Cat Woes

This evening I got home from doing some work and noticed that my cat had become distressed. As I tried to figure out what he could have eaten that was making him sick, I discovered a corner of a door jamb that he had gnawed off. Chunks of plaster on the floor, insulation tufting out. So I took him to the late nite emergency vet and after almost four hours and $248 he is more or less back to his old self, though I'm supposed to keep getting his lead levels checked throughout the week. Also, alarmingly, he keeps returning to the now cleaned and blocked off scene of the crime.

I hate going to the vet. It just seems like such a rip off. It's not that I begrudge paying for actual care, but the only thing they actually did for Kitcat was to give him some subcutaneous fluid to rehydrate him; but it was $95 for the "exam" and what that basically consisted of was a $75 call to poison control, who, of course, didn't really know anything and just advised taking lots of expensive precautions. I shudder to think what tomorrow will cost--and, of course, I'm still also worried that Kitcat is not as much improved as he seems.

The vet trip was particularly stressful because the waiting room was occupied the whole time by a young couple who had just moved to Seattle and whose dog had also had an unwholesome snack of some kind. The woman spent hours on the phone begging her father to co-sign a loan to cover the several thousand dollar surgery that the vet was waiting for approval to start performing. She was weeping and incoherent; her boyfriend looked more and more miserable every time she forgot what she was asking for and said "we'll pay you back." I could kind of feel for the father too--she kept saying "we'll have jobs," and $4,000 is a lot to spend if your job is in the future tense--but the situation was pretty awful.