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hallmarks of a lousy veterinarian
Friday, June 4 1999
Suddenly I'm working on a different project at work, one with a more pressing deadline than my message boards. Ideally, of course, I'd work solidly on something until it was done, then I'd move onto something else. I think that's the best way to harness the full force of the human brain, at least the one inside my head.
The project I'm working on now is the creation of a horoscope/fortune-telling sub-site. Most of today I dedicated myself to the task of making a random-fortune sentence generator, much like the "random Musings generator" made my Issac Exist "that's what I do" Boy about a year ago. Unlike that widget, mine is written in VB-Script ASP and runs entirely on a web server. Isaac is written in Javascript and anyone can see how it's done and what the possibilities are simply by viewing the source.
The evening seemed destined to end prematurely when, after I'd had a few vodkateas, Kim came home from wherever it is she goes on Friday nights and I headed off to bed at about 9:00 PM.
But then, some hour or more later, Kim suddenly woke me up to tell me that Kevin and Scott, my two motorcycle-riding co-workers, had just shown up on their steel two-wheeled Bon Jovi horses. Kevin had brought along a former girlfriend who is visiting him from out of state. He'd actually taken the day off of work to hang out with this girl as well as to get new tailpipes installed on his bike. These new pipes mainly had the effect of making his bike as loud as Scott's Harley, that is, so loud that revving the engine now sets off car alarms within a 50 foot radius. Now, forgive me if I come off sounding like a pussy, but I can't imagine going out of my way to make my transportation louder than it might otherwise be just for the sake of its being louder. It's a little too much like eight year olds attaching wires to the forks of their bicycles to get that delightful plink-plink-plink ersatz engine noise. But here's were I really show my pussy side: I'd much rather cause my sociopathic grief in a nuanced, cerebral fashion. Indeed, I take this motorcycle tailpipe issue to be indicative of a broad swath of values-dissonance that I have with these boys, who, it's important to note, are among the most interesting people in my workplace.
Unfortunately, Kim and I weren't especially prepared to host a party. The only libation we had was kind buds, but at least we had those. Still, eventually the craving for beer reached such a crisis that I was inspired to get up off the couch and head out towards the liquor store. About this time Kevin wanted to head home with the girl, and after Kevin's ear-splitting departure, we were left with Scott, who wanted to come with Kim and me on a Sophie-walking jaunt to the store.
Scott is a refreshingly interesting and well-rounded character. He's much more worldly and literate than the average people with whom we socialize. He frequently makes offhand references to concepts that I'm sure are unknown to most of my workplace colleagues. Why, just tonight he appended the prefix "über" to "couple" and used the newly-forged term to describe Kim and me (then Kim asked what "über" meant).
But Scott has also paid his dues on the wrong side of the tracks, as his loud-piped Harley attests. At one point he asked Kim, "So what drug scene were you in? Pot, crank, heroin...?" After replying "crank," Kim went on to enthusiastically describe the days when she used to teach elementary school and smoke crack with her rough-hewn mountain-man boyfriend, David.
Perhaps the best thing that came out of my hanging out with Scott tonight was an agreement that, in our workplace, there is far too little communication between engineering (where I am) and sales & marketing (where he is). "There is none," he corrected me. I compared our professional situation to gasoline and air, and how in an engine there's a corroborator to make sure the two are mixed together to facilitate combustion. In the current social/seating paradigm of our workplace, such mixing is actually discouraged. As a result, sales has no idea what is possible for engineering to do and engineering has no idea what exactly is being demanded by the greedy commercial capitalist world. We resolved to eat lunch together more in the future.
After Scott roared off (car alarms beware), Sophie started hurling pumpkin and rice (her special new diet) all over the place. The poor little dog seems to have great difficulty keeping anything down, and, as for the other end of her GI tract, she hardly shits at all anymore. It seems that her digestive system has become topologically identical to her respiratory system, that is, bidirectional. Other than that, though, she seems perfectly healthy and happy. Still, tonight we were concerned about the continued undiminished presence of her pancreatitis symptoms. I was feeling frustrated because of the weak effort the vet had put into explaining the situation to Kim. He'd gladly charged her $230 bucks but had failed to do the following extremely important things:
- Provide a detailed description of Sophie's specific case of pancreatitis.
- Provide a schedule of anticipated recovery under his treatment plan.
- Give case histories of other dogs who have had pancreatitis.
- Give an account of what the medication he prescribed is supposed to cure.
According to Kim, the vet's attitude was mostly condescension, a "don't worry your pretty head about this and give your dog these pills" attitude.
Tonight I was angered and saddened by the possibility that the vet had kept back a serious, sad prognosis, seeing this as a lucrative opportunity to provide the expensive heroic procedures necessary to keep a dog alive a few extra months after its pancreas has failed.
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