A Blog of the Ridiculous and Sublime, by Mark Sackler
“Life is wasted on the living.”–Douglas Adams
If anybody is counting, I’m pretty sure Mr. Adams has had more quotes in this series than anybody else. He should probably have his own series. Let’s hope this isn’t wasted on the late author: today is the 40th anniversary of the publishing of The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy. Happy Birthday, Arthur Dent! I bet you can’t wait until he turns 42.
“Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.”–Jeff Valdez
Jeff Valdez obviously doesn’t know our dogs. We can hardly get them to go outside to do their business when it snows. Pull a sled? Hah! We used to have a nasty little Spitz named Miles. The Spitz is also sometimes known as The American Eskimo Dog. Miles was having none of it. We literally had to pick him up and throw him outside when it snowed. Dogs are smarter than you think.
“There is no blue without yellow and without orange.”–Vincent Van Gogh
“All’s well that ends well.”–William Shakespeare
The bard was right. Van Gogh was…um..uh–I have no idea.
But here is a story that ended well, though with an unexpected twist that makes it one of my all time favorite veterinary vignettes.
This happened some 30 years ago, when Cheryl was working her last job as an employee before starting her own clinic. Her partner in crime in this particular case was the junior associate in the group, one Susan Cole, a pretty and vivacious young blond just a few months out veterinary school.
It started one typical Monday morning, when in came a panicked old lady, Mrs. P, with a pearly white cat.
The cat was struggling to breath.
Mrs. P: “Save my kitty!!!”
Dr. C: “When did this start?”
Mrs. P: “Save my kitty!!”
Cat: “[cough] [choke] [wheeze]”
Dr. C: “How did this start?”
Mrs P: “Puhleeeaaase save my kitty!!”
Cat: “[gasp] [gasp]”
It was obvious that Mrs. P was not going to be any help. Enter my intrepid Cheryl to consult.
“This seems to be some sort of respiratory distress, we’d better take an X-Ray.” She advised.
Dr. Cole thought otherwise, and suggested drawing a blood sample first. Cheryl was skeptical, but realized it couldn’t hurt, so that’s what they did.
The cat’s blood was brown. Freaking brown.
The two of them scratched their heads in puzzlement. What could turn a cat’s blood brown? Cheryl observed that if they saw this in a cow they would diagnose it as methemoglobinemia, a condition that bovines get from eating cherry leaves. You guessed it, cherry leaves are toxic to cows. But cats? How would this indoor feline even have access to cherry leaves, whether or not they are toxic to cats?
At any rate, regardless of the cause, the diagnosis was confirmed. But, then, how to treat it?
“Well” Cheryl posited,”we use methylene blue to treat this in cows. Let’s try it.”
Methylene blue is a dye that also has some medicinal purposes. But the cat’s wheezing and gasping for breath was rapidly worsening, so Sue and Cheryl frantically calculated the appropriate dosing. Let’s see. Bovine dose, 60cc. Feline dose…hmm…. 6cc.
They administered 6cc of methylene blue, and by golly, that cat rapidly improved and its blood and breathing were back to normal in no time.
End of story? You know me better than that–there’s a little kicker. Of course there is, there always is. You see, there was a slight miscalculation in the dosage. The feline dose should not have been 6 cc, it should have been 0.6cc. But hey, what’s a silly little order of magnitude among friends. After all, the cat got better.
It’s just that the pearly white cat turned….BLUE!! Its skin, its gums, its sclera, its paws. Everything but its fur turned a bright shade of blue!
And that, of course, is still not the end of the story. The denouement came the next morning, when Mrs. P. phoned to find out the condition of her kitty.
Dr. Cole took the call, and she answered with a straight face, within ear shot of just about every employee in the clinic.
“Oh, she’s doing much better, but she’s feeling a little blue right now!”
Crash! Bang! Thud! All over the hospital employees dropped whatever they were holding as peals of laughter erupted. They say that in comedy, timing is everything. I guess that goes for veterinary medicine, too.
Anyway, the cat’s normal color soon returned, and it turned out that Mrs. P had given it Tylenol. Tylenol, you may surmise, is toxic to cats. So don’t give your cat Tylenol. This goes doubly if you have a yellow cat, as the antidote could turn the poor thing an ungodly shade of green.
Is there a moral to this story? Yes. The next time you are feeling blue, be thankful it is only a metaphorical, and not a literal, blue.
If you are feeling blue, try my other blog, Seeking Delphi.™ That will really get you down. 😛
“The trouble with a kitten is that it eventually becomes a cat.”–Ogden Nash
Pet doors are a wonderful thing. They allow your pets the joy of repeatedly going in and out without having to constantly bug you to accommodate them.
