For I Am Costanza, Lord of the Idiots

Today’s lament is that of the world’s best kitty cat, who would be mine. If you have a cat, you might think yours is the world’s best, and I would agree with you if you were correct, but sadly for you, you are not. This is a story she might tell you, if she could type. Or drive. Okay, she would never tell you this story. She would leave the room as soon as she became aware of your presence. In any case, the world’s best kitty cat, who I’ll just call Cat because you don’t need to know her real name, is fifteen years old, which is roughly equivalent to 75 human years. For the first 13 years of her life, she had an excellent veterinarian, whom she hated with a deep abiding passion. I will call him Dr. Young. That’s not his name, but it rhymes with his name. (His name is not “dung.”) (Or “bung.”) (Or “hung.”) (Actually, just forget about the rhyming business; it’s distracting.) Although Cat hated him, I was very fond of him because every time he saw her for her annual exam, he was gentle with her but thorough, he kept her in excellent health, he didn’t try to upsell us on products or procedures or tests, and on the two occasions when she needed to see him for illness, he and his staff took the time to talk with me on the phone before and after the visit, following up on how she was doing. You would think this is standard in veterinary care — and it should be; unfortunately, it isn’t.

(After reading over the first few paragraphs of this post again, I feel I should say that Cat does not die at the end of this story. It kind of sounds like that’s where I’m going with this, but she’s fine. At this very moment, she’s in the kitchen eating turkey.)

For the last few years, the area around Dr. Young’s office has been undergoing a lot of commercial development. Although he presumably could have sold the building that housed his practice at a hefty profit, he didn’t. He continued to see his patients in the same spot he always had, as newer, taller buildings crowded in around him. Two years ago, he retired, and instead of doing the expected thing and selling the building separately and then the practice itself to a younger vet just starting out, he sold everything to someone he’d gone to vet school with. In the 1960s. Hrm. My immediate thought was, “if this dude went to vet school 40 years ago, shouldn’t he have a job already?” I don’t know what Dr. Young’s reasoning was; perhaps he wanted to help out an old friend or maybe he just wanted the practice to continue on as it had, but in any case surely he would not have entrusted his patients to someone who was No Good. After all, the couple of times when Cat had seen someone filling in for Dr. Young over vacation, they were also wonderful; thus, when it was time for Cat’s annual exam in 2007, I took her to see Dr. Young’s successor, who I will call Dr. Old. No reason. I wasn’t thrilled with Dr. Old’s exam. There were little things that seemed off to me, but the main thing was that he didn’t show Cat any affection. I don’t expect vets to gush over their patients, but he seemed completely indifferent. I mean, Cat hates all strangers and especially all vets on general principle so it made no difference to her, but if someone who has presumably centered his life around animal welfare can’t even muster up a single head skritch for the world’s best kitty cat? That is not right.

Still, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I am aware that I always expect more out of people than … I was going to say I expect more than I should, but that’s not true. I expect exactly as much out of people as is appropriate AND IT’S NOT MY FAULT IF PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS SO DAMNED DISAPPOINTING.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I tried to rationalize the ooky feeling I was getting from Dr. Old by telling myself that (a) no one was going to seem as good as Dr. Young, and (b) Dr. Young is the one responsible for Dr. Old being there in the first place, so Dr. Old must be a good vet. If I had also told myself that (c) no good ever comes of giving someone the benefit of the doubt, then further unpleasantness could have been avoided.

I took her in to see Dr. Old again for her 2008 exam. There were no other animals in the waiting room. There were no sounds of animals coming from the examining rooms. There was one assistant at the desk instead of the normal two or three. During Cat’s exam, I had to prompt Dr. Old to look at certain things. “How are her ears?” I would ask, or “Do her teeth look okay?” Dr. Young always used to palpate her abdomen looking for growths, but I didn’t know how to ask about that. “How are her internal organs? Tumor-free today?” The thing about her teeth was that although she has had them cleaned every three years, the last time I saw Dr. Young, when she was 12 years old, he said she was getting a little too old to undergo the necessary anesthesia, so he recommended against doing it again unless she developed gum disease. But Dr. Old, noting a bit of tartar, leapt upon the idea. “She should have a cleaning! Right away! Let’s schedule it! Receptionist! Bring the book!” I asked him about potential complications from the anesthesia, which he brushed off with a “well, I haven’t lost one yet, knock on wood.” At that point, I just wanted to wrestle Cat back into her carrier and get her home as quickly as possible so she could begin the 36-hour post-veterinary period of being Put Out With Me For Taking Her To The Barking Dog Place When I Know She Does Not Care For That. The path of least resistance was to make the appointment and cancel it later, which is exactly what I did.

