‘You’re very easy to deal with, I must say,’ said the tall, handsome vet who was examining the spaniel.
I laughed. ‘That’s not what the last vet said.’ The last vet sacked me after I asked to see my dog’s notes.
After a long and arduous battle with corporate vetdom, I made my way down south to a proper country practice and a chap recommended by my horse vet. He was old-fashioned, I was assured.
An old-fashioned vet simply means a vet who will make a diagnosis by using his expertise and experience, causing minimal distress to the animal, and not charging you many, many thousands for high-tech invasive testing that will get you no further forward.
I could pay a specialist to scan, biopsy and aspirate every lump and bump in my dog until she gave up the will to live. Or I could allow a man who has seen it all to examine her, take a history, do blood tests, X-ray her, weigh up the possibilities and give me his best guess.
Because the real problem is not the money. The real problem is that if a specialist found conclusive proof of malignancy, he would then have campaigned to do some very distressing things to her that would probably have failed. They rarely last long after the trauma and the chemotherapy. So around £10,000 to give my dog the worst few months of her life as an end?
Who would do that? I told this old-fashioned vet to do what he could reasonably do in-house. It didn’t take long, and the dog wasn’t distressed by it.
The answer came back as we had suspected. It was probably this rather than that. If it was that, then no need to poke her about anyway, but if it was this, then there was nothing you could reasonably do about it.
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