Emergency Veterinary Clinic

There's something wrong with Fluffy, our eldest cat. He seems fine, and it isn't as though he's acting any different, but for two nights running we've found pools of urine containing traces of blood, and Fluffy is the main suspect. Bess is so worried that we take him to the emergency veterinary clinic. It's seven in the evening, Saturday night.

Fluffy - which is his nickname - is about nine, maybe ten. His actual name is Scarface - chosen by the boy after his class learned about some similarly named Native American hero at school - but I've never been able to bring myself to address him as such because it sounds pompous and pretentious; and he is, by some definition, my best friend.

The internet is full of persons who routinely pour scorn on those of us who like cats. Apparently it means we are emotional weaklings, tantamount to adults who coo over stuffed toys and who probably watch weepy films with our understanding, sensitive partners when we could be out killin' sump'n with a gun in the good honest company of a pit bull or similar. I find it difficult to take such inane Nietzschean bleatings seriously. Anyone cracking jokes about drowning cats in sacks of bricks or quipping that our latest batch of kittens would make ideal bar snacks for their dog can similarly fuck off too. You're not funny. You're just a fucking twat.

I spend more time with cats than I do with human beings. I feel I have come to understand them fairly well. We remain different species and so have variant priorities, but we nevertheless communicate regardless of their inability to either speak or understand English. There are cable channels full of admittedly often twee documentaries about animal companionship, goats who hang out with a favourite horse, the dog which has raised a litter of baby bunnies as its own, and so on. It no longer seems meaningful to regard myself as superior or senior simply by virtue of opposable thumbs and the fact of my traipsing to the store to buy cat food. I look after them, I enjoy their friendship, and that is more than enough. They're more like small people who share our home, and I have achieved more meaningful exchanges with my cats than I have with the majority of human beings I've met, because the simple fact of a common language has no bearing on the quality of that which is communicated. Fluffy's happiness is therefore important to me.

Fluffy doesn't much like being in the cat carrier, and is loudly expressing his reservations. This is where the absence of a common language is particularly unfortunate, and there's very little I can do to put him at ease.

We answer questions at the reception desk. Yes, we've been here before, specifically when Holly broke her leg. The treatment ended up costing six-thousand dollars so we remember it well.

We take a seat and wait as instructed.

An assistant comes to escort Fluffy to the surgery, to where the vet will take a look at him.

We continue to wait in the reception area. There's a flat screen TV on the wall showing Saturday Night Live, one of the episodes which is mostly gales of laughter greeting nothing I actually understand or find funny. Ten minutes pass, then twenty.

We are called into one of the smaller rooms. The vet will be with us in just a moment, the assistant tells us before leaving us alone. Opposite the door through which we were admitted is a second door leading through to the surgery. We can hear Fluffy meowing in distress somewhere in the building, a plaintive wail every ten seconds or so. The room is a little warmer than I like and we don't even have the television as a distraction.

Last time we took Fluffy to the vet, he wailed and meowed and then magically transformed into the world's most sociable cat once the vet showed up. His meowing therefore indicates that he's still in the cat carrier, waiting his turn.

The veterinarian comes in after about twenty minutes, asks the same questions we've already answered, and then talks about what she's going to do and what she will look for as though seeking our approval for this proposed course of action. I don't understand why she's telling us this instead of just getting on with it. We ourselves have no actual veterinary training, which is why we came here seeking the expertise of someone who does; and twenty fucking minutes is not in just a moment.

She will be back in just another couple of minutes, she tells us.

We are alone again, Fluffy distantly wailing through the walls of the building. The proposed couple of minutes, once counted, come to around thirty. I'm not happy.

The veterinarian returns and tells us that Fluffy has a small bladder, an ambiguous statement which we later take to mean that his bladder presently has limited capacity due to being mostly taken up by a growth. She doesn't actually use the word cancer, but she doesn't need to. She talks about treatments which, by her own admission, aren't likely to have much effect. She discusses the cost of these treatments, effecting a weird pantomime of how we're all in this together and why oh why do vets charge so much as she rolls her eyes and sighs at the injustice of medical bills. Amongst all of this blather is the implication that Fluffy has a growth. Our veterinarian is unable to be any more specific, because if it is cancer, it may be of the kind which crumbles when manhandled, making it more likely to spread, leaving it all the more difficult to treat. In other words, we're not going to check for cancer in case it's cancer and the investigative procedure gives him cancer, which he probably already has.

We just want to take him home by this point. Fluffy has had a good ten years and is presently still fine. We're not going to pay thousands of dollars for a treatment which will extend his life by months at the most, has no guarantee of working, and will additionally cause him further distress. It's hard enough ejecting him from the bedroom before we go to bed. Chemotherapy would finish him off.

We just want to take him home by this point, but if we wait just a few more minutes, they'll bring him out to us and sort out some antibiotics in case the thing we can't yet name is infected in any way.

We sit in the waiting room for what feels like an hour.

The receptionist resembles Chassie Tucker from At Home with Amy Sedaris. Each time I catch sight of her forearm I think why doesn't she get that fucking thing removed?, and each time I realise that it isn't a birthmark but a really shitty tattoo, a big dark splotch which only resembles a rose if you get close. She has other tattoos of the kind suggesting a kid without much of an attention span absently doodling on himself with a biro during a particularly boring lesson - I Love You, amongst other heartfelt sentiments. I'm sure she's wonderful but everything is annoying me right now.

Elsewhere in the reception area, a teenager gets excited as the flat screen fills with some generic autotuned superstar singing a sappy song, Girl, You're My Girl, Girl or something of the sort. The artist accompanies himself on a glittering piano. The teenager sings along, not in the least self-conscious. She knows all of the words.

We are customers, and medicine - whether human or animal - is a business. If its custodians cared so much as they clearly would like to have us believe, the charges wouldn't be anything like so arbitrary - two hundred for the consultation, three for the treatment, another two for something else they've just cooked up which hasn't entailed any financial outlay on their part; but they'll charge because they can. I already understood this to be how it worked, so it isn't a revelation.

This latest instalment of just a few more minutes is actually forty. We're called into another room because they're just going to bring our cat so we can take him home. Fifteen minutes later I open the inner door to the surgery. I see three members of staff doing something or other, a row of cages, no-one actually paying attention to me.

'Any danger of getting our cat back?' I ask with considerable restraint, 'It's been fifteen minutes, which definitely seems a lot longer than we're just going to get him.'

The three look at me but say nothing.

The veterinarian reappears. 'I'll be just a moment,' she says.

Five minutes later we are reunited with Fluffy. He's meowing a lot. He's not happy. None of us are.

A young man with a beard intones instructions for care of sick animals from a sheet of paper as though we'll be unable to read it ourselves. Few of the instructions apply to Fluffy. Eventually he gives us the promised antibiotics.

We leave. It's been almost three hours since we got here.

We don't know how long Fluffy has left, but he's happy right now, and obviously not in any pain. We've looked up the statistics and can't rule out the possibility that he may last a long time. It could be benign, or he could have just months left. We don't know.

Worth every fucking penny.

I think of all the poisonous shitheads who'll still be walking around oblivious for decades to come, and yet somehow the clock is ticking for my cat.

It's too much to have to think about.