Pet doors are an awful thing. They allow all manner of unwanted vermin to come in (mostly) and out along with your pets. Or in many cases, to be dragged in by your pets. Here are some examples.
Awful thing example #1: While you expect cats and dogs to freely use the pet door, you don’t really think a pet chicken would use the pet door. Think again. We had one that did, and it not only came in the house quite unexpectedly, but it joined Cheryl in the shower. That’s a horror story even Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have imagined. Eat your heart out, Norman Bates.
Awful thing example #2: While our cats have frequently brought dead mice or chipmunks into the house and disemboweled them in the dining room (ick!), that is not the worst of it. They bring live ones in and let them go. The most notable example? We had a living room full of guests for a tea for a local political candidate. Just as the proceedings were about to begin, our cat, Velcro, dropped a live mouse by the side of a rather full couch. The critter ran across the feet of about three people and hid under the coffee table as everyone scattered. Cheryl caught it as the cat looked on with amusement. The dogs were worthless.
Awful thing example #3: While we are on the subject of the cat sitting back and watching in amusement as we and the dogs chased a live rodent, I present you with the case of the chipmunk in the laundry room. Did you ever watch one of those Donald Duck cartoons where he tries to catch Chip and Dale? Where he winds up destroying his house, his R.V., his camp site, or whatever? It felt like we were in a Donald Duck cartoon. The chipmunk was behind the washing machine. The dogs went nuts; but the chip was gone by the time we pulled the washing machine out from the wall. By then, the chip was behind a pile of laundry. Then it was in the pile of laundry. Then it was behind the drier. Then it was under the washing machine. The dogs were always one hiding place behind it. Cheryl finally caught the thing–I swear she must have been a cat in a previous lifetime. And our laundry room? It looked like Donald Duck’s living room after a few minutes of chasing Chip and Dale.
Awful thing example #4: This one takes the cake. Cheryl and I were sitting in our home office late one evening, clicking away at our computers. Why, it was the very room I am sitting in as I write this tale. I glanced in back of me. Our three dogs were all lying there contented to be in the same room with us. And sitting right in the middle of them was what I, for a split second, took to be a rather large stuffed animal doggy toy. For a split second. But it wasn’t a toy. Good grief, it was a live possum, apparently playing possum! We have no idea how it could have gotten in there without the dogs going nuts. We can only guess that the one dog large enough to drag it in, must have done so. Cheryl picked it up by the tail, dropped it outside the front door, and it sprung to life and dashed off.
Which finally brings us to Awful thing example #5: There is a rodent in this office, right now, as I write this post. I saw it dash off the top of my desk and hide behind the file cabinet just as I walked in. The fleeting glance I got of it was too brief to tell if it was a mouse or a chipmunk. But it has eluded me. Don’t worry though, Cheryl will be home from the clinic with the dogs (they go to work with her every day.) The dogs will, of course be useless, and the cat will sit back and watch in amusement as Cheryl, as always, catches the thing.
Oh, and this one didn’t happen to us, but Awful thing example#6, below, illustrates the further dangers of pet doors in the wild. Stay safe, my friends.
Be sure to check out my new (second) blog, Seeking Delphi.
“I got a big mouth.”–Floyd Mayweather, Jr.
Note: This material is rated PG-13. My wife should have realized that before she retold this story to a bunch of Catholic middle-schoolers at a career night. Have you heard the phrase “he (or she) has a mouth that could make a sailor blush?” Cheryl could make Larry Flint blush.
It was the late night for office hours at the clinic–a Thursday to be specific. It was a few minutes before 8 PM closing, and the doctor undoubtedly was tired and ready to go home. But she had just come back from a seminar that focused on bonding new customers to the practice, and wouldn’t you know it, the last appointment of the day was a newbie.
The woman was in her mid 20’s or so, and the kitty she had just adopted was her first pet ever. Despite the fatigue of a long day, Cheryl was determined to execute a perfect “bonding” experience. She launched in her “new kitten” spiel, and all was going well for the first few minutes. But then the office manager stuck her head in the exam room and interrupted.
“Pat D. is on the phone, Cheryl,” she reported matter-of-factly, “he wants to know if he can bring his dog in for a semen sample.”
“What? You’re kidding me. The lab has already picked up today and I am out of gas. Tell him to bring the dog in tomorrow morning.”
So much for that, or so she thought, and immediately pushed the “kitten spiel” button and resumed the pitch.
But something had changed. The customer seemed distracted, even a bit perturbed.
“How do you do that?” The young woman asked, two minutes into the resumed talk.
“Huh, do what?”
“How do you get a semen sample from a dog.”
Cheryl is never one to mince words or be diplomatically indirect under any circumstances. At 8 PM after a 12 hour day of appointments, this was certainly not going to be an exception. Making the appropriate gesture, she curtly replied, “hand job!”