For a month after her checkup, Cat spent several hours every morning hiding under the bed. Normally after a vet visit, she’ll hide for a day or two until she’s sure I’m not going to be taking her anywhere, but never has it gone on for a month. I have to assume that when they took her in the other room for a blood draw, they hurt her in some way, and whether it was on purpose or due to general ineptitude makes little difference to me. She would not be going back there again. Later, I was talking to a neighbor who told me she used to take her dog to the same clinic. Like me, she loved Dr. Young and had a bad yet non-specific feeling after one visit with Dr. Old, and thus took her dog to a new place, which she liked a lot and where I plan to take Cat for her next checkup in August.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a vet clinic I was unfamiliar with. The receptionist told me that Dr. Old had closed his practice and had sent all of the patient files to their office. Well, this is certainly a professional way of informing me of the fact. She furthermore wanted me to know that Cat’s first checkup with them would be free. Uh huh. As you all know, I am frugal to a purse-clutching fault, but there are certain things I do not skimp on and one of them is how much I will pay to a person who might stick a thermometer up my cat’s butt. That is not a time to bargain-hunt.

I know that when I take Cat to the new vet that my neighbor recommended, they can get her file from the Discount Vet, but I started to worry about what would happen in the meantime if there were an emergency, so yesterday I went to Discount Vet’s office to get the file. It was seriously a disturbing experience. In the first place, it was in one of the most rundown parts of town, surrounded by tire stores, payday loan outlets, and boarded-up buildings. Second, when I got out of my car outside the clinic, it smelled like unwashed dog. And that was just outside; inside, the smell was so bad I could barely breathe. It was dark and everything looked old and grimy. I could hear a cat in the examining room not just yowling, but also hissing. Someone who works there had brought a little girl in and parked her next to the reception desk so she could stare at all the clients like some creepy child of the corn. I asked the receptionist for the file, she said, “no problem!” and got up to get it. I could see her in the hallway talking to one of the vets (I assume), and they kept turning and peering at me in an unsettling way, as if attempting to determine if I would fit in the trunk of a car. She brought back the file, took the contents out and started to copy it on a desktop copier. I asked if I couldn’t just have the file since my cat had never been seen there, and she said they were “required by law” to keep it and could only turn it over to another vet. That sounded like it might be true, and I had no information to refute it, so I didn’t argue the point. I watched her making the copies on the cluttered little section of desk. She kept setting the originals and the copies down on other piles of paper and I couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t getting it mixed up with other files. Finally, she handed me a random stack of paper and asked if I wanted it stapled. I said no, but would she mind if I put the original file back together just be sure I had everything? Again, “no problem!” and she handed everything over.

I took a seat in the waiting area and found that she had mixed up the copies and the originals and had also given me warranty information for a coffee maker. I spent about twenty minutes making an honest attempt to make sense of the mess she had made but having little success, then there was a sudden glut of people and the most pathetic parade of animals you would ever want to see coming in. Sad-faced pit bulls, scrawny cats, and then a tiny puppy wrapped in a blanket, eyes not open yet, obviously taken from its mother far too soon. Between the complete clusterfuck she had made of my cat’s medical records, the fetid smell, and the pitiful dogs and cats, I kind of lost it. As soon as the receptionist got up and went to the back, I did something completely ridiculous. I made a break for it.

I threw all the papers into the file folder, pushed my way between Mullet Woman and Gold Tooth Man and made my way briskly out the door, fishing around in my purse for my car keys at the same time. Had I not been alone, I would have been just like that women in the IKEA commercial, run-walking to the parking lot, screaming, “START THE CAR! START THE CAR!” In my case, there was no screaming, although there was one second of contemplation regarding how I had NO TIME to put on my seatbelt, followed by squealing tires on pavement.

About three blocks later, I said to myself, “um … Nitwit? Are you done being, you know, so stupid?”

I turned the car around, reparked outside the clinic, walked back in to find everyone staring at me, said to the receptionist, “yes, I am going to need to borrow your two-hole punch, if you don’t mind.” She gave me the two-hole punch and some tape, I retook my seat, and spent the next hour sorting out the mess she had made of 15 years of medical records. As it turns out, a few of the pages were still sitting on the copier, so it’s probably a good thing I went back, and not just because my name and address were on those pages.

Before leaving, I asked her if she knew why Dr. Old had closed his practice, and she told me it had gone bankrupt. She said she had heard he was now breeding animals for sale, and I could tell she thought that was as bad an idea as I thought it was. She quietly said that if I needed anything else just to call and she would be happy to assist. She seemed like a nice woman. I feel bad about almost robbing her. Driving home, I could only think about Dr. Young and all of his great assistants and techs who had been so kind to me and Cat and, many years before, to my parents and their cat, who I’ll also call Cat because you don’t need to know. It makes me sad and a little angry that they did a lot of good work for 40 years, building up trust and goodwill with their clients, and in less than two years, it all got shot to hell. On the way home, I went past the building where the practice used to be. A For Sale sign is nailed up over the door.