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The blood-pressure reading was fine, and now the veterinary anesthesiologist picked up a small electric clipper to clear a patch of fur from my dog's foreleg, just above the paw. This was too much. Stoic through even the tightening of the blood-pressure cuff, he now began to quaver in a way I'd never seen."He's probably just picking up on your anxiety," the vet tech said. I nodded and tried harder to act like a $1,400 veterinary brain scan under general anesthesia was no big deal.
But the dog knew better, and so did I. Looking down at my companion for more than half of my adult life, I thought, I hope this is the right thing.
Bear was a mutt who looked a lot like a black Lab, until you stood him next to one. He was 14, and he'd survived falls through pond ice, fracases with raccoons, tangles with barbed wire, transatlantic air travel and even a bounce off the bumper of a moving car. Nothing fazed him, except thunder and, oddly, brooms. It was part of his charm.
But now Bear was sluggish. He had loss of sensation in his paws, and was running mysterious fevers. And he wasn't getting better. The vet diagnosed a thyroid condition, but beyond that, he was stumped. He sent us to a veterinary neurologist, who, suspecting a brain tumor, had sent us here, to the IAMS Pet Imaging Center in Vienna, Virginia.
"An MRI for a dog?" said an acquaintance. "You're kidding, right?"
I was having trouble wrapping my brain around the idea myself. I'd always been a fan of the approach enshrined in James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small, where the vet is kindly and competent and does things the old-fashioned way.
And now we were in the middle of a $1,400 brain scan. And if there was a tumor? How would I know how much treatment was right and how much was too much? And how much could I afford? Already we were flying on credit cards; I'd just refinanced my house to pay off debt, and now the numbers were rising again.
The waiting room was full of other people seeking similarly sophisticated treatments. We were all locked inside our own compartments of worry. Far be it for me to make waves by asking whether anyone else was as surprised by these prices as I was.
At the country's leading veterinary teaching hospitals, surgeons now routinely perform procedures that once were reserved just for racehorses and champion purebred dogs: kidney transplants, chemotherapy, hip-joint replacements.
"Pet owners began to ask, 'If medical science can remove my cataracts, why can't it take out my dog's?' " says Jack Walther, past president of the American Veterinary Medical Association. "And the answer was, we could. We'd just never been asked."
Now many people think of their animals as members of the family. Pets are living longer too. From 1987 to 2000, the life spans of the average dog and cat increased by more than one-third, thanks to better food and widespread vaccination. But longer life means a jump in the diseases of old age -- cancer, organ failure, arthritis. With the family pet now ensconced on the bed instead of in the yard, medical problems are easier to spot and harder to ignore. The average veterinary bill -- which doubled from 1991 to 2001, to $91 -- reflects this.
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