Our first patient on my shift tonight was a very sick kitten. Would have been $1300-$2000 to hospitalize, with very guarded to grave prognosis. The people who found her had only had her for 2 evenings and opted to euthanize. Not a wrong decision. At all. Then one of the vet assistants had to start in with, “Can’t we just do an xray?” “How about at least a snap test?” “I just fostered two kittens who looked just like her!” “I wish I was rich, so I could take her and not worry about affording it, and even if she didn’t make it, I could at least say I tried everything.” And on and on. To both me and my Doctor.
I’ve been doing this work for 15 years, the doctor for 35. She got both of us upset. I’m pretty pissed at her. You know, all this shit goes through all of our heads. Every fucking day. We compartmentalize because we have to. Unless some immature little girl gets in our faces and makes sure we feel like assholes, even when we know damn well, even without diagnostics, that a ghost white kitten who is open mouth breathing and hasn’t eaten in over 18 hours, is not long for this world no matter what we do.
That’s a vet assistant who’s got a counseling session with her supervisor/employer coming up. Are you going to be on the hook for delivering it, or the boss?
Very sorry you had to go through that. ETA: and for the poor kitteh and her family, of course.
Thank you. The doctor was upset enough to talk to a manager about it. Mind, this doctor is the Medical Director - he’s the honcho of all the doctors. So it’s getting kicked up to the Hospital Director, rather than the manager who was spoken to. This may not be the first time she’s done this, and what I don’t get is she’s not new. She’s been here a couple years now. I haven’t worked a shift with her in quite a while, she’s a sweet girl and she means well, but damn that was over the top and made us both teary. I thought she would have matured a bit by now.
While I love me some pumpkin pie and pumpkin spice coffee, this reminded me of a funny story from when I was a kid. Back in the mid-late 80’s my dad worked at an ice cream factory. He would sometimes get to bring home potential new products or new flavors to for us to test. One day he came home with a container of pumpkin ice cream. This was way before the October pumpkin takeover that we have today, so we had never heard of such a thing and were all eager to try it.
Mom scoops out some for everyone and we all take a bite… and look at each other and simultaneously say “yuck!” Mom thought some caramel sauce might improve things. All of us grab our bowls and head back into the kitchen. All of us except my sister, for some reason she left her bowl on the coffee table. We hear a noise and turn around to see the cat jump up on the coffee table and start eating my sister’s ice cream. He stops after a few licks, makes a face, and barfs.
Needless to say that was the end of the pumpkin ice cream. I can’t see it today and not think of that cat. I haven’t eaten it since.
Dear Archie Comics: I was enjoying your series Afterlife With Archie. Was. Kind of hard to keep up when only ONE FUCKING ISSUE has been published this year and the way it’s looking that’s the only issue we’re going to get. And that one issue was delayed from 2014! Really? Get your shit together!
Missy is not feeling well. She is still purring and eating and all that stuff, but I can tell that she isn’t right. So, off we go to the vet in the morning so I can tell them that there is something wrong with my cat and I don’t have anything to report except that she just isn’t looking right.
She’s sitting on my lap and allowing me to give her scritches. She never does that. She isn’t being a PITA and she always is the biggest PITA in the house. She is drinking out of the fountain bowl instead of prying the lid off and drinking from the top.
So now I’m going to take a cat to the vet and complain that she isn’t being a PITA. How fucking lame is that? :smack:
There is something wrong with Missy and I want her fixed. She might be a PITA, but she is MY PITA and I love her.
This may belong more properly in the workplace griping thread, but I am fed up (to HERE!) with a few of my coworkers. One has …issues…and every little thing causes him to retreat to a cocoon of “life sucks and I just wanna die” and another who cannot understand human interaction. Why would a lady of a certain age object to being told she is not in a younger demographic? Why should I use the hold button on the phone? Why should I check my work before calling the customer for pick up?
Yup Flatlined, I’ve done that. Took a cat who was eating, drinking, socializing, being essentially normal in, & the only thing I could tell the vet was that she just wasn’t right, and her eyes looked… different. I couldn’t explain even what was different, just, something was off.
Turns out she was getting anemic. Not so much that it really showed in her gums, but definitely Not Right. Treatment for Hemobartinella and she was fine
Fucking cat! Your old ass almost died two months ago of puking and diarrhea. We spent over a thousand dollars to keep your 17 year old empty ballsack around and you eat a freaking twist tie right in front of me? Slurp it up like spaghetti as I try frantically to pull it out of your mouth?
And not the plastic, easily bendy twist tie-- noooo. A six inch long wire wrapped in paper twist tie. You better hope it comes out your ass pointy end first because I am not spending another thousand dollars getting that shit removed from your stomach. And if you’re gonna puke it out, please take your face out of my sneaker first.
I love our vet. I called the first thing in the morning and told the receptionist that I needed an appointment because there was something wrong with my cat. The receptionist asked what was wrong and I said “she’s not being a brat”. Receptionist asked if there were any other symptoms and I said no. She gave me an appointment for this morning.
I pack Missy up with a minimum of struggling and off we went. The vet walked into the exam room, read Missy’s chart, exclaimed “She’s not being a brat? Well, we can’t have that, can we?”
Missy has some congestion in her lungs and probably has a cold. Vet gave me antibiotics. When I questioned that because I know that antibiotics do nothing for a virus, she explained that cats often get a secondary infection from the build up in their lungs and she wanted to stop that before it happened. The results of the blood work will be in tomorrow morning, but she is pretty sure there isn’t anything else going on.
Hopefully, Missy will be back to her PITA self is a few days.
Dear record-breaking heatwave - please fuck off and die. It’s October, dammit! Can we have at least a few days where the temps don’t go above 90? I’m dying here.
Hubby earned a pretty good pitting this weekend. He’d been ostensibly looking forward to a weekend-long social event at the beach where we got to take our dogs. He took Friday off to pack and do other preparatory stuff. Since he wanted to beat the Friday afternoon commute, I let him talk me into taking a half day off.
It took us 5 hours to get there because of traffic and the shitty GPS sending us a little way off the beaten path and having to backtrack in traffic to get back on the route. One dog was anxious and whiny the whole time, the other dog was snarling and snappish at the first dog the whole trip. So we all arrived tired, hungry and cranky.
He HATEd the hotel room I’d booked. It smelled. The bed was hard. It was too small. It wasn’t next to the beach, although I don’t know how he decided this in the dark. He proposed sleeping in the car, going home the next morning and coming back to pick up me and the dogs on Sunday. I told him that was stupid, to just eat his dinner and rest and he’d feel better. While I was finishing my dinner, he laid on the bed. Then he laid on the dog bed. Then he said he wanted to go home, because he could NOT stay in that room. Granted it was a low-end motel, but the bed was clean, the smell was just stale cigarettes. We wouldn’t be able to find a dog-friendly room in another hotel at 8pm on a Friday night, so we packed up the suitcase, the dog beds, the dogs… and drove another three hours back home. When I turned the key back in to the hotel office, the lady clearly thought I was nuts.
So we spent money on the nonrefundable event registration and 2-night hotel booking, took time off work, spent so much time in the car that both of us had back aches for the rest of the weekend, and upset the dogs… all for no reason.
Ya should have booted them months ago, however…