clothes when the old ones were still adequate, and the clothes are still returnable: that’s a different matter.
As for the education: I’d say that’s case by case. I’d have felt queasy about going to a fancier school if one of the cats had died specifically so I could do that. If that money’s the only way the child’s going to get educated at all, or if the specific child has a specific urgent need for a more expensive education, that’s a different matter. If the kid’s only two, chances are you can make it up later; if they’re getting D’s in college and begging to drop out and threatening to drop out even if you disagree the money’s probably being wasted there anyway; if they’re in year 4 of a 4 year course and doing well at something they love and the 10K means they’d have to drop out at that point and not get a degree essential to their getting a job in that field, that’s a different situation entirely.
The thing is, the doctor(s) who is explaining this to you may have conflicting interests. S/he may have a practice they’re trying to build, or keep afloat. And so the information they provide may be biased, sometimes heavily so.
With my views of human nature, I believe everybody is biased. Sometimes very little, sometimes a lot.
We had a dog, a Chessie (Chesapeake Bay Retriever) who, at 10.5 years developed cancer. The doc (vet) who talked to us was so smooth, calm, even-keeled with his information — not slick like a used car salesman, but professional in demeanor and yet I couldn’t help but think that he was leading us to the Have The Surgery decision, and leading us in such a way that my wife and I thought it was definitely the right decision, after rationally considering all of the information.
After a $15,000 surgery, and then a follow on $5,000 procedure, in the end it didn’t extend her life much, and the 3 months after surgery, until she recovered, her quality of life was poor.
When we put her down she was 11 yrs 1 month.
I remember thinking that if I owned a vet practice, I would want a doc just like the one who talked to us — he knows how to generate revenue. I felt dirty, unclean, after deciding to have the surgery.
I hope so too!
Nothing wrong with that.
That’s why I keep saying ‘a vet you can trust’.
The vet. I use has recommended against procedures, as well as for them. There’s a long distance between ‘I have to tell you that this is available’ and ‘Let me make that appointment for you right now’. And because I know they’ve recommended against things, I’m comfortable that the answer to ‘what would you do if this were your cat/dog?’ will be honest.
Finding a vet. you can trust in the matter may of course be a problem for some people; especially those with only one vet. within a reasonable travel distance.
I’m with you. I think our outlook about pets and medical care and something as extreme as surgery is absolutely a very recent first world phenomenon. Perpetuated perhaps even some level because of social judgement or shame if the owner doesn’t do everything possible.
Similar with childcare, I grew up in the 80’s with parents that smoked in the car and didn’t wear a seatbelt.
Yes, definitely — a vet you can trust, like an auto mechanic you can trust, is extremely valuable. And we did have a vet we could trust. He was great. Problem was, he’s not an oncologist. Our vet referred us to a clinic that he trusts, and they had several radoncs (radiation oncologists). It was the radonc there that we just happened to get, he’s the one who I’m talking about.
On second thought and in hindsight, maybe we should have gone back to our vet to discuss the options laid out by the radonc. Alas, we did not.
Anyway, yes, a trusted vet and trusted docs are extremely valuable.
My dtr just told us her 7-yr old greyhound has bone cancer in a rear leg. They are trying to see if it has metastisized. If not, they will consider amputation and chemo.
The dog was a rescue, and has already been rather expensive (tooth extraction, couple of leg procedures). She and her BF both have good jobs, and do not intend to have kids. I suspect they will put down considerable coin over the next year(s) on this dog. Their choice. At least they can afford it.
IMO, they gave the dog 4+ great years. I’d be looking to make the dog comfortable, and look for a new dog.
Poms average life span is 15 years. Not 20. We have a Pom. Glad she has responded to the meds. In no way, would I spend $10k to extend the life of my dog for 1-2 years.
You appear to be confusing “average” with “maximum.”
And, again, the statistics are going to be different for dogs that are already 14 and otherwise in active good health.
I think it’s also an urban/rural thing. In rural areas, the social pressure goes the other way: there’s this constant thrum of “you have to remember, animals are not people” and “don’t get too attached”. I think it is connected to the attitude you have to have toward livestock. Half the point of 4H seems to be to pound home the message “You can love that goat, and spend a lot of time with that goat, but after the stock show, that goat is going on a truck and you’ll never see it again.” The country side of my family isn’t just not willing to spend significant money to save animals (though they will spend real money to buy one), they go out of their way to assert scorn for those that do. It’s not just weird, it’s self-indulgent and (subtext) feminine to do such a thing. And that attitude is also present in urban areas–but there’s push back from the other side, as well.
