Oh, and thanks for the sympathy, everyone. I’m just glad nobody crashed or seized while I was dealing with these folks. I was a little concerned, though, about the animals being worked on by the tech who originally took the snail call. I wouldn’t want someone who can’t stop snickering getting near my neck with a needle.
Those of you who think these calls are bad should search for my muskrat rape thread from a couple of weeks ago. I believe it was in MPSIMS, but I don’t really remember now. And those are just the calls that are quasi-plausible. We also get our fair share of calls from people wanting to know if they can get STD’s from fucking their dog, how to revive a monkey after spanking it too hard (it’s just laying there all limp!), that sort of thing.
These call would be annoying at a regular business, but these cum-dripping rectal warts don’t seem to realize that distracting and annoying the staff of an emergency room is dangerous. Oh, well, I guess it’ll be their animal needing attention some night when two of our three techs are answering crank calls.
Generally speaking it’s better to direct people to a HUMAN doctor before draggin the CDC into it.
For all you know over the phone the damn critter had fleas and the person is having an allergic reaction to the flee bites.
And to be honest, monkeypox isn’t exactly a national health crisis…
Unless someone starts licking your sores when you have monkeypox you’re probably not going to infect anyone else. You really need to stop going crazy over every little pathogen.
Yes, cc, we get questions about overdoses all the time. Catnip, chocolate, and various medications are the most common ones, but those questions are completely serious, and we treat them seriously. Overdoses can quickly become very serious situations, and we never laugh at people with those sorts of questions.
As for the crabs, I’d think your doctor would have told you that mites are generally species-specific, but as long as you just asked your question and got off the phone, we wouldn’t hold it against you. If you’d been ramishing on and on about how worried you were about it, and why it was a concern, and giving us your cat’s entire life history, that would be completely different.
Tangent : reminds me of when that transport aircraft carrying a cargo of japanese car parts had to jettison its load - the local news headline was "It’s Raining Datsun Cogs"
This reminds me of the time my mom’s cat drank my science project. I was disolving different brands of calcium supplements in vinegar and he jumped up on the table and lapped one bowl up. We kept calling the vet every five minutes to find out how to make him throw it up. They started laughing at us.
I still have fond memories of the emergency vets who were patient and did NOT laugh at me when I called them to ask if there was anything I should know about treating a boa constrictor bite. Yup, stupid me, stuck my hand in the wrong place and the snake decided two of my fingers were a mouse, and hung on for dear life. (Turned out I needed to get an X-ray to make sure no teeth were broken off in the bite – and the folks at the human ER managed to not laugh at me, either! :eek:)
Or the wonderful emergency vet who told us how to keep our golden retriever from scratching off her bandage where our regular vet had just removed a tumor from her shoulder. (Put a t-shirt on her – she wore one for two weeks, loved it!)
You guys ROCK.
Have you ever considered hiring someone to weed out the obvious crap phone calls so you guys can practice medicine???
OOH, oooh, I volunteer for that job! Not actually being in a position to have to save fuzzy little lives, I could pass on the legitimate calls to a vet or vet tech, and get some great entertainment from the rest.
Sweet holy Jesus. My renaissance Italian is a little rusty, but I’m pretty sure there’s a circle in Hell for that. And if you told dr_mom_mcl about that, I’m pretty sure there would be some Hippocratic oath recantation going on.
We have a receptionist till 10 most nights, and our front desk staff is generally very good at knowing when people need to come in or not. Once in a while we’ll still need to take a call about things the receptionists don’t know about, but not too often. After 10, though, we’re on our own to do the phones, check in/check out, etc. in addition to our tech duties.
MissTake takes out pen and paper, adds new slur to her lexicon
Thank you CCL for what you do.
When one of my cats decided a glowlight necklace looked nummy and started to foam at the mouth profusely from whatever it is they use in them, the emergency vet tech was my best friend.
