Medical Madness, Cat Guts and Dog Butts
It's amazing what us humans will endure to forestall death. In just the last month, for instance, I've had a physical therapy (PT) session for a bad back, gotten a pap smear and today, the beloved mammogram and an eye test for glaucoma.
And I'm not even 50.
It just happens that I have two older sisters who are nurses. Every time someone in the family gets something I get a warning to check this or that even if I'm not symptomatic. It's preventive, they say.
Next month's feature is even worse. A colonoscopy. For the uninitiated, a colonoscopy is a procedure in which some kind of camera on a piece of tubing, of sorts, is shoved up the hind end. The purpose is to check for polyps (like what Reagan had) and make sure there's no cancer nasties. (We can send people into the universe, build complex systems and clone sheep, but we don't have any better ways to do this? Go figure.)
Adding insult are the pre-appointment requirements. You can't eat for a day ahead of time. Even before that you have to keep foods with seeds, like strawberries, out of your diet because the seeds clog up the camera. Although you don't eat, you ARE required to take a host of laxatives that will, ahem, keep you going.
Once you're cleaned out and starving, you supposedly get an anesthetic so you're in a "twilight" sleep, an unfortunate term given the once-popular focus of the frightening TV series known as The Twilight Zone. We'll see.
My pets have gotten in on the medical madness, too. Our kitty Simone recently swallowed something that didn't mix well with a hairball and the resolution required a $500 bowel surgery. Ouch.
Not to be upstaged, our Pom Celine had a ruptured anal gland. Apparently this is common in small dogs, particularly less active ones. It was her second one. Cha-ching.
The anal gland problem can be averted, according to the vet, with a better dog diet, more exercise and the regular "milking" of the dog's gland, located on either side of the anus. We've tried diet and exercise. The vet can milk the gland for a price. Could I watch, I inquired, so that I might be able to deal with the anal glands at home?
Sure, said the vet, but most people don't want to do it. On small dogs the milking process needs to be done from the INSIDE.
Lovely.
Obviously I'll be scheduling Celine for the anal gland process in late July. After all, I'll remind her, it's preventive.