We need $9,000 or we’re not going to wake the vet.
Things were getting serious between my girlfriend and I, we had dogs together. It was 1am Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend and we had just finished packing to meet her family for a week long vacation. I had let my 1 year old Great Dane outside to potty one last time before bed, but he wasn’t waiting at my back door like I expected.
I found him on the ground in the backyard, where he had literally laid down to die. He had what’s known as bloat (torsion). A condition not uncommon to his breed where the stomach fills with gas and then twists. It’s life threatening and the time you have to save them is measured in minutes not hours.
“We need $9,000 or we’re not going to wake the vet”
He was going to need emergency surgery, observation, medication, a procedure to prevent it from happening again and it was all going to happen at middle-of-the-night-on-a-holiday-weekend pricing. I wasn’t even aware of pet insurance at the time. So, my choices were to put this enormous bill on multiple credit cards or they were going to put him down.
He went on to live for 10 years!
Which is not too bad for a dog his size. He was my best buddy and we had a blast together. But that wasn’t our last vet encounter. He had a range of unrelated on-going issues. Skin allergies. Ear problems. A rare (for his breed) condition which caused bleeding from… well, you don’t want to know.
Procedures, allergy medications, the occasional steroid, alternative protein diets… did you know there’s dog food made out of kangaroo meat?
The vet bills kept coming. And, without pet insurance, we paid them, out of pocket, every time. Because that’s what you do for loved ones. On occasion, usually after one of these events, I would sit down beside him on the couch, give him a big hug, and whisper ever so gently “you could’ve been a boat.”
That girlfriend of mine? She’s my wife now. The Cavalier King Charles she got early in our relationship is still with us, and outside of her getting a little bossy in her old age (The dog! Not the wife!) has had virtually no health issues this whole time.
When I was considering pet insurance for her, I asked the question “you know, she’s an old dog, in the event of something like cancer we probably wouldn’t pay for like chemo, right?” The look my wife gave me told me everything I needed to know. I bought the pet insurance.
Patrick Thompson – Fort Worth, TX