Epic Vet Adventure

When I made the vet appointment for The Vet at the Barn, I was only thinking of the things I needed to accomplish during the day, not how bad the traffic up the West Side Highway at 5 on a Friday evening in July would be. This new vet was a mixture of holistic and allopathic medicine and the combination made me feel safe. Who’s Walking Who is a holistic center and we recommend home-cooked diets and not vaccinating dogs so conventional vets make me uneasy. Like any big business, not all who play can be trusted.

Stacy recommended Vet at the Barn, and because West Chelsea, where we were taking Brenda refused to give her a prescription for Prozac, and the last vet we took Sadie too failed to diagnose her skin problems, I made an appointment for both Sadie and Brenda that Friday night.

The Vet at the Barn is located just outside of the city, fifteen minutes away on a good day. This was not a good day. Ben and Brenda and I made our way downstairs to pick up Sadie from daycare, which is located around the corner from our apartment. We were dog-sitting Mika, our neighbor’s chocolate lab that night and so had arranged for one of the daycare staff to bring Mika and Porter home in the next few hours.

Ben went to get the car, which was parked a few blocks away and Ruthie, one of the daycare girls, got Sadie ready. They waited inside while I waited outside with Brenda. Brenda had a muzzle on because I had to take her inside The Dog Run for a second. Luckily, it stayed on, because as soon as I stepped outside, I was approached by an Italian film crew—three guys with bulky equipment—who asked if they could interview me for an Italian news segment on the way Americans treat their dogs. Luckily, when I saw they were approaching me, I scooped Brenda up in my arms. Good thing, because documenting Brenda attacking three Italian news anchors was not how I wanted to spend my Friday night.

As it turned out, making this trip wasn’t either.

I held Brenda, monkey style, while she still wore the muzzle. They asked me questions, such as how much money did the average dog parent in Manhattan spend a year and why are dogs treated like children here.

Ben pulled up with the car in the nick of time. Ruthie ran outside with Sadie and I shoved Brenda inside. Ben drove while I sat in the back with the two nervous girls. Sadie wedged herself on the floor behind the front passenger seat (her normal spot) and Brenda sat on the seat with me, drooling nonstop. I held onto a paper bag in case she needed to throw up. Porter gets carsick and so I’ve gotten pretty good at catching dog spew midair.

Traffic was start and stop all the way to the vet and we were an hour and half late. Even though we called to tell them, I was anxious and felt horrible. I’d forgotten what service outside of Manhattan was like, though. Once we finally got there, my worries were gone. They were so nice, and actually seemed to sincerely pity the traffic we hit.

Once they were ready to see us, the four of us shuffled into a tiny room and they examined the dogs. Sadie behaved until the tech who emptied her anal glands came into the room for the second time. Even then, Sadie just growled a little, and all the techs and the vets thought that Brenda was drugged she was so comatose. I think she was terrified, and had on a muzzle so she new that she couldn’t do anything.

The most immediate diagnosis we got that night was that Brenda’s multiple, huge pustules on her chin were probably due to an allergy to plastic and we were told to feed her out of glass bowls from then on. We have, and her chin has cleared up.

We also got the vet to prescribe Prozac to Brenda (the stash we had was unused portions of friend’s prescriptions). In the end, we walked away with nearly twenty bottles of homeopathic remedies as well as antibiotics. Both dogs had allergies (as a blood test later determined) to chicken, flax, potatoes and wheat, and Sadie’s allergies was what caused all of her skin problems.

At that time Sadie’s fur was soft enough to touch and relatively clear, but when we first got her, she felt like sandpaper and had acne everywhere. I recently found out that the daycare staff called her Ranky Sadie. To be fair, she was. Apparently, her allergies caused sores that then got infected, and because she had already been treated with almost every kind of antibiotic, we had to buy one that cost $150 per bottle. Luckily, one month’s dose zapped the infection, though we didn’t know if it would at the time.

Our bill was almost $2000.

One the way home we got caught in a lightening storm that actually blew down trees in our path. The rain was so hard I couldn’t see out the window.

For the next month I had six post-its on my fridge. Each filled with what supplements each dog got in both meals of the day. I memorized it quickly enough but kept them up just in case.

Both Sadie and Brenda are healthy now. One part of Sadie’s neck still doesn’t have any fur on it and she breaks out occasionally.