Playing God with cats and dogs

I’ve just got off the phone with the vet clinic that helps with our “more complicated than spay/neuter and vaccinate” cases. Later today I may get a call requiring me to decide whether a cat should live or die.

This is never an easy call. It particularly sucks when money is a big part of the equation.

Take this cat. I haven’t met her; a friend, who is associated with the pet rescue Kuja and I started last year, picked her up. She’s a sweet kitty, except when she’s not. Loving and affectionate, until she whirls around and bites or smacks you.

Also, she is ferocious in attacking other cats and dogs, so we can’t find her a foster home, and finding her a forever home is going to be hard.

All this makes her a challenge and a pain in the arse … but it’s not a reason to kill her. Instead, we sent her to the vet with a request for evaluation. Maybe she’s mean because she’s hurting, and we can fix the hurt and let her sweet self come out. Or maybe she’s sick in a way we can’t help, and we’d do best to end it for her without more pain.

I emailed the vet – because putting things in writing is the best way to ensure that all involved have the same information. Then I followed up with a call to ensure that they’d check their email. And now we wait.

This is what I asked them to do:

1. Sedate her. She can’t be properly examined without that.
2. Check her mouth. Her behavior suggests she’s in pain, and also she drools a lot. If her teeth are a really terrible mess that’s going to cost a fortune to fix, or if she has some condition that will continue to hurt her, euthanize.
3. Test her for FIV and FeLV (feline immunodeficiency virus and feline leukemia). These are incurable, highly contagious diseases. There are sanctuaries where infected cats can live together as long as their quality of life holds out, but that’s not an option for a highly territorial kitty, even if we could find one with room for her. So … if she’s infected, euthanize.
4. If her mouth is a reasonably simple fix, and she’s disease-free, she gets dental, spay and vaccinations … and, we hope, eventually a new home. In the meantime she’ll continue as an outdoor cat, cared for by her rescuer. Perhaps if her dental issues get fixed she’ll become a gentler, sweeter kitty, and bringing her in to live with other dogs and cats will be an option. That would also make her easier to rehome. One can hope.

Making these decisions is hard, and it’s harder knowing that, if we had more money, we’d simply fix her up and then figure out what to do next. And it’s hard not to feel guilty, knowing that if she were a dog we wouldn’t even be asking the question. For both Kuja and me, we care about cats and will try to help them … but dogs are people. You don’t order a person’s euthanasia unless you really and truly have no options.

Take Zeus, the German Shepherd the Hubbit and I took in last week. There were no questions, no discussion. I simply let Kuja know, “He needs a vet – I’m taking him to Urgent Care,” and she said, “Of course,” and that was that. Several hours and more than $400 later he was back home with a bucket on his head.

It helps that he’s the sweetest, most mellow German Shepherd I’ve ever known. It helps, but it’s not the reason. We’d have taken him in anyway.

It bewilders me, though, that a dog like this could be starved, apparently for most of his life, and then thrown from a moving vehicle onto a gravel road. Who does such a thing? How does a dog to whom such a thing is done continue to love and trust humans?

Zeus. The wounds on the outside are healing, and soon there won’t even be scars. On the inside there’s nothing but love, trust and gentleness. Well, except where Argos is concerned. All the German Shepherds I bring home hate Argos, because they try to get him to line up straight and … he’s a Malinois. Lining up straight simply isn’t on his itinerary.

In cases like this, I find I have to make up a story, just to try to make sense of it. So this is Zeus’ Story According to Belladonna:  He was bought as a puppy from a breeder who didn’t worry too much about bloodlines, but who probably didn’t let him go until he was old enough to leave his mom and his litter. While he was a puppy his family loved him and played with him, and there were probably other dogs in the family as well. But as he got older, he became an outdoor dog. Every day his food bowl was filled, but only with the cheapest food – Alpo or Old Roy – something that goes in, fills the belly for a little while, and passes through without leaving any nutrition behind. His coat got coarse and dry and sunk into the gaps between his bones, and he failed to grow as big as he should have.

