1. We have finally seen a specialist about Edward’s anemia, and that specialist sent us to another specialist, and now Edward is going to have an endoscopy. I am somewhat worried, but not VERY worried. I am much less worried than I was about Elizabeth’s tonsillectomy, for several reasons: (a) I’ve been through a child-under-anesthesia experience once before, which helps take the edge off; (b) an endoscopy doesn’t involve any cutting/removal of anything; (c) the recovery is expected to be much, much, much easier than with a tonsillectomy (a day or two of resting and eating bland foods, as opposed to two weeks of crying and throwing up). I’m still anxious, though. And it didn’t help that the first specialist was in a part of the building called Cancer Care. (This is because pediatric hematologists are also pediatric oncologists, not because cancer is one of the leading theories at this point.)
2. Our 3-year-old male cat is or isn’t having a medical crisis. The vet thinks it’s a common liver issue, of the sort requiring lifelong treatment and medication. Or maybe he ate something that poisoned him, and he’ll be fine when it’s out of his system. Or maybe it’s something completely different. This is not our usual vet (our usual vet is on leave until later this month), and I hadn’t realized how much Trust Equity our usual vet has built with me until I tried to see another vet. I find myself suspicious and paranoid at every turn: “Does she know what she’s talking about? Is she making sensible decisions about treatment, or is she assuming we want the most expensive options unless we specifically ask? Why is she recommending a $350 test in that casual ‘We can do it or not, whatever’ manner, as if $350 is such a small amount of money we might want to spend it just for the heck of it? Why when I mentioned cost did she mention lines of credit, as if ‘ability to pay the bill’ is the only possible issue in deciding what to buy?”
And expensive animal care always makes me get uncomfortable flashes of charity ads mentioning that a child can be kept alive for $30/month. (It’s odd that, say, automotive care and large-appliance care don’t give me those same uncomfortable flashes. It must be the comparison of living thing to living thing.) So far we have spent on a cat in four days enough money to keep twenty children alive for a month. And yet, we’re going to continue spending money on this cat, and if we were not spending it on the cat we would not be sending it to children, so where does this leave us? With uncomfortable feelings, that’s where.
3. I am even more behind on Christmas preparations this year than usual. Usually I set up the dining room table with card-writing and gift-wrapping right after Thanksgiving before the dining-room-table clutter can re-assert itself, but this year I had to wait for the get-together at my house earlier this week. So yesterday I got everything out and got started, but I feel Late. I also realized we’re short on gifts for Henry.
I remember reading something from the post office awhile back that said that the greatest number of holiday cards are sent on December 14th, and the greatest number are delivered on December 17th. I like knowing that. But also, it makes me feel a little antsy on the 14th.
So I guess it’s time to write the holiday cards? As always this month is flying by! Hope Edward and the cat recover well.
I took my mom to her endoscopy years ago and I remember it being no big deal. They asked me if I wanted to watch (I do not know if this is normal or not, our neighbor was the doctor doing it- we didn’t know him well or anything but the fact that we were neighbors added a bit of familiarity to the whole thing.) I did watch and it was very interesting and the doctor offered me a soda while he was moving cameras up and down my mother’s digestive track.
I have the same feelings about animal care money. Our dog has jaw problems and we have to get her teeth cleaned reasonably often and it is so expensive and she’s a DOG.
I am so behind on Christmas everything. And so is everyone else. I’ve only gotten three cards so far and I bet I get a lot less this year than regular years. Thanksgiving being a week later than usual really threw me off.
“And yet, we’re going to continue spending money on this cat, and if we were not spending it on the cat we would not be sending it to children, so where does this leave us? With uncomfortable feelings, that’s where.”
Classic Swistle here: Noting the awkwardness and moral uncertainties with total honesty but not trying to tie it all together in a tidy bow. Plus humour.
Yours is one of my favourite blogs – thanks for writing in the midst of the Christmas busyness.
Elizabeth beat me to the punch, so, basically, I’ll just second what she said. I love it. “Where does that leave us? With uncomfortable feelings, that’s where.”
As a vet, I can tell you that I have a lot of uncomfortable feelings as well. It’s difficult with new clients to know WHAT to offer. Are you the type of owner that wants to sell off everything you own and go to the ends of the earth for your cat? Are you the type of owner that gets genuinely pissed off and angry that the vet would DARE suggest services that cost more than a fast food meal for something that’s “just a damn cat?” (Not that you said that, just that that is a fairly common occurrence.) Unfortunately, just an exam for a medical problem doesn’t often lead directly to an answer and the list of possibilities is annoyingly long. And our diagnostic capabilities are limited to whatever you can afford…which leads us to try to delicately figure out what YOU want us to do. Some people seem better at this than others, just like in human medicine. Just my two cents. :)
I have a lot of sympathy for vets in these situations, and this is (one of quite a few reasons) why I adore our current vet – when you first go there, you get an intake form that has questions about what your preferred level of treatment will be. I can’t remember the specifics, but it had a few separate questions, and asked about what your approach is towards serious illness/ injury (lots of intervention, moderate, or just the basics), which options you want to hear about, and it also incorporated (general) questions about financial limits on treatment. All the language was nonjudgmental, too.
Maybe our philosophy just meshes well with this vet, but it was really a wonderful way to start things. (To be fair, all of vets but one have been great at negotiating this, but she was bad enough to leave a lasting impression. We’ll put a fair bit of $$ into the cats, but it felt like she was always trying to upsell us – her suggestions made me feel like a mark at the carnival.)
