Anyone with a beloved pet knows the dreaded feeling of taking the four-legged baby to the vet.
It’s an awful feeling. The anxiety, the fear of making a heart-wrenching decisions at the spur of the moment can be overwhelming.
It’s about as bad as it gets in the pet ownership world.
We know and understand that pets don’t live forever when we welcome them into our lives, but their adorable little faces and unconditional love kind of blurs that.
And if you’re lucky - like we have been - they live well past their prime.
That’s where things get uncomfortable, and that’s when some vets can get you.
Before you pick up the phone, it’s not every veterinarian, but some that will use that pain to get to the purse strings.
That’s wrong, and there needs to be regulations in place to protect the pet owner.
We have a 14-and-a-half year old dog, he’s old and he’s cranky. But we had a real scare last summer, and we rushed him into a 24-hour clinic.
Where we met a very nice vet tech and a nice veterinarian that were generally concerned for our pup.
We were there in the early morning, tried, freaked out and upset.
He had what appeared to be stroke-like symptoms.
Eyes rolling into the back of his head, no control over his limbs and no general control over anything really.
We’re not vets. I’m a writer and my partner is an engineer student. We don’t know anything about anything medical.
I’m too afraid to look up symptoms on WebMD for fear of believing I have cancer or meningitis.
So, our vet ordered up tests - nothing fancy, blood tests and a urine sample.
The bill? Just for the test and two nights in a kennel in the back room? $2,500 there about.
That wasn’t even to “fix” the dog, that was to see what his blood cells were doing.
$2,500 to achieve the same outcome. I can understand (not really) if that included a surgery and medication and a five hour doggy massage, but it didn’t.
Just blood tests. If you look on the Alberta Health Services web page, the most expensive blood test for a human costs, $82.11.
Thankfully, while I was on the floor staring at her and trying to comprehend what she had just told us, my partner had his wits about him, and asked if they could do just one test and could we take the dog home and have the clinic call us with the results and appropriate measures that needed to be taken.
“Oh, ya, I suppose, sure you can do that,” she said.
The bill ended up being $250.
$250 to know that my 14-and-a-half year old dog was fine, healthy as an eight year old dog.
She sent us away with the “it’s time to think about putting the dog down.”
No medication, no other advice, unless we wanted to spend another $2,500 on X-rays.
Feeling lost and without answers we called another vet, who proceeded to tell us - over the phone - what the dog actually had and how we could fix it.
Within two weeks he was back to his obnoxious self.
One could safety assume that the ultimate outcome did not need to cost more than $5,000. I understand that becoming a veterinarian is one of the hardest to achieve, with cutthroat academic grades needed and a strong heart to bare the worst outcome. But like any other economic venture there needs to be rules in place to protect against those that could take advantage.
