Vets Vets Vets

Welp, I took my cat Chester to the vet again today – third time now. If you don’t know chester, he’s an 8 year old ginger family cat (who actually belongs to me). He is pretty much one of the best dudes that ever lived. These days he’s going through a bit of a ‘rough patch’.  Always out, never answers my calls, picking on his litter sister, and now... fighting. He keeps getting beat up too. I wonder when he will actually get sick of being pulverised and be too scared to venture out. He has too much pride I guess. 

Anyway this time it was a cat bite to the face. It got all swollen and infected and looked like a golf ball was stuck in his throat, but over to the left side. Luckily he popped it today himself and they didn’t have to ‘lance’ it. (Note: Lance is a weird name for a person. Other funny verb names: Pirouette, Strum, Gulp, Scream, Swallow.)

I opened the door this morning to find Cheds vomiting on the driveway. It looked like spit/bile so I did the whole call the boss thing, then had to wait an hour before the vet opened so I could get an appointment. The original appointment was around lunch time, but of course I couldn’t find Chester anywhere, even walking around the street shaking a box of cat food half an hour before the vet appointment. I freaked out a tiny bit thinking he’d gone off to die somewhere warm and quiet. Josh was asleep in the middle of a split shift and I woke him up to have a bit of a moment. The search went on for a few hours in preparation for the re-scheduled appointment. At one point my housemate found a pile of cat vomit a few houses away (half-digested little sponges in the shape of fish and circles) so I thought it was a sign he was around. Presuming it was his, which I did but didn’t want to believe it because I pictured him gagging all the way down the street.

Anyway the vet was a young guy called Dennis. I reckon he puts on this authoritative air, but he would only be max 27. Maybe he has to put one on because he’s so young and needs to create the respect and trust in his abilities. There didn’t seem to be much of an age gap, but we were worlds apart. I also do this- act more responsible to others than I really am. I can see myself one day rebelling against societal pressures and living out in the forest just finger painting all day. Just a matter of time. Anyway, Dennis was nice-looking but looked like he hasn’t had a super fun life, maybe he has the kind of parents who ...  well, who would call their son a past-generational name like Dennis, thus extinguishing any chance of him becoming a party king or at very least a ladie’s man. (This does not apply to Dennis from Always Sunny).

Maybe Dennis is one of those guys who goes to parties with his friends who he might only see every few weeks and is slowly drifting apart from because he works so much. At the parties he is the quiet one, who doesn’t drink too much and is pretty reserved and drives home early, just as everyone is tipping over the edge into drunkenness. He slips out and people barely remember he was there. God I hope I’m imagining wrong about Dennis. He was good at the job but not so personable, I tried to get a little banter going but he wasn’t interested. Maybe I’m just a repulsive person? (‘Aha moment’ right there!)

So this Dennis, he also had a braces lisp, the one that sounds like it’s at the back of your teeth. He may have been wearing a plate even. He had so many teeth in his mouth, kinda like the guy from Glee (Kevin McHale). Is it weird that I didn’t even have to Google his name, I just knew it? Possi-proba-maybe. He also had bags under his eyes- they looked almost like bruises –all purple and pink- under his thin pale skin. I wonder how much sleep he gets, or if he’s into the pet medicine supply? I wonder if he could tell from the scar tissue/scab on the bite that I had left this go for a few days and that’s why he was being not so jovial – because he could tell I’m not the best at putting my cat’s needs first? 

Well I was actually trying to hold off until the weekend to get to the vet because 1) pay day is tomorrow and vets are expensive and 2) because my boss decreed that from now on you couldn’t take a sick day unless you had a certificate. This naturally put me off a bit because I took one last week without going to the doctor and an email was sent the very next day to all staff with the new law of the land (which I have a feeling isn’t even legally valid).

Maybe when I called my boss in the morning of the sick day and he invasively asked me what was wrong I shouldn’t have given him a strange answer like “Well...I just don’t feel up to it today”. What else would I say? Perhaps I should have gone into detail about periods or diarrhoea or something. Maybe that’s what he was after all along? His reply was “Not...up to it. (pause) Seeya!” and hung up on me. I guess he’s a busy guy. Maybe he was boiling eggs for breakfast and realised at that moment they had been on for exactly 3 minutes and he had to run off immediately to catch them before they turned rubbery. What he probably meant to say was “I understand, thanks for calling me. Hopefully I’ll see you at work tomorrow because I value you not only as an employee, but as a person too.” Yeah, I’ll keep telling myself that.

Back to the vet. It all went well although Dennis kind of walked out on me. There were 2 doors in the room, one to the waiting room and one to the secret back vet corridor, and he said thanks and then went in the secret corridor. I presumed  we were done and that I should let myself out. I’m used to doctors and vets standing up and opening doors for you etc. A hang-up and a walk-out in 7 days. Wow, I really must be an arsehole of a person, guess I must have deserved it though. Ha! :)