Maybe his owner was old. Maybe they died or went into a home. However it went, something happened that separated him from the person who loved him – not enough to have him inside, or groom him, or feed him good quality food, but enough to win the whole of his big old Shepherd heart … Something happened, and he became the responsibility of someone else. Someone who didn’t want to be bothered with him. Someone who loaded him into the back of a vehicle, and drove down a country road, and then accelerated fast and gave him a shove and sent him flying onto gravel that tore the fur and skin off his face and neck, pitted his body and legs with puncture wounds. And then they drove away. And a few days later the Hubbit and I took him in.

It isn’t fair that he’s getting whatever he needs – treatment at the Urgent Care vet last week, dental care and a neuter last Monday, a visit to a groomer next week, and meanwhile a safe haven, affection, good food, a warm bed, and the certainty of a safe and loving home in time for Christmas. It isn’t fair that he’s getting all this just because he’s a German Shepherd, and the cat has to go through a series of steps in order to qualify to wake up from sedation this morning because she’s … just a cat.

Usually I like to end my posts with some sort of neat conclusion. This time I don’t have one. It isn’t fair, and I can’t do anything about it.

So I got phished

Well, that’s three hours of my life I won’t get back.

It’s my own fault. I was supposed to be Writing The Book, and instead I let myself be distracted by a [presumably fascinating, but I don’t really know, since I didn’t actually get to read it] article about how some stars appear to be older than the universe.

Suddenly this enormous red square bloomed on my monitor, and upon it a lot of words, the largest of which read MOZILLA FIREFOX CRITICAL ERROR. The gist of the subsequent, smaller words was that my computer was being hacked, my data was at risk, and I had to call the Microsoft help desk.

There was also a phone number.

Which I called.

Yes, really.

Look, that square? It was really red. Not a bright happy red, like cherries or a toddler’s cheeks on a cold day. It was a gory, gloomy sort of red, like old ketchup the morning after you brought dinner home in a paper bag because you’d had a shitty day and were too tired to cook, but you’re not a complete slob so you ate off plates, only you were too tired to wash up afterwards. And it took up the whole screen.

Anyway, the young man who offered was so helpful and sympathetic, and he explained that it was our “home network” that was infected, not just the computer. We don’t actually have a home network, as such … but I figured he meant the bad stuff was leaking in through the modem and into both the Hubbit’s and my computers and our smart phones.

Naturally, when he said he needed to access my computer over the internet in order to see what damage may have been done, I couldn’t wait to say yes.

Well, sort of. I did have a moment of sanity. You see, you have to hold down the Windows icon key on your keyboard and another key – I think “S” but not sure – and then a window pops up on your screen. And you type some things and click on things and then you have to input a special number, which the helpful person on the other end of the phone gives you. And then your computer asks you if you want to give that person permission to access your shit … and at that moment I did hesitate.

“Wait,” I said. “Give me a moment. I need to verify that you’re real.”

He was a little impatient, but polite. If he’d been more impatient and less polite he’d have lost me … but he was reassuring. He gave me his name and his employee number. So when Google didn’t immediately scream “SCAM!” I went ahead and clicked yes, and he was in. Then I sat and watched as he poked around my computer. It was a bit like having a plumber in to fix a leak and to do it they have to empty your sink and – oops – you have underwear soaking in there. I mean, my internet habits are boring (as is my underwear, to be honest) … but still.

Eww.

So then a display appeared on the screen, and it was this long list of attacks. More than 1,500 warnings (bright yellow) and error messages (bright red) zipped up the screen. My new friend tutted in my ear. “See?” he said. “This is just from this month. You’ve been under a heavy attack!”

“But what could anyone possibly want?” I asked plaintively. It’s not as though we have any serious money, or interesting secrets.

“Well,” he said. “They could be using your personal data to commit international fraud. See there?” He showed me columns where the action was headed “Local” and “Foreign”. “Or maybe they’re after your money. It doesn’t matter how much or how little it is – they want it all! Tut tut tut. This is terrible. I’m so sorry,” he said. Then he showed me where I had a trojan – only, he said, he couldn’t fix it. It wasn’t clear why not.

Helplessly I sat and watched file names scroll rapidly up my screen, and after a while he said he needed me to wait on hold for a minute or two while he spoke with his supervisor to try to figure out the best way to help me.

Well, waiting is boring. And since I wasn’t actually doing anything with my phone, I clicked over to Google again … and found … this.

Sigh.

