Wherein I help to keep one of Bako’s veterinarians gainfully employed

You remember Ferret Bueller, right? Big (for a ferret). Bitey. Death to degus. But generally a good little shit.

He wouldn’t eat yesterday morning. This was worrisome, to say the least, since our ferrets inhale their food like little black holes with fur and four clawed feet. They like to act as though I haven’t fed them in weeks, when in fact I feed them twice a day. I was a little worried to find him off his food, but he was still drinking, so I thought I’d give him until evening to see how he fared. When I came home, I put a little food in their dish. Harmonica did the inhale thing and Bueller pleasantly sipped at his water bottle. Once again he seemed fine, just no appetite.

Well, there really wasn’t anything for it, so I had to take him to the emergency animal hospital. We have a really big, new one nearby, maybe three miles away. Bueller stayed in his pet carrier and was interested in everything going on around him, all the smells and noises, but eventually he curled up in his towel. Fifteen minutes into all this waiting, someone brought in a large mutt, looked like a Great Dane mix of some sort, and he kept barking at everyone and everything. The owner made no attempt to restrain him. The receptionist roomed him before she roomed Bueller, and that annoyed me. I mean, I understand why she did it — who wants to listen to that? But still, I was there first. And the vet did in fact see the barker before he saw my pet.

I brought my Nook and spent the time reading China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station (definitely not as good as The City & The City or Kraken. He is growing as an author, and it shows in his earlier work. Common problem, really . . . try reading Martin Cruz Smith’s Nightwing sometime.) It took about an hour before the vet saw me, a young Chinese guy who quite clearly knew no more than I did about ferrets. He disappeared for a half an hour, ostensibly to “check charges” (find out how much the X-ray and labs would cost), but he admitted later that he was researching ferrets. He didn’t learn much more that was helpful.

He kept calling me “Mr.” which, I have to admit, I find irksome. It’s not like I hadn’t put my MD down on the patient information form. And this is not arrogance — it’s merely a plea that they talk to me in the lingo and not dumb things down. But I needn’t have feared, since he was the type of doc who doesn’t know how to dumb things down.

So we decided to just get the X-ray and the blood tests and skip the overnight IV therapy. I’m a good enough vet to realize when my pet needs (or doesn’t need) IV hydration, thank you very much. I was surprised he even suggested it, since I told him straight away that Bueller was still drinking. He just wasn’t eating, that’s all. Anyway, he told me the whole thing would only take 20 minutes. Thirty minutes later he came out and said that they would need to gas Bueller down because he was too squirmy to take an X-ray. Ya think? I began to wonder if he had ever seen a ferret in person before. They don’t hold still. It’s kind of in the nature of being a ferret. I told him to forget about the X-ray (again, me playing vet; if Bueller had had a bowel obstruction, he would have been in some discomfort, and he was not). I paid up and took Bueller home. The whole thing took over three hours and cost about 200 dollars.

If Bueller had been human, this would have taken seven or eight hours, and would have cost a few thousand dollars. So no, I’m not bitching. Much.

At home, Bueller drank some water. I tried him out on some linatone (an oil they need to keep their coat healthy) and he ate that. I tried some of his dried food, and he ignored it and went to sleep.

This morning, he ate with his normal appetite. So go figure.

D.

Walnut, February 12, 2011. Category: Critter foo, The Barbarous Craft.

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