Cupcakes

Occasionally at work I have to service a number of branch clinics, each about an hour away from home  base. It’s not a bad (but long) drive and it takes all day to see the three clinics, so it’s usually not too bad. The first two are supposed to be quieter, allowing some time for lunch, but not on my day.

I arrived at the second clinic 30 minutes early so I could have lunch, but the lady with the keys hadn’t arrived and the carpark was already filling up with people and pets.

So I started seeing patients in the carpark while I waited for the clinic to open. The work was steady and I ended up running overtime trying to see everyone. The next clinic (which I arrived late to) was no better- as busy as all the others had been.

So it was approaching 4:30, after an unusually busy day, in which I hadn’t had any food since 7:30 this morning, when I went to the housecall that I had promised to do.

Let me explain something to you: Housecalls Suck. They seriously suck, which is a big reason why most vets don’t do them anymore. You can’t control the environment, you usually don’t have all the equipment you’d want for every eventuality and you don’t have trained nurses to handle the animals with you. Not only that, but you’re in somebody else’s house and they always have great expectations. Everything just makes it harder to be a medical professional.

Not only that, but the sort of people who insist on housecalls and refuse to come to the clinic tend to be a little crazy.

The one in particular I had promised to see that day was particularly eccentric. She was a very devoted dog owner who had hand-reared her pet and for all intents and purposed refused to go more than 1 block from her house. We had convinced her to let us take the dog into the main surgery once for an operation on a tumour, but an Xray of the lungs showed that the cancer had already spread to her lungs, and surgery was going to be a moot point.

When she was told this over the phone, and advised that her dog was probably looking at months left to live, she became violently angry down the phone. Yelling, cursing me, hitting something in the background and crying. Even though she was a long way away it was still extremely stressful to know that this woman was a ball of rage directed at me, the vet that had told her it was too late for her dog to have surgery.

This woman went through the first thee stages of grief – denial, anger and bargaining, within that very heated fifteen minute phone conversation. I cannot express how intense and nerve wracking it was for me, because I knew at some point this dog will be put to sleep. This dog which has so much neurotic live vested in it, and this woman is not letting it out of her sight ever again.

So I did what I could do and sent it home with pain killers for an ‘as needed’ basis.

It was this dog and this mad woman I had agreed to make the house call to on this particular day. The dog that wad not been doing too well, which I knew in my heart didn’t have long left, and a part of my mind suspected the owner might get aggressive or violent if I couldn’t fix her dog.

It was with this deep anxiety in my heart, a low blood glucose and absolutely no food in my stomach that I approached the house, stethoscope in hand. My car was parked in the driveway for a quick getaway and as my stomach growled at me, and by brain cursed at me, I tentatively knocked on the door.

To my surprise the woman was smiling and welcomed me into the lounge room where the dog was sitting on the leather sofa. The delicious aroma of freshly baked cupcakes filled the room and my stomach growled louder.

It turned out that since she was given one of her pain killers that morning, but the owner had neglected to call to tell me that. She thanked me for coming such a long way to see them and asked if I’d had a busy day. I told her the truth- my day was incredibly busy and I hadn’t even had a chance for lunch yet, and probably wouldn’t when I got to the clinic. She very sympathetically told me “what a shame that was” and proceeded to tell me all about her dog’s diet………

• Fresh cooked chicken breast
• Scotch fillet
• Bits of roast with gravy
• Occasionally pasta
• Cooked Veggies

………and as her daughter brought out a tray of heavenly looking cupcakes with pink icing and shiny sprinkles, she mentioned that the only way she can get the dog to take the tablet is by putting it in a cupcake.

I looked at the cupcakes.

The dog growled at me.

Needless to say, the cupcakes were for the dog, not for poor starving humans.

They thanked me for their time and repeated at least a dozen times how much they loved this dog of theirs (which I was hating more with every cupcake it ate) and sent me on my way.

Still no food, but no dead dog.

Some days it’s just not worth it.