I settle for a vet I can gauge. I like my regular vet okay, he’s got a good bedside manner and is pretty rational. But I don’t quite trust him billing-wise, because there is never a test to be had that he doesn’t recommend.
I’m generally relatively price insensitive with my pets. I can afford to spend a fair bit on them in a pinch and have spent thousands for various emergency procedures and, for an earlier pet, oncology consultation and cancer treatment( curative amputation rather than chemotherapy ). However I do have to pay some attention to my vet larding up treatment bills with potentially slightly useful but often not entirely necessary exploratory tests, because he will. I’m fine with that dance, generally - just an extra price in due diligence that I accept as part of the treatment bargain.
The vet I trust most at the moment on that front is actually a heart specialist, precisely because she doesn’t play those games and her consultancy fees are more than reasonable. She recommended filling prescriptions at Costco( very cheap meds at that )and getting supplies cheaply from Amazon rather than marking them up at her office.
I’m like you, in that I’m price-insensitive with vet costs. However, I also agree with you that you as the owner of the pet must be in charge of all decision making because most vets will offer to do anything as long as the checkbook is out. We had a cat many years ago that got deathly ill and it took many exploratory surgeries and treatment plans before we finally euthanized him. Way, wayyyy overdue, and in hindsight all of that just made him suffer more and longer. We allowed the vet to guide us and they were more than happy to try everything under the sun. The poor cat was nearly shaved bald by the end.
More recently, and MUCH smarter, we had to euthanize a greyhound who got osteosarcoma. It normally presents in the long bones (i.e. legs) so we didn’t think his back problems could be that. As a result we caught it too late. He had a lemon-sized lump between his shoulder blades that was the bone tumor in his vertebra that crushed his spinal cord. I took him off his pain meds and anti-inflammatories at midnight (on the dot) so we could get an MRI the following morning and that was enough for things to escalate extremely rapidly to agonizing paralysis. He was paraplegic going into the vet’s office and quadraplegic 15 minutes later and in complete agony, and the vet still offered surgery to remove the tumor. Like, (I can be flippant about it now but I was nearly as traumatized as he was at the time) what do they expect surgery to do, allow me to have a pet greyhound head in a jar, or wheel his head around in a wagon?
Our 10 year old dog managed to badly hurt his back one weekend a year or so ago. Since his back end was not working well, and he was in a lot of pain, my wife took him to an emergency clinic. They took some x-rays that didn’t show anything so they tried to talk her into spending $6000 on an MRI with the possibility of needing to spend an additional $5-6,000 on surgery if they found a serious issue. When we declined they tried to convince her to setup a go fund me to pay for it all. We took the pain killers and anti-inflammatory meds and hoped for the best. Luckily for us he is 90% better and super happy. The hard sell left a really bad taste in my mouth and we won’t be going back there if we can avoid it.
My rational was that i would not put an older dog through major surgery. So spending $6,000 on a test would only tell us if we needed to put him down right away instead of waiting a few days to see if the drugs would work.
It’s always important to ask “What would we do differently, based on the results of this test?”
Sometimes the answer is “Not much.” Sometimes the answer is, “possibly take the animal to a strange vet two hours away and leave them there for several days to have massively invasive surgery which they have only a 30% chance of surviving long enough for them to get over the trauma.” Sometimes the answer is “give them X medication, which we can give them anyway on a trial basis because it’s unlikely to do harm.”
In any of those cases, yeah, I wouldn’t do the test.
For that matter, I’ve declined further testing/possible treatment for an older cat who was afraid of strangers and had never in his life been anywhere other than my place, the farm on the next road over which he was born on, and the one vet. eight miles down the road; on the grounds that he would be so terrified by being taken an hour away and left for days in a strange place that a) it wasn’t worth it and b) his chances of survival, which already weren’t great, would have been lessened by his mental stress. Some years previously I had taken a bolder cat, with a better chance of survival, to the place an hour away. He lived, at least, long enough to forgive me for it.
My vet., FWIW, agreed with both of those decisions.