Jabba the Cat on best medical plan in house
I had planned to take Jabba the Cat to the vet last week, but Jabba had other plans. Specifically, his plan was to hide under the bed until the pet carrier was long gone.
Once he’s under the bed, there’s no getting him out. As soon as he sinks the six claws on each of his huge paws into the carpet, there’s no moving him — left, right, up or down — no matter how hard I pull.
How did he know we were going to the vet and not to a spa for overweight cats? It’s as if he has ESP. And Jabba has never even had a bad time at the vet’s; it’s always been a painless, almost boring, experience. A little poking, a look at his teeth, a look in his ears. He doesn’t even seem to mind the booster shots, so what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that for this cat, every day has to be just like yesterday. Any change in the regular order of things — moving his dish, Sue and I going to bed 15 minutes earlier or later than usual, having new visitors — drives him crazy. The sight of the cat carrier isn’t bad, exactly, it’s just that it wasn’t there yesterday. So I had to cancel our appointment and reschedule. This time, I left the carrier next to his dish for a whole week, and sure enough, he got into it without a struggle on the day of the appointment.
The first thing I realized when we got to the vet’s was that I am in the wrong business. The vet’s office has doubled in size since the last time Jabba was there. It has an “east entrance” and a “west entrance” now, the staff wears fancy uniforms and they accept bitcoins as payment. My human doctor’s office is not half as big — or lush. I’d never given much thought to how much money we are happily willing to spend on our pets. I know what I spend on one cat; can you imagine what it costs to own a horse?
The good news is that vets seem to want pets, and their owners, to have a good experience. The vet called for Jabba less than five minutes after we arrived. If Jabba had an appointment with my human doctor, it’d be a two-hour wait. The vet treats Jabba like a visiting dignitary — an honored guest. My own doctor always gives me the feeling that I’m wasting his time, that he has more important things to do. If only I were really, really sick with some fascinating but incurable “House”-worthy disease, then he’d find me interesting. Finally, I would have given him something he could talk to other doctors about. My everyday plantar fasciitis obviously isn’t it.
Jabba can’t even talk, yet the vet hangs on his every purr. Somehow the vet can get him to open his mouth without upsetting him in the slightest. Me, I still have a scar from trying to pill him years ago.
It makes me wonder — why are vets so much better to their patients than human doctors are?