• making playlists full of dope yet inoffensive midtempo jams as a subtle reminder that they had chosen a hospital with cool-ass motherfuckers working there yet ones who are savvy enough to know that you can’t have the word “shit” unbleeped during business hours
—
I’m very good at covertly grinding my teeth down to stumps as gentlemen who’ve clearly chased a soiled diaper with bitter espresso wheeze instructions on how to best do a job I have held for the entirety of my adult life directly into my face. And while my brain says, “Go kill yourself,” my mask remains a placid lake of serenity, whose surface remains unrippled despite the frothy rage boiling just beneath its surface.
I am also exceptional at keeping a straight face at the same time a person asks, “Ugh, is this table clean?” while pointing in disgust at a sterilized table upon which she has been asked to set a creature who is enthusiastically licking its own asshole. Or when a man primed to spend upward of $100 on pain pills for a dog complains about how much his 100 percent optional companion animal is costing him, despite his having paid twenty-five hundred real American dollars to bring that purebred host to all manner of insect, arachnid, and parasite into his home.
—
I excel at remaining outwardly calm on the telephone while women yell at me about cat dandruff on speakerphone from within the lush confines of their roomy Land Rovers. I’m totally able to keep a cool head as someone explains to me in a condescending tone how of course she can’t come in to get [redacted]’s flaky dry skin checked out at four thirty; she has a job. Don’t I know what having a work schedule is like?!
I’m superb at seeming interested in the thirty-seventh conversation of the day about the weather, or feigning surprise at how congested Main Street is on a Tuesday afternoon. I don’t give a shit about traffic. Or weather. Or any combination thereof. Want to know what the last thing the hourly wage drone trapped behind a desk in a windowless office for eleven-plus hours wants to hear from a person who clearly has a lot of in-the-middle-of-the-fucking-day free time on her hands? How beautiful it is outside. How gorgeous the clouds are and how wonderful the air feels. Oh, you didn’t have to wear a jacket today? WELL GLORY BE, DIANE. I don’t care! For me, today is the same temperature-controlled sixty-eight degrees it is every other goddamned day. Storm clouds? Sixty-eight degrees. Blizzard? Still sixty-eight degrees. I mean, sometimes I turn on the ceiling fan if I really want to feel like I’m living my best life, but even then it’s still only sixty-eight degrees with a light breeze. Dude, every day I dream of chewing my wrists open and emptying them until I’m dead. I really ought to get out and enjoy that sunshine, I get it. But then who would sell you your dog’s outrageously priced limited-protein food?!
I can and will answer to many names that aren’t my own, “Hello, Stephanie? Sabrina? Salmonella, is that you?” I have been referred to as the “nice African-American woman” on the phone more times than I can count. Which is interesting because I am decidedly not nice. “Mildly unpleasant” would work just fine, I think. Speaking of my awful voice and face, even though a lot of Dianes have been looking at the same scowl for the past fourteen years, three months, and handful of days, many of them think of me as their friend. Which is surprising, even to me, and so my friend-making-under-duress skills will obviously be an asset in my new position. I totally understand why watching this metamorphosis over the last decade would fool someone into thinking he knows me in real life. I scheduled their rag doll’s tooth surgery! I faxed their bichon’s Bordetella vaccine to the kennel! And sure, they often don’t remember my name, but they’ve invited me out to lunch (dreading that I might take them up on it), asked me over to their actual houses for dinner (really, really dreading that I might wear my work jeans stinking of Roccal-D into their homes), and on one special instance, paid for my books that one semester I decided I was going to finish my degree (okay, that was actually amazing). The nice ones come in with boxes of chocolate and cases of beer and bottles of wine, grateful that an adult woman who got a thirty-three on the ACT dedicated most of her life to explaining the difference between fleas and ticks to college freshmen who use their meal allotment money to buy corgi puppies from shady Craigslist breeders. One time, when I was in Whole Foods with a cart full of shit pretending to be rich, I ran into this woman who was so thankful that I’d talked her through getting her dog to vomit up the carcass of a squirrel the week before that she bought all of my groceries. I don’t know why I’m resistant to say so, but I am actually quite good at serving a customer.
