Robot Claw

The other week, the Great Queen went to the vet for some dental work. Who is this ‘Dodongo’ you ask? Well here she is, in all her glory:

Cat dentistry is (apparently) an “important but often overlooked” element of the total cat health regime. We often overlook it, and I can probably count on one hand the number of times we’ve sent a cat in for dentistry. In fact our beloved Ziggi once had a tooth fall out (yes, I found it on the floor one day). It bothered him not at all, but may have been due to us overlooking as aspect of his regime.

(And believe me, that cat had a regime!)

So our local vet (name withheld to protect the innocent) was having a cat dental month in February and we were suckered in decided to send Daisy along for a checkup.

Not to go off on too much of a tangent, but I went to the dentist myself the other day. I had a checkup, teeth cleaning, x-rays and a small battery of other tests such as ‘oral cancer’ and some sort of weird overbite thingy. My teeth were fine (as they always have been) and everything went well. Total cost: $96 (paid for by our insurance). I go every six months, and usually it’s a bit cheaper since they don’t do x-rays every time.

Anyway GQD went to the vet as well. She had a checkup, teeth cleaning, x-rays and perhaps a few other small things done. Total cost: $300…

…

In case you missed that the first time, the total cost was:

$300 God Damn Dollars!

Oh, but we got a big bag of free dