A reader writes:
Some years ago our beagle – then about age six – started screaming in the middle of the night, so we let her in. The next morning her neck swelled up to about four times its usual size. We rushed her into a pet carrier and ran, in near-panic and barely clothed, out to the truck to rush her to the vet. Before leaving the driveway I called ahead so they would be ready to see her on an emergency basis, explained that she had probably been bitten by a snake, most likely a copperhead.
The vet assured us that they had treatment for that, they would be standing by in the parking lot to receive her and rush her in, and that they recover nicely in a couple of days, and that it would $800.00 + boarding for several days. I exclaimed "Eight hundred fucking what?" and turned to the then-10-year-old daughter and the wife, sitting in the back seat of the truck with the mutt.
I should probably tell you that my wife and daughter both know the value of a dollar. My wife is Asian and they eat dogs, so they sure as hell don’t spend $800.00 on them. All of a sudden we were all like, uh, yeah. OK. "Well, the vet says they usually recover.” "Yeah, dad, I read that, too. They recover on their own. I think." My wife was like “Oh, that’s horrible, thinking abut the cost, the poor, poor dog." And then I was like, "OK, we can go." And the wife was like "Well. What do you think?"
I was first to open my door, we weren’t really looking at each other too closely, then the girls slowly slipped out, and we took Bailey back into the house and made her comfortable, and well, that was it. She did recover – her swelling went down in about five days.
The Dish 