So I ended the call and ignored his attempts to call back, and logged off my computer, and unplugged the modem just to be sure. And then I went and confessed to the Hubbit, who sighed and rolled his eyes but was otherwise forbearing. I figured out how to change the access to my computer, and I changed our most critical passwords. And then I called Microsoft – the real one, this time – and paid $99 for a year’s worth of technical support for all the internet devices in the House of Took. And after that I spent about an hour and a half on the phone with a very nice young man, who also requested permission to prowl around in my underwear computer, and while he was in there he did a whole lot of necessary housekeeping.

Which is something I didn’t get to do today, owing to spending the entire damn day on the computer – and not a fresh writerly word to show for it.

Except this post, of course. Does this count? Probably not … but it does make me feel better!

Have you ever been scammed? How stupid, exactly, did it make you feel?

 

 

Channeling my inner little old lady

So you know how sometimes you have to dial an 800 number, and from the first syllable emitted by the robot voice you can tell by the roiling in your gut and the pricking of your thumbs that this isn’t going to go well, but you persevere because you screwed up and now you’re in a panic?

And the reason you’re in a panic is that you’ve just woken up to the fact that your husband’s insurance has been blithely denying all the claims relating to his tractor accident? Okay, in all honesty I don’t know they were necessarily blithe about it. They may have been in ho hum mode, thinking about the past weekend or looking forward to the next one. No reason for me to presume there were any shrill cackles of banshee glee. Either way, to get back to my point…

What this means, in ordinary everyday terms, is that the giant wodge of papers covered with numbers and headed, reassuringly, “Explanation of benefits” and “This is not a bill”, which you’ve been ignoring because, seriously, who reads those things … but then you do, and HOLY CRAP!!

The actual wodge, artistically draped over a pile of fresh bills.

Oh – and I should mention that the reason you’re reading the wodge is that suddenly you’re getting actual bills – $1,814 for the emergency physician, who is the guy who essentially saved the Hubbit’s life, so it was totally worth it (most of the time, although maybe not so much when he refuses to wear his hearing aids) but, you know, on the other hand, you could do a lot with $1,814, if you had it. For example, that’s pretty much the cost of a pregnant cow around these parts.

But I digress. I was telling you about bills you might happen to receive following a major medical event.

Like $961 for the emergency hospital. You go “Ouch” because, after all, he was there for only a couple hours before they shipped him off to a hospital that was actually capable of keeping him alive – and then you look again and you realize the $961 is what’s left over after insurance kicked in $25,765 – and I mean, seriously, that’s more than $10,000 per hour! The Hubbit’s a smart guy who was highly qualified and certified up the wazoo back in his pre-retirement days, but no one ever thought he was worth that much back then! If they had, we’d probably be in ho hum mode at the sight of these numbers. Or maybe not, because … there’s more. So much more.

A whole sheaf of bills for the ambulance services that got him from home to the local emergency hospital, and from there to the bigger hospital in Spokane … and bills for the rehab facility, and the orthopedic clinic, and the imaging company, and the physical therapist. But that pile of bills is still smaller than the “explanation of benefits” wodge, so you start flicking through it, and you come across one for $25,765, which is the amount due for the local emergency hospital, and you realize that when the hospital sent you a bill for $981 they were (blithely?) assuming that the insurance company was going to pay – only this particular benefit explanation says, in a word, “Nope”. And you keep going and you find one for $99,285.97, which is just for that first day at the hospital in Spokane – less than a day – he arrived there after 6.00PM, for crying out loud. But that’s what it cost to make it so that he didn’t die right away.

You see that number? Someone tells me that’s my “total responsibility” – except that it isn’t, because this is only one of 55 pages of ridiculous numbers that came in a single envelope; other envelopes have come bearing additional pages – and all I can do is laugh. Shrug my shoulders. Vote for Bernie. Because this is absurd – not because magical medical technology isn’t worth what it costs, but because no individual human can or should shoulder such a responsibility.

And you look at it and you think, “Well, he’s alive. So there’s that.” But at the same time you realize your heart is going “Ofuckit Ofuckit Ofuckit” like The Little Engine That Could, after it made it to the top of the hill and headed down the other side and then gravity took over just as it noticed there was a wide, churning river at the bottom … and no bridge.

