Maire Anne and I had a long history with cats. When we moved back to Boston from Austin in 1984, we took three cats with us -- quite an experience on a long trip, especially when Phoebe, drugged and leashed, tried to jump out the window. But that's another story.
The kids grew up with cats. We had a spectacular black cat, Seamus, for many years. We'd let him out during the day but tried to keep him in at night. One night he failed to come home. We suspect the Newton coyotes got him.
We were cat-less for a few years until last New Years. We began The Great Kitten Hunt, wherein we visited probably fifteen animal shelters within a radius of 50 miles of Boston, looking for the right pair of kittens. We wanted bright. We wanted engaging. We wanted a little rascally. We didn't want "a lap cat." Boring boring boring.. The amount of information these shelters asked for, you'd think we were adopting children. One place literally wanted a copy of our mortgage statement. We declined.
But our diligence paid off when, New Years Day 2011, we went to the Pat Brody shelter in Lunenburg, and saw a cage in which there were three small black kittens, short haired with some sort of Asian lineage. I opened the door and kitten cat ran out, ran up my chest, and perched on my shoulder. Clearly that one (Seymour) was a keeper. The second one, Franny, was almost as engaging. The third (Zooey) one was bit smaller and more timid. I tried to coax her out; she was interested but wouldn't commit. Until we were about to leave with the other two. Then she realized that she was about to blow the deal. "Meeeeeew. MEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWW!" she howled plaintively.
"What do you want to do? You want to take these two or all three?" the woman running the shelter asked. "Well," I said, "we can't take three, but gee I hate to break up the set."
"Tell you what," she said, "if you take all three, I'll only charge you for two."
"Oh... damn it!. Sure."
So we went home that New Years Day with three black kittens. They rapidly became an inextricable part of the family, as if we'd always had them. Three is so more more than just one greater than two. Three is nearly a herd. They swarm you.
Seymour is trouble incarnate, but very sweet and interesting. Zooey continues to be needy and whiny, but is very little trouble. And Franny, the prettiest of the bunch, is a bit more inscrutable.
But she is trouble. She likes to eat things. She'll hork up some disgusting mess which I will need to inspect, only to find SHE'S EATEN PACKING MATERIAL. One soggy lump was clearly a Styrofoam peanut.
Anyway, about a week ago, Franny started puking up. Frequently. Then she stopped eating and drinking. She'd just sit inside her basket. We'd put food and water in front of her and she wouldn't take it. She just sat, listless. Knowing her predilection for eating things that aren't food, we tried to wait it out, but after four days we needed to intervene.
So last Saturday I took her to our vet at Kindness Animal Hospital. He examined her and noted she was dehydrated. The symptoms pointed to her having eaten something and either still had it in her or reacted very badly to it. He did x-rays, but all that shows is that she didn't eat a rock or a ball bearing. If she ate string, or a piece of plastic (both of which we've seen her pulling out of the trash), it wouldn't show up in an x-ray. He recommended ultrasound, but they didn't have an ultrasound machine.
He recommended we take her to the Vescone 24 hour emergency animal center where they could admit her, hydrate her, have an ultrasound, and can do surgery, but cautioned that, especially on a weekend, it would get very expensive very quickly -- just to walk in and out the door was probably a thousand dollars. I asked why he couldn't hydrate her, and he said that 1) that would be treatment without diagnosis, 2) he could hydrate her subcutaneously (shooting fluid under the skin) whereas the emergency center would do an intravenous hydration, 3) whatever was wrong with Zooey had gone on long enough that a higher level of intervention than just outpatient hydration was probably appropriate, and 4) unlike the emergency center, his office wasn't open 24 hours and wasn't open on Sunday.
I'm not a vet. I don't know what an appropriate course of treatment is. I tend to take recommendations of people who know more about something than I do. So I paid the vet the $208 bill and, as per his recommendation, took Franny to the Vescone 24 hour emergency animal center. They examined her and wrote up a low and a high estimate. The low estimate was for a one-day stay, blood work, and hydration, and came to slightly over $1000. The two-day estimate added a second day including ultrasound, and came to $2300. Neither included the cost of any surgery; I was told we'd get that estimate if and when this was a recommended course of action.
I gulped, and signed an authorization to hydrate her.
Then I called back our vet and asked what the cost would be if THEY did surgery (if it turned out to be required to remove a foreign object). They estimated the cost at about $2500, and advised that was "much cheaper" than the cost would be at the 24 hour center. But they didn't have an ultrasound.
So, we risked getting sucked into a very high bill by degrees. IF the cat needed surgery, it was looking like the cost-managed approach was going to be two days at the 24 hour clinic followed by surgery at the vet, for a total of nearly five grand. It would be far higher still if the surgery was done at the clinic.
I presented all this to Maire Anne, and we talked.
She said "I'm not sure how we assign a value to the cat's life."
I said "Oh, I know how we do it. We can do this right now. Watch. Would you pay fifteen grand to save the cat's life?
"No. Of course not. I mean, she's very sweet, but we have kids in college, and two other cats."
"Good. Neither would I. How about ten? Would you pay ten grand to save Franny's life?"
"No."
"Good. Neither would I."
We continued this process downward until we arrived at a number we were both were comfortable with, somewhere in the two to three thousand dollar range, representing what we both were willing to spend (if the outcome had a high probability of success). Unfortunately, this number did not encompass surgery. And if we weren't willing to pay for surgery, why have the ultrasound? And if there's no ultrasound, why authorize another day of treatment in the 24 hour center?
That evening, the doctor from Vescone called me to tell me the results of the blood work (no obvious infection, liver functioning normally) and that Franny was responding well to the hydration. She offered me two courses of treatment. One was to do an ultrasound that evening. The other was to continue the hydration through until morning. I explained that not only did we want the latter course, we had talked about it and, because of cost, regardless of the outcome of the hydration, were prepared to check Franny out in the morning and take her home.
The next morning, Vescone reported that Franny was doing extremely well. They hydration, apparently, was very effective. I went to pick her up and found a bright-eyed responsive playful cat. I paid the $1100 bill, for a total of $1300.
We're glad to have her back -- she is very sweet -- but it was a very eye-opening experience.
Lessons learned:
--Emergency animal clinics can be VERY expensive.
--While it was reasonable to give the cat time for the problem to resolve itself, had we taken her to the vet a day earlier, we wouldn't have been faced with the "vet closed on Sunday and 24 hour clinic is very expensive on weekends" scenario.
--You can wade into a very large bill by degrees.
--You are not a bad person if you decide how much you want to spend, and stick to it.
--If I had to do it again, I might tell our vet "I want you to hydrate her" as a responsible intermediate cost-effective course of treatment that is more than doing nothing and less than the thousand dollar ante-on-the-table at the 24 hour clinic.
So, Franny, I love you, but you're down one life. Use the remaining eight wisely.
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