Vet's Day

I spent Sunday night at the University of Pennsylvania. Crash course in Linear Algebra? Dance Performance at Annenberg? Hoops at the Palestra? Trying to pick up sorority girls on Locust Walk? Nope, none of the above. I spent 2 1/2 hours Sunday night, or more accurately Monday morning, at the Veterinary Hospital emergency room, with our ancient Welsh Corgi, Greta.

Dogs are like kids, I suppose. They seldom get sick at say, 10AM on a Tuesday. Nope, shortly before midnight on Sunday, the dog starts upchucking (I must say, I had a pleasingly large choice or words I could have inserted there) dinner, trembling, and looking like she'd prefer to continue the upchucking but no longer had any chuck to up.

It being that time of night, we (me and Ronnie, not me and Greta) had to debate whether or not to take her in to the hospital, but ultimately thought we wouldn't be able to go to bed with her in that condition, so we carried her to the car and drove her down to West Philadelphia. I used to room with a vet student, back in the day, so I know where it is.

We weren't the only ones in the ER, but there were curiously only people there. A nurse came out quickly and took Greta away, I suppose to do triage on her. She said they'd examine her and then the vet would speak to us. We then sat and waited for quite a while, watching, and I am not making this up, Vanilla Ice Goes Amish. It was pretty heartwarming, watching the washed up but good with construction materials former rapper bond with his Amish friends, at one point hustling one of them into wagering and losing his buggy. It's basically a construction makeover show, with a sidelight of the buggy guy pimping out Vanilla Ice's new ride.

As we drifted through this, the nurse came out with a box of (living) cat, which she gave to a woman waiting. Then she came back out holding a small dog, which a waiting couple embraced and then left, crying (the people, not the dog) on their way out.

Eventually it was our turn. The on-call vet went through her whole spiel, recommending that we leave Greta there overnight for observation and then full physical in the morning. her estimate of cost, $2000. As a friend once noted, you can get several new dogs for that. We said we though we'd like to take her home and bring her to her regular vet in the morning, and she said, "Of course, that will be fine." So if that's fine, what's with the keep her overnight for observation thing? Is that some sort of fundraising technique?

So we went home, pushing 3:30 AM at this point. As it turned out, she was fine; she just needs to take antacids. And we thought things would be easier as empty nesters.