You know how that feels?

I really hope not, because if you’re taking the time to read this blog I like you, and I value you as an important source of warm fuzzies and endorphins, and I don’t want you either to plunge headfirst into a river or succumb to a heart attack.

Anyway, at that point, feelings aren’t really the issue. The issue is, what are you going to do? What I did was clutch the wodge in sweaty hands and take it to the Hubbit, and pick a fight with him about politics – his being conservative, and therefore opposed to state-funded universal healthcare. That urgent business having been satisfactorily concluded (it’s hard to concentrate on defending a philosophical point of view when your doting wife has just delivered a quarter million dollar-or-so whack upon your shiny pate), we agreed that there was no point in worrying about it, since payment was impossible. I promised to call the insurer on the next business day for a WT actual F conversation, organized the wodge into a neat stack (ordered by date and page number), put it on my desk, and promptly forgot about it.

I have an excuse. The Girl Child has been visiting and I’ve had coffee to drink and arguments to have and … oh, just generally more interesting things to do. Every few days a fresh bill would arrive, sometimes with a plaintive note scrawled across it from a medically-oriented bookkeeping person dismayed by the failure of the insurance to pay, and I would snicker at their naivete and rush out to suck down another coffee with the Girl Child. A couple included a form and a request that we complete it with the details of the “motor vehicle accident”, and I’d roll my eyes, because a tractor is not a motor vehicle, it’s farm equipment, and the reason I know this is that it’s not insured as a motor vehicle, so obviously it can’t be one! I’d add each bill to the growing pile on my desk and promise myself (and, occasionally, the Hubbit) to deal with the matter “tomorrow” – which, as we all know, is always a day away. Hooray for tomorrow!

Well, a couple days ago I was poking around on my desk and I came across a letter from the insurer dated April 12. It was addressed to “Dear Sir or Madam”, and expressed regret at our injury/accident and a wish for “good luck with your recovery”. There was also some reference to the need for a prompt reply.

Ofuckit Ofuckit Ofuckit.

They provided a post office box address, and a phone number.

I pondered my strategy while remembering how to breathe.

It was clear that a snail mail letter wouldn’t work. For one thing, my hands were trembling too much to type. Also, my grammatical synapses felt out of whack. And this wasn’t all bad. While tremor and grammatical uncertainty are a problem when one is wording a professional-sounding business letter, they can be helpful in presenting the persona of a slightly dotty and forgetful old lady.

I picked up my phone and dialed 1-800-ETC-ETRA – as provided at the end of the insurance company’s letter for the Other Party Liability office. A chirpy young woman answered, and introduced herself as Jessica. She asked for my name, and I gave it. With cheerful enthusiasm she expressed her eager willingness to help me. “But first,” she said, “I’d like to tell you about a great opportunity we can offer you.” Then she asked whether anyone in our household was over fifty years of age. I didn’t feel like listening to a sales pitch, but on the other hand she sounded so hopeful and eager that I decided to humor her. “Yes,” I said warily, “we’re both over fifty.” She launched into a description of a medical alert system the company was offering. She was clearly new to selling – she said “um” a lot, and a couple times she forgot to tell me something and had to backtrack, and although she was very sweet after a while I ran out of humor and cut her off.

That is, I tried to cut her off. “You know, I don’t want to waste your time. I really just want to deal with my query. Can you put me through to someone?” She ignored me. Just kept right on talking, rolling over me. “Hey!” I said. “Jessica, stop! I’m not interested!”

There was a pause, then she asked, “Would you like to talk to one of our representatives?”

“NO!” I shouted. “Just put me through to customer service!”

“Oh! Okay!” she chirped, perky as ever. I ground my teeth and breathed deeply, and a new voice came on. This sounded like a more mature, experienced woman. She also expressed a desire to help me – but first, she said, she’d like to offer me a great opportunity. Did I have a cellphone? I exploded – I was totally and irredeemably out of humor by then – and blow me down, she also just rolled straight into her pitch.

It finally dawned on me that she wasn’t human, and nor was Jessica. Nor was the woman who invited me to sign up for a roadside assistance program, or the friendly young man who wanted to know whether we had a TV. They were all, every one of them, bots. Not even real artificial intelligence.