Thinking that would be the last of it, she forgot about it and resumed the kitten spiel. But the woman was still not paying attention, and two minutes later interrupted Cheryl again.
This really is how it’s done.
“C’mon how do you really do it?’
“Huh, do what?”
“How do you really get a semen sample from a dog?’
“Well,” she replied impatiently, “really, you get a cup and you stimulate the dog manually and, well, I can show it to you in a text book if you want.”
The woman frowned and Cheryl resumed the kitten talk, but it was readily apparent that the client was still not satisfied with the answer. In fact, she appeared downright angry. Within a couple of minutes, she abruptly changed the topic for a third and most emphatic time.
“You’re just goofing on me,” and by now she was almost yelling, “HOW DO YOU REALLY GET A SEMEN SAMPLE FROM A DOG?”
Cheryl had had enough.
“Look at it this way lady, I’m not gonna give him a blow job!”
That ended that. Permanently. She never saw that customer again, and to this day she reckons it was worth sacrificing one client just to have the story.
Oh, and she really did tell that story at a Catholic middle school career night. The students loved it; the nuns were horrified. She never got asked back, and I’m guessing she thinks that was worth it as well.
If you enjoyed this story, just wait for the next Tales of a Veterinary Spouse, which will deal with extracting semen from a rather larger species.
Cheers.
On twitter @MarkSackler
“Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.”–Robert Benchley
We have a house full of animals. At the present we have a very manageable three dogs, two horses and one cat. OK, the horses are in the back yard, not the house. You get the picture. In the past we have had chickens, guinea hens, turkeys (both wild and domestic), rabbits, hedgehogs a rooster and a donkey. I had to put my foot down regarding the latter two. I work from a home office. The noises coming from our backyard wrecked havoc while I was on the phone making business calls. It sounded like I was selling farm supplies out of a silo in Iowa.
OK, I knew there would be animals in my household. I signed on for that. But Cheryl doesn’t just collect animals. She collects other veterinarians. They come here; they live with us. They stay for a few days, weeks, months, or in a couple of notable cases, years. They come from all over the world: from Venezuela…Columbia…Chile…Afghanistan…Turkey…The Philippines…all over. If there were Martian veterinarians we would have housed one by now. Just for variety, we also had a law student from Beijing. Never mind how or why they have landed in our hacienda; I could write an entire book on the characters that have lived with us. But today, let’s talk about just one. Dr. Gibson Fernandez.
Ah, Gibson. He hails from Maracaibo, Venezuela where he is a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Zulia. He did an internship at my wife’s veterinary hospital back in the late 1990’s and has been spending the month of August with us every year since. He just happens to be be one of the most personable and likeable people you have ever met. I swear, he has more friends in Connecticut, just from his one month a year, than we do living here our whole lives. The phone starts ringing days before he arrives. “When is Gibson coming?” “Is Gibson there yet?” “Can Gibson come out and play?”
Gibson is smart, funny, affable and a loyal friend. Everybody loves Gibson. It seems he has but one small failing.
His English sucks. Even after fifteen years of visits and an ESL course, he still never fails to leave us in hysterics with his lingual gaffs. You think Desi Arnaz sounded funny? You ain’t heard nothing yet. On his most recent visit the three of us were in the car when we crossed over one of Connecticut’s major rivers, the Housatonic.
“Isn’t that the Titanic?” Gibson queried.
El Doctor Gibson.
We almost drove off the road laughing. Here are three of his best gems from years gone by.
Scene #1: A warm summer’s day. Gibson comes in from the yard and proudly states, “I killed all of the Wops under the deck.”
We are presently paying the Irish mafia to protect him from the Italian mafia
Scene #2: A balmy summer’s eve. We are eating dinner out on the now Wop-free deck. Gibson licks his lips as he devours the barbecue chicken I have just finished grilling and proclaims, “Mark is a good cock!”
NOOOOOOOOOOOO!! Gibson!! That’s not a complement. Well at least, not coming from you.
Scene #3: A typical day at my wife’s office. Or rather, a typical Gibson visit day. But as he and Cheryl are working up a case, the groomer is having a hard time in the next room with a rather hissy cat.
“Bad pussy! Bad pussy.” The groomer scolds the feline. Cheryl and Gibson hear this and Cheryl ignores it. But Gibson immediately goes next door, picks up the cat, and begins examining its genitals.
“What are you doing?” Cheryl asks.
“Well,” Gibson says quite seriously, “Donna said it has a bad pussy!”
It’s OK. We still love Gibson. We love him the way Lucy loved Desi, bad English and all.
I'm not the most interesting man in the world, but I might have the most cluttered mind.
The Millennium Conjectures™ 