Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend...

“Ingratitude is treason to mankind.” James Thomson


Tuesday 26 April 2011

Maybe I should try rubbing it on my face.

So go on and call me a bore but I just came home from another vet appointment. Stuff was achieved - steroid injection, antibiotics, er, rectal exam (sorry dog) - and before I left I asked about the eye infection which wasn't yet completely cleared up.

(If I'm honest, I was trying to squeeze some extra value out of the, what, fourth? appointment in six weeks, cause in my mind's eye, I could see myself rocking up there in a couple of days to deal with the eye thing again. Even the lovely man, who doesn't have a stingy bone in his body, said after the last appointment "Every time I leave that place I feel like I've been mugged." I wouldn't like to sound disrespectful/inappropriate/cheap - delete as appropriate - but we have poured an awful lot of money down this particular hole and still we have a speculative non-diagnosis, a rubbish speculative prognosis and thus a probably-dying dog, so it's not the expenditure I mind as much as the fact that we don't seem to have anything to show for it. Not that I'm bitter, etc.)

Anyways, the vet does this test which involve sticking what look like strips of paper in her eyes for exactly a minute each, which, you know, after a rectal exam brings to mind the words 'insult' and 'injury.'  Then he fetches a small box of ointment and tells me "it is very expensive, so you only need to use a tiny bit."

Now, hang on a minute pardner. This is an expensive corrective treatment for my imminently dying dog's eye which has had a little infection because it is not as moist as it should be? I mean, I will do anything for my dog, but having recently been given the news that she probably has an untreatable cancer - so untreatable that it is considered unnecessary to find a specific diagnosis - this eye ointment gave me pause for thought. Why be stingy? What am I saving it for? Why not just bung it all in there like we're havin' a party?

It turns out that you can just use ordinary moisturising eye drops. The kind that you can buy at Boots for £3. But he advised me that if I do that, I need to do it eight to ten times a day, and my dog diary is all full up what with the antibiotics, fresh food, cleaning (oh the cleaning), managing the effluvia, not to mention yay! vet visits! And worrying.

I bought the damn ointment. Cha-ching!

1 comment:

  1. well, a pet is a family member, and anyone who disagrees with this is either a heartless bastard or has never had a pet.

    having said that, my mom has a cat whom she loves a whole big bunch (thanks to me for not providing grandchildren) and when the cat almost poisoned herself to death, my mom put up with two useless and expensive vet visits and then decided she'd do everything she could at home and screw the thousands of potential dollars that were only potentially going to prove helpful. they wrapped her up in a towel and force fed her (that was fun!) and now she's perfectly healthy. some might have said my parents were being stingy but they hated the fact that it was money thrown away with precious little promise of return (of healthy cat).

    i think one must do what one feels right and that's that.

    keeping my fingers crossed for you.

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