The fact that Jessica had fooled me was profoundly embarrassing!

So, anyway, by the time the fourth robot voice came on I gave up on the number provided in the letter. If you’re wondering why I didn’t hang up sooner, it was because I kept hoping for a human! There comes a point in any venture where you’ve invested so much time and emotional energy that you can’t stand to quit, in case you’re just one cuss word away from Nirvana.  Come to think of it, that’s probably also why I keep buying Lotto tickets.

Anyway, eventually I called the number on the back of the Hubbit’s medical insurance card. That got me through to someone who could find no record that I had authority to speak with them on his behalf, so we got to have one of those super-fun threesomes that so enrich the lives of partners of the hearing impaired. You know how those go: you turn on the speaker phone so you can both hear, and he leans over the phone, breathing heavily into your ear, and then the person on the other end says something and he says, “Huh? Whut?” So you repeat it, and he loudly and clearly enunciates his response, and … rinse and repeat, for however long it takes. In this case it took a while, and the grand finale was when she read back a contract, and every time he started to say “Huh? Whut?” I’d frantically flap my hands in his face, because we did NOT need to be interrupting an electronic recording of a legal document. Eventually he got to say the required legally binding words, and he was given leave to kiss the telephone, and they were married. Or something like that.

We all heaved a sigh of relief and the Hubbit trundled off to play with his tractor, leaving me to explain the difference between a tractor (wheeled farm equipment) and a vehicle. “Oh,” she said, “No problem. You just need to speak with the Other Party Liability department. I’ll give you the number.”

“Oh no you don’t!” I exclaimed. “If the number you’re planning to give me is ETC-ETRA, forget it. That’s the number I called before this one and it connects directly to the fifth circle of Hell!”

There was a slightly stunned silence. “Are you sure you dialed the right number?” she asked. I said I was, and launched into a tirade about companies that infest the ether with robo-voices and inflict sales pitches on helpless little old ladies (at this point I remembered to insert a slight tremor into my voice) who are exhausted by caring for their injured and aging spouses, and also potentially facing homelessness because of denied claims and unpayable medical bills in a world that keeps voting for Damn Capitalists who refuse to support Medicare For All and just want us all to die in penury..

She offered to connect me directly to someone in the Other Party Liability department, and I said that would be acceptable provided she could vouch that they were human.

So that’s what she did, and this time I remembered right from the start of the conversation to quaver and dodder and make reference to how slowly old men heal after running over themselves with heavy equipment (which is not the same thing as a vehicle), and how stressful that was, and how difficult it was to remember everything, especially when we’d dealt with all sorts of paperwork at the hospital and I’d no idea there was more. I should mention that by this time I was tired, which meant I had to pause and say um occasionally while I thought about what to say, and I tended to forget details, which made it necessary to keep backtracking and repeating elements of my story, and all I’ll say about this particular young woman is that she sounded perky enough but she didn’t exhibit much empathy or compassion. She abruptly cut me off. “Was he at work when the accident happened?” I explained that he was loading up the tractor to get feed to the animals, right here at our little farm, and that he’s been retired for more than fifteen years now. She interrupted me again. “Okay,” she said.

“Um,” I said. “So what happens now?”

“I’ll adjust the record and pass it along to the appropriate department,” she said.

“But what do I have to do?” I quavered

“Nothing,” she said.

And that was it. What had been building up to be a fabulous blog post on the fundamental awfulness of the American medical insurance system fizzled with a soft pop. Which doesn’t mean I won’t still write it … but maybe not today.

Instead I thought I should write a blog post on the fundamental awfulness of insurance companies that use robots to try to sell services to people who want to deal with serious business, so I decided to call back 1-800-ETC-ETRA and find out just how many exciting new opportunities they’d offer me before connecting me to a human. I looked up the number on the insurance company letter.

That’s when I realized that the number they’d provided was in fact 1-866-ETC-ETRA. The 1-800 version of the number connects to a company that sells panic buttons, roadside assistance, and similar products.

So what the heck am I supposed to blog about now?

Please talk to me! What do you think about the cost of healthcare, and how it should be funded? Do you talk to robots on the phone, and do you find it reassuring or terrifying when they sound human? How do you decide what to blog about?