Tuesday was a pretty calm day at work. I had an urgent care scheduled for about 5 pm, but they ended up going to the wrong clinic. Oh well, I thought. At least I can get out of work a little early and run some errands before I need to help out at my sons' soccer practice.
As I was getting ready to leave, one of my techs came into my office. There's a walk-in injured kitten. Can you see it? Of course, I said, calculating how long it would take vs. when I needed to be at practice. There should still be time.
The poor 4 month old kitten had been found trapped under the owner's tool box for almost 24 hours. The owner heard a crash the night before, but didn't get out of bed to investigate. Then he went to work the next morning without thinking about the kitten, and didn't realize something was amiss until he came home from work and Kitten didn't greet him at the door.
Kitten (not his real name. Plus, I like calling all kittens "Kitten") had a broken leg. Worse, it was his femur (the long bone that comes out of the hip socket). The bone was literally folded into a 90 degree angle. This type of fracture really requires surgery. I gave the owner an estimate of $2500-3000 to have an orthopdedic surgeon repair the leg. That was completely out of the question. Well, I've repaired a few broken bones in my career, plus the jaw repair I did last week got me all revved up, so I told the owner I could do the surgery myself (albeit, I am certainly no expert) for about $1600-1700. Still out of the question. You see, Doc, I'm in construction and the economy's been real bad, as you know. Plus, I pay too much for child support. I'm living in an apartment with my uncle here, who's been coming to your vet clinic for years. Can you work out a payment plan or something?
That's where I get into trouble. Always a sucker for a sob story. But not too much of a sucker. Yes, I replied, but I need 50% down before I do the surgery, then you can pay off the rest. I can also look into finding some charity funds, but that would only amount to a few hundred dollars.
He got on the phone with a few people, including his kids. They all decided that they really couldn't afford any surgery. Crap. Now what? Well, it is not recommended, but he is a young cat, and he may heal with just a splint. Not ideal, but it's better than nothing. Go for it, the owner said.
As I reduced the fracture and rigged some kind of traction-producing spint, I could hear the owner in the waiting room on the phone with his kids again. It sounded like they wanted to put Kitten to sleep. Well, there's no way I would allow that. He's such a young cat! With a possibly fixable problem! My mind started to race, thinking through all of my options, the main one being having the owner surrender the cat, me fixing the leg for free, and our clinic adopting him out. I've done it before, I'll likely do it again many times in my career.
In the end, the owner elected to keep the kitten. I was pretty impressed with how my splint turned out, and I hope he does come back for his weekly rechecks. And I doubly hope that Kitten's leg heals at least a little straight.
The owner also only paid about $100 of his $300 bill for the visit (he wrote a promisorry note for the rest).
I was also a half hour late for soccer practice.
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