Upon finding out that I work in an animal hospital, people are usually like, “Aww! You must love pets! Are all the puppies and kitties so cute?!” And then they blink real hard and smile with all of their teeth showing, waiting for me to regale them with heartwarming stories of cats rescued from trees and dogs that save little boys who’ve fallen down the local well. They picture my day to be like Belle’s in Beauty and the Beast, except instead of skipping through the French countryside, I’m limping through the suburbs, waving hello to the baker and the cobbler as they tip their caps while I struggle past, carrying a backpack full of a halfhearted attempt at lunch I already don’t want to eat and anxiety meds in lieu of a basket laden with library books, ruffling the heads of children I pass on their way to school. This imaginary hospital is little more than a modernized gingerbread house, purring kitties and floppy-eared dogs bounding after me with their bushy tails wagging as I flip on the lights and turn on the fans and cast open the shades to let the sunshine stream in. No animals are violent or in critical condition, and all of them are well behaved enough to roam free, maybe alighting on my shoulder as I hand Mr. Martin his parcel of healing tonics and tinctures I’ve made myself, the price of which he wouldn’t dream of haggling over. Cool breezes blow through open windows that no dog is actively trying to commit suicide through, and who needs doctors when the needles and blades just come to life and perform the operations themselves?!
In reality, I stumble through blinding snow from the train at 7:20 in the morning to the darkened door, grope blindly down the pitch-black hallway to find the keypad that shuts off the alarm, then have thirty seconds to enter the four-digit code before those flashing lights and that awful siren start blaring, signaling that the police are on their way and I have to find something in this building other than my secret painkiller drawer to prove I actually work here. I spend twenty-seven real seconds punching in various pass codes until one finally stops the ticking clock, then immediately bend at the waist to dry heave as the computerized voice bleeps “Disarmed, ready to arm.” I try to regain composure as I rummage through the communal fridge to find the Coke I swear I left in there, but give up when I hear voices approaching, shoving someone else’s soda into my bag, swearing to myself that I will replace it as soon as the liquor store next door opens. When I get to my desk, the fax machine is shooting memos from various referral clinics by the dozen, and the phone’s blinking red light indicates that eighteen messages have been left in the twelve hours since we’ve last been around to answer the phones. Hospitalized patients, realizing that the box-cleaners and food-pourers have arrived to start their shifts, howl and yowl and caterwaul for their breakfasts. The place quickly fills with the brain-rattling noise of the day: the sharp clang of metal bowls in the waist-high tub/sink, the whoosh of water from the hose spraying down the outdoor runs, the slam of a washing machine filled with blankets and towels, treatment orders shouted over the din of bark and meow.
I listen to the voice mails (several hang-ups, a couple “Hello, is this the answering service? Hello…? Hello…?! JEAN, I TOLD YOU THEY WEREN’T OPEN YET!” and at least one “No, I don’t have an appointment but I’m bringing my dog right when you open and I want to be seen immediately, I don’t care what else the doctor has coming in” just to get the stress adrenaline pumping) while trying to say good morning to coworkers as they answer e-mails and file lab work. By the time we unlock the doors, we’ve done so many things that it feels
like the day should already be over, and then comes the constant deluge of impatient questions I may or may not have the answer to (yes, I know the requirements for filling out an international health certificate for a cat to fly to Romania; no, I don’t know whether your dog walker’s advice to use cedar oil will get rid of a flea infestation); the hourly pop quiz of every single one of the prescription diets we carry and its indications (because if I sell Hill’s a/d to a person who really needs IAMS Low-Residue, I could get in hot water); and the ungraceful mating dance that occurs when someone mindlessly talking on her cell phone has a pissed off, scared, snapping terrier raging at the end of a loosely held flexi-leash as I’m trying to usher her into an exam room.
I can translate the consistency of a dog’s stool as relayed to me by its owner into the proper medical terminology:
“Soupy” = diarrhea.
“Watery” = diarrhea.
“Like a melted chocolate bar” = diarrhea.
