Cat Stories

Medical Emergency Part 2

I called my sister at work; did she want me to put Frequency down? “Wellllll, no, maybe not. She didn’t start out great, but she’s become a nice cat now. You know they’re going to want $500 to fix it. Why don’t you just get her some antibiotics and we’ll see how she does?”

The vet wasn’t keen on the cheap fix, I suppose, and haughtily told me that it would be cruel to leave the cat in this condition without repairing the damage. She said if the cat didn’t die in agony, we’d end up bringing her back to have her put down anyway and have to pay for another office visit.

I can’t prove it, but I think she bumped the price of the antibiotics up to $35, and of course, tried to push pain killers on me too for $20 more. When I conveyed the message to the sister person, she shouted at me, “Thirty-five bucks for cat antibiotics? What are they; gold plated?” I listened to the decision making process on the other end of the line, “Well, you know the aspirin will work fine. We don’t need the fancy pain killers.” She himmed and hawed a minute, then said what I knew she would, “Buy the stupid antibiotics and I’ll pay you back.” Then she muttered to herself, “Eighty-five bucks for a cat. I’m getting soft.”  

         

I took Frequency home and in two weeks she was fine and yelling to go back home to her trees and flowers. We never did find out what she had done to herself. My sister guessed that a dog chased her up a tree and managed to get a good chomp on her backbone before she escaped. As they say in the Tootsie Roll ® commercial, the world may never know.