I think that’s why I like my regular vet so much: she’s REALLY good at this. She’ll say, “Well, we could do A. That would cost about $6000, plus we’d have to reasonably anticipate another $500 or so in follow-ups. The second option is B; it would be more like $3000, though again you’d have to plan for the $500 in follow-ups; also, he would need to be an indoor cat from then on. The third option is that we could try C, which would be $1000 but if it fails it could easily lead us to A being our only option—and then you’re still out the $1000 PLUS the $6500.” Then in the case of the quite elderly cat we’d been discussing, she paused delicately and added that the fourth option was to euthanize him. She makes me feel like I really have CHOICES in his care—and that I know what those choices are and how much they cost and what the consequences will be.
I personally know a physician who does endoscpies – although not on kids – and am happy to ask any questions you may have about procedure or recovery etc.
My holiday cards – and we might as well call them Chrustmas cards this year, since Chanukah was already AGES ago – are sitting on my floor, awaiting a holiday letter and addressed envelopes. (I feel I MUST send a letter this year, since we sent one last year. Plus, we didn’t do birth announcements, so I want to use it to share the birth weight/height/time details that most people missed. But it is really just a letter about the baby. I certainly didn’t do anything besides grow and birth her.) anyway, I am trying to remember that I don’t care WHEN I get a holiday card, I just like getting it. So the same must be true of others. And I have only gotten six so far. So I think many people are behind.
I’ve had three endoscopies and have taken ~20 minutes to recover from and that was it (albeit I wasn’t a child, but I doubt it would be much different). I wasn’t sore or anything afterwards. Good luck and merry Christmas.
I keep thinking of you (card etiquette/scoring) & chewing my lip because I was late ordering my photo cards this year, and now their shipping has been delayed, so I’m not even sure I’ll get them in time to order beFORE Christmas, and I don’t want to lose my Swistle scoring points for them arriving AFTER Christmas. AIYEEEE! Alas, I will send them regardless because I already ordered & paid for the damn things. Sigh. Good thing I just wrote “Happy Holidays” on there. Phew.
Definitely send! And notice that although it’s a holiday card scoring list, I’ve used December 1st and 25th as the range, which…er, that’s kind of derpy and personal-holiday-revealing of me, so perhaps that whole category of points should go!
Hmmm. We’ve gotten very few Christmas cards this year and I’m considering not sending any (!). Thanksgiving was late, cutting the time available, so there’s that. Or I may just get some copies of DS’s school photos printed and tuck those in the old cards we have lying around from former years, rather than getting an actual card ordered because — hello! It’s 12/14.
I feel just the same way on spending money at the vet’s (though I have plenty such in my time, over the years) and am similarly unaffected by cars and appliances (though not, possibly, by vacation travel). And am empathetic to the points @Danell raises though was surprised when I took my dog in to discover he (likely) had an ear infection and need to be tranquilized and have the ear cleaned and evaluated and have the vet ask me if I wanted to do that (i.e. was willing to pay for it). As it seemed absolutely the best-case and least expensive possible outcomes for my dog’s behavior (staggering, vomiting) I couldn’t really imagine that I’d have brought the dog in at all if I weren’t willing to do at least that (for the record, it was a bad ear infection and took a long time to get cleared up. But so it goes, and clearly worth addressing). Sorry to hear your cat is unwell and hope you will have answers, and effective treatment, soon.
Also sorry to hear about Edward needing an endoscopy, but, hope it will lead to useful information.
I’ve had endoscopies and my son has had endoscopies and I’m happy to answer any questions or receive any stress venting. It’s pretty easy, even on the kiddos – the hardest part for my son (age 4 at the time) was putting on the hospital-issue jammies (“TOO ITCHY”) and then the nausea from the anesthesia when he woke up.
I’m sorry about kitty issues and Other Vet issues.
I’m not even doing xmas cards this year. We’re unemployed and overchildrened and there’s just no time or money. I feel LAME about it but I’m trying not to dwell.
I think I read somewhere that the 20th was the busiest day at the post office (look at that I just bought you 5 extra days). I don’t have my cards done either–but they are all addressed, just waiting on the other people in this house to do their parts.
Funny story, one year early in our marriage, we did the christmas card thing and had them ready to mail and were doing a bunch of other errands too and I had to many things to carry (he was driving) and so I stuck half the cards in the glove box, thinking I’d get them out when we got to the box. So then we ran errands, all was fine. THEN on Christmas day we were driving to a relatives house, and again I had too much stuff that had to be carried, (as opposed to sloshing wound in the trunk) and I opened the glove box and wham, 15 cards fell out. So yeah, we swung by the mail box on the the way out of town.
Thankfully we both laughed a lot. That’s probably why we are still married.
I had been wondering whether we got knocked off of people’s Christmas card lists this year, because as of today we have received, like, four. Your post made me feel better that maybe people are just doing them later, or that this isn’t even “later” and it’s just not Card Time yet. Anyway, I put most of mine in the mail on Sat so I guess I am right on trend.
If an endoscopy is anything like a bronchoscopy, the recovery shouldn’t be bad. My son had a bronchoscopy at 6 months old…the hardest part for him was the fasting. :( I hope Edward’s recovery goes smoothly!
I’m wondering about pets in the US – considering expensive / controversial healthcare issues for humans in the US… We have pet insurance over here (UK) where you spend about a fiver a month and then almost all vets bills are covered – it’s only weird things like teeth that for some reason you have to pay for. The older the pet the more expensive they are – but it’s still better than being hit with a massive vet bills. Can you get that in the States?