“Kinda runny this morning but lumpy by lunchtime” = diarrhea.
“You know, like, vomit but from her butt” = diarrhea.
—
There are seven doctors in our practice, which means that in addition to explaining surgery-consent forms and the difference between each of the dangerous vectors that can bite and infect a dog and the products we carry to protect them, I have to be a personal assistant to one dude who likes his messages time-stamped and dated and listed in order of importance and a woman who prefers to be tracked down and delivered her messages by hand. PLUS FIVE OTHER PEOPLE. I just interviewed a young woman who responded to the blunt and very direct ad I posted to find more front desk help, and during the meeting I was like, “Listen, I like you very much, so I’ma be straight with you. Can you: spread a payment across three credit cards without forgetting how much goes on which one, remember which cat in the waiting room is vomiting and which one is here to get subcutaneous fluids, find that list of files the technicians asked you to pull half an hour ago and get them pulled, and send the refills Ms. Bruggeman called in to the pharmacy? All at the same time? Without coffee because no one told Lori we were out and the delivery isn’t coming until tomorrow? Because that’s what this job is.”
To have a child, you have to at the very least find someone to make it with you. I mean, doesn’t that constitute some sort of unofficial screening process? Whenever I see someone dragging along a snot-nosed little tax deduction I think, “Someone liked that guy enough to let him pollinate her flower. He must be cool.” (No, I don’t. I really think, “I bet he only got fourteen minutes of sleep last night, thank the Lord I can’t get pregnant.”) Or at least you have to get someone to sell you a bag of sperm, and that takes enough money to pay for it, and you probably have to fill out a bunch of paperwork and forms and background checks, too.
But you don’t have to do anything to prove you’re worth a pet, and that makes our job totally ridiculous 82 percent of the time. Any old asshole can pick up a cat in the street or walk into a pet store and buy a sad puppy-mill puppy. And as soon as they do they call us, asking the kinds of questions that are often baffling to me. Now, I’m not going to get up on a soapbox, because it probably couldn’t support my weight, not to mention I am most certainly not the kind of person who does research before making a decision or a purchase. Everything I buy is an impulse purchase, be it a new flavor of sparkling water or a thousand-dollar computer. I get my clothes off the Internet, for fuck’s sake: I am not risk-averse. But yo, I wouldn’t get a goldfish without at least asking the kid at PetSmart what kind of tank I had to buy for it and how much the food was going to cost and whether I had to find a doctor to take care of it. Not everyone is as lucky as I am to have seen the horrors of pet ownership up close and personal for a decade, but every day there’s a situation that makes me drop all pretense of professionalism and hit some client with a “Bro, for real?!”
—
A couple of years ago we had a cat come in that had been run through a heat cycle in a dryer. Please read that sentence again. Read it again, and imagine the type of person who would allow such a thing to happen. Can you picture it? Are you there yet? Perfecto. Now imagine answering his phone call as he described the practical joke that had gone wrong, and the feeling in my stomach while listening to him try to explain what happened, then multiply that feeling by fourteen years, and maybe you now have some insight into why my outlook is so dreary sometimes. We are exposed to human beings of the lowest common denominator, all day every day, and this is a multimillion-dollar, incredibly busy practice in the suburbs. It costs sixty-plus dollars just to walk in the door.
Once I sat, horrified, as a woman in our waiting room licked a kitten to “clean it” because she “wanted it to feel like it was back with its mother.” Another time I watched a woman with long lacquered nails and an expensive-looking boob job eat a dog treat to “see what it tasted like to her dog.” You know, because human and canine taste buds are so similar; it’s why I have a bowl of Purina One every morning in lieu of traditional oatmeal. And that was shortly after a different birdbrain drank a little bit of her dog’s diarrhea medication while Laura ran her credit card “just to see if it worked.” Listen, I put a lot of dumb shit in my mouth, but at least I have the decency to do it where no one can see me, like the time I smashed some sour-cream-and-onion potato chips on half an old cheeseburger I found in the backseat of my car and wolfed it down behind a nightclub.
