The lady came in, put the transport basket on my treatment table and exploded. “That emergency doctor wanted to put Tommie to sleep, but of course I didn’t do that,” she said. “We did a healing and I gave him iron tablets for the anemia.”
In recent years I have heard more often that pets are taken care of by paranormal healers. Doesn’t help, doesn’t hurt, I guess.
At least Tommie didn’t look bad for an old cat who was given up by a colleague two weeks ago. On the contrary: apart from a little mucus from the nose and a heart murmur, I couldn’t find anything with him. As I bent over the cat, the lady bent over me. “They wanted to put him to sleep, but that was not necessary, was it? He eats well, then he is not sick, is he? He has had a healing and iron tablets. What did you think helped? Is he still anemic, like the ER said?”
“We are going to draw blood,” I said.
Waiting for the results of the blood test took a few minutes.
“Do you know what an aura is, doctor?” asked the lady. Yes I knew that. “Do you know that you can also see them in photos?”
“Eh, yeah?”
“Do you want to see that?”
She pulled out a photo. It showed an elderly lady on a couch. “This is my mother. Her knee was completely worn out and there was nothing the doctors could do for her. This photo was taken just after a healing was done for her knee. See that spot near her knee? That’s an aura.”
I wanted to ask if a knee also has an aura, but I didn’t.
“She never had any problems with her knee again,” she said and put the photo away.
The blood test was done. Oddly enough, the cat was only mildly anemic and all other values were good.
The lady reacted elated when I told her.
“I knew it!” she cried. “I knew it! What do you think helped, doctor: the healing or the iron tablets?”
I tried to temper her enthusiasm. “There is still a slight anemia and we need to investigate that heart murmur as well.”
“Yes, yes, yes, good thing I didn’t put him to sleep, eh?”
I couldn’t deny that. “Let’s treat the respiratory infection first and then check the anemia in two weeks,” I suggested.
“How could that emergency doctor tell me to put him to sleep? Was that research good?” I didn’t immediately have an answer to that.
Chris Polanen wrote the novels Water Hunter and Centaur.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on August 22, 2023.
2023-08-21 11:57:34
#cat #didnt #sleep
