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There are seven doctors in our practice, which means that in addition to explaining surgery-consent forms and the difference between each of the dangerous vectors that can bite and infect a dog and the products we carry to protect them, I have to be a personal assistant to one dude who likes his messages time-stamped and dated and listed in order of importance and a woman who prefers to be tracked down and delivered her messages by hand. PLUS FIVE OTHER PEOPLE. I just interviewed a young woman who responded to the blunt and very direct ad I posted to find more front desk help, and during the meeting I was like, “Listen, I like you very much, so I’ma be straight with you. Can you: spread a payment across three credit cards without forgetting how much goes on which one, remember which cat in the waiting room is vomiting and which one is here to get subcutaneous fluids, find that list of files the technicians asked you to pull half an hour ago and get them pulled, and send the refills Ms. Bruggeman called in to the pharmacy? All at the same time? Without coffee because no one told Lori we were out and the delivery isn’t coming until tomorrow? Because that’s what this job is.”
To have a child, you have to at the very least find someone to make it with you. I mean, doesn’t that constitute some sort of unofficial screening process? Whenever I see someone dragging along a snot-nosed little tax deduction I think, “Someone liked that guy enough to let him pollinate her flower. He must be cool.” (No, I don’t. I really think, “I bet he only got fourteen minutes of sleep last night, thank the Lord I can’t get pregnant.”) Or at least you have to get someone to sell you a bag of sperm, and that takes enough money to pay for it, and you probably have to fill out a bunch of paperwork and forms and background checks, too.
But you don’t have to do anything to prove you’re worth a pet, and that makes our job totally ridiculous 82 percent of the time. Any old asshole can pick up a cat in the street or walk into a pet store and buy a sad puppy-mill puppy. And as soon as they do they call us, asking the kinds of questions that are often baffling to me. Now, I’m not going to get up on a soapbox, because it probably couldn’t support my weight, not to mention I am most certainly not the kind of person who does research before making a decision or a purchase. Everything I buy is an impulse purchase, be it a new flavor of sparkling water or a thousand-dollar computer. I get my clothes off the Internet, for fuck’s sake: I am not risk-averse. But yo, I wouldn’t get a goldfish without at least asking the kid at PetSmart what kind of tank I had to buy for it and how much the food was going to cost and whether I had to find a doctor to take care of it. Not everyone is as lucky as I am to have seen the horrors of pet ownership up close and personal for a decade, but every day there’s a situation that makes me drop all pretense of professionalism and hit some client with a “Bro, for real?!”
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A couple of years ago we had a cat come in that had been run through a heat cycle in a dryer. Please read that sentence again. Read it again, and imagine the type of person who would allow such a thing to happen. Can you picture it? Are you there yet? Perfecto. Now imagine answering his phone call as he described the practical joke that had gone wrong, and the feeling in my stomach while listening to him try to explain what happened, then multiply that feeling by fourteen years, and maybe you now have some insight into why my outlook is so dreary sometimes. We are exposed to human beings of the lowest common denominator, all day every day, and this is a multimillion-dollar, incredibly busy practice in the suburbs. It costs sixty-plus dollars just to walk in the door.
Once I sat, horrified, as a woman in our waiting room licked a kitten to “clean it” because she “wanted it to feel like it was back with its mother.” Another time I watched a woman with long lacquered nails and an expensive-looking boob job eat a dog treat to “see what it tasted like to her dog.” You know, because human and canine taste buds are so similar; it’s why I have a bowl of Purina One every morning in lieu of traditional oatmeal. And that was shortly after a different birdbrain drank a little bit of her dog’s diarrhea medication while Laura ran her credit card “just to see if it worked.” Listen, I put a lot of dumb shit in my mouth, but at least I have the decency to do it where no one can see me, like the time I smashed some sour-cream-and-onion potato chips on half an old cheeseburger I found in the backseat of my car and wolfed it down behind a nightclub.
I have seen people pay thousands of dollars for chemotherapy and rehabilitation and get acupuncture for their dogs and psychiatrists for their cats. I would have never understood the logic in that before but now I get it. My first week was straight-up shocking. I had no idea that people paid to have their dogs’ teeth cleaned! How would you even do that? Coax her into the chair, get her to lie back, strap the goggles on her then hang a Milk-Bone over her face so she holds her mouth open so you can get those molars clean?! (Now I know that you put a dog under general anesthesia and take a digital X-ray of its head and Alyssa scales its good teeth while the surgeon on duty that day pulls out the bad ones, and the first time I ever stood next to the dental sink watching it go down I nearly passed out.) Ultrasounds, neurology, dermatology, ophthalmology, radiation, cardiology, oncology? Man, who knew?! When I was a baby we had two dogs, one of whom remained chained to the garage due to bloodlust and unpredictability, while the other stayed inside with us and guarded my crib. I would fall over dead right now if you told me that either of those goofs had even had shots, let alone that my father had ever put one in his nice car to drive out to Buffalo Grove to get thousands of dollars’ worth of chemotherapy. I don’t even think the outside dog got dog food, just milk and scraps of raw meat. (Which, with my current level of companion-animal expertise, I would gently discourage my dad from feeding him.)
Things I’ve learned at my last job that might come in handy in a very specific set of circumstances at a new one:
? Don’t give your dog Advil if you suspect he has a fever, and please refrain from giving him Imodium if he has a little diarrhea. Especially if he has diarrhea because you thought he should have some of your burrito. Call your vet.
? And, while we’re at it, stop diagnosing your pets at home. Take them to the doctor. Unless you have a DVM license, in which case I’d like to see it.