I have seen people pay thousands of dollars for chemotherapy and rehabilitation and get acupuncture for their dogs and psychiatrists for their cats. I would have never understood the logic in that before but now I get it. My first week was straight-up shocking. I had no idea that people paid to have their dogs’ teeth cleaned! How would you even do that? Coax her into the chair, get her to lie back, strap the goggles on her then hang a Milk-Bone over her face so she holds her mouth open so you can get those molars clean?! (Now I know that you put a dog under general anesthesia and take a digital X-ray of its head and Alyssa scales its good teeth while the surgeon on duty that day pulls out the bad ones, and the first time I ever stood next to the dental sink watching it go down I nearly passed out.) Ultrasounds, neurology, dermatology, ophthalmology, radiation, cardiology, oncology? Man, who knew?! When I was a baby we had two dogs, one of whom remained chained to the garage due to bloodlust and unpredictability, while the other stayed inside with us and guarded my crib. I would fall over dead right now if you told me that either of those goofs had even had shots, let alone that my father had ever put one in his nice car to drive out to Buffalo Grove to get thousands of dollars’ worth of chemotherapy. I don’t even think the outside dog got dog food, just milk and scraps of raw meat. (Which, with my current level of companion-animal expertise, I would gently discourage my dad from feeding him.)
Things I’ve learned at my last job that might come in handy in a very specific set of circumstances at a new one:
• Don’t give your dog Advil if you suspect he has a fever, and please refrain from giving him Imodium if he has a little diarrhea. Especially if he has diarrhea because you thought he should have some of your burrito. Call your vet.
• And, while we’re at it, stop diagnosing your pets at home. Take them to the doctor. Unless you have a DVM license, in which case I’d like to see it.
• Walk your dog on a leash and keep your cat in the house. Every time I saw a dog that got beat up by a possum or a raccoon or a fox or a dingo it made me want to choke-slam somebody.
• Stop leaving chocolate and grapes and shit where your dog can get at them, and please, for the love of Doritos, put your weed away. Because at least once a month a dog just houses its owner’s stash, and while it’s kind of hilarious, (1) it makes your dog feel like crap, and (2) loud is expensive. I mean, you really can’t get a dog if you want to still live like a careless slob. I do, that’s why I never got one. Sometimes I leave deliciously stinky underwear on the bathroom floor or fall asleep with sushi next to the bed or forget to tie the
trash with the old pork chop bones in it up tight. All careless things that could lead to hundreds of dollars of treatment at my vet and a stern side-eye from the staff at the front desk. I have seen dogs vomit: socks, toys, jewelry, bottles, soap, and underwear. Put your things away already. Are digital pets a real thing yet? I saw Gone Girl, go order a robot dog.
• Name your pet something reasonable that people who maybe aren’t hip to the zeitgeist can spell and figure out. Yeah, I like Game of Thrones, too, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to find your cat Daenerys Targaryen with ease in our computer system. Far be it from a woman with a cat named Helen Keller to criticize, but at least the average third-grader could spell that. When Lord of the Rings was poppin’, we had a lot of Éowyns and Faramirs and Galadriels coming in for booster shots and heartworm tests, and I never read those books, hoe. And these nerds would take it as a personal affront that I needed a hint at how to spell their dogs’ names. Fine, tell me who Kizzy Reynolds is and then we’ll talk. JUST NAME IT WRIGLEY LIKE EVERYONE ELSE IN CHICAGO, GOD.
—
I am calm in a crisis. Like the time that one dog got hit by a car right in front of us on the street or the time that cat had a heart attack as her owner handed me her carrier. Once, after a dog was euthanized, we witnessed a funeral ritual in our office that I found surprisingly moving, even though I’m convinced that whatever spirits there happen to be, they’re all in collusion against me. I’ve held a lot of scared hands, hugged a lot of people who bravely came alone to put their best friends down, and cried a lot of tears with people I don’t really know, but I kind of do? Because as they neared the end they were in the office every other week or because I was there when Megan was pregnant with her first baby. He is now ten years old and his sister is eight and they’re on their second dog, geez where does the time go!?!
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Page 22
