Day at the vet’s

I spent the morn­ing at the vet’s with Mac Our Dog, and it was a par­tic­u­larly busy morn­ing there, with the recep­tion­ist at sixes and sev­ens, and though she was try­ing her humanly (and doggedly and cat­tedly) best to cope, Mac and I had to wait about an hour before we saw the vet, and when we did, the con­sul­ta­tion rooms were all full so the vet actu­ally came out to the recep­tion area to see Mac.

Which was good of course, because Mac Our Dog has an under­stand­able fear of the con­sul­ta­tion rooms — he’s pretty happy in the recep­tion area because he thinks it’s a won­der­ful place full of other peo­ple and ani­mals. But once he’s in a con­sul­ta­tion room, mem­o­ries of nee­dles and other cold and painful instru­ments assault his senses and he’s so stressed out you want to look for dog­gie cig­a­rettes for him to calm his nerves.

The good thing with the wait was that Mac Our Dog got to make lots of friends (and piss some of them off with his over-friendliness), most notably a Eng­lish Bull­dog whose first action upon see­ing Mac was a play-bow, (an invi­ta­tional ges­ture to play — for those not in the know) which drove Mac nuts — which meant that Mac next attempted to hump the (male) bulldog.

If you’re unfa­mil­iar with Mac Our Dog, here’s where I tell you that Mac Our Dog humps every­thing that moves, although he has a pref­er­ence for human legs.

The bull­dog wasn’t the least bit offended by Mac’s for­ward­ness, and I was afraid he was going to be mauled or at least severely barked at. But no. The bull­dog attempted to return the com­pli­ment instead, and what ensued was a merry dance of dogs, han­dlers and leashes, much to the delight of the dozen peo­ple who had been wait­ing half the morn­ing to see the vet.

Stand­ing for a long time next to me wait­ing to get the atten­tion of the recep­tion­ist was a cou­ple in their 60s car­ry­ing a small ani­mal in a bag which upon some con­ver­sa­tion revealed itself to be a five year old rab­bit with a large tumour on its chest.

Lucky The Rabbit’s gone under the vet’s knife a few months pre­vi­ously to remove sev­eral sim­i­lar tumours, and his bald patch from that surgery hasn’t even had time to grow back. But his dot­ing own­ers just want to make sure he’s ok, and don’t see them­selves as hav­ing any other choice than fork­ing out another thou­sand bucks to get Lucky’s tumours out.

“It’s between his arms”, the cou­ple cor­rected me in Can­tonese when I sug­gested to them that the tumour being between his front legs would pose prob­lems with Lucky’s movements.

“He’s very “kuai”, and sits down with us to watch tv every day”, says Aun­tie, who also tells me Lucky was found down­stairs of their flat, aban­doned by his pre­vi­ous owners.

“If we don’t let him have surgery, then we don’t know what to do” she says, as the recep­tion­ist finally calls for me and Mac to get our pre­scrip­tion and bill.

Uncle just looks at Lucky and very gen­tly strokes him from behind his bunny ears while Mac goes nuts at the sight of two Shi-Tzus being slung from the shoul­ders of another irate owner who’s been kept wait­ing for most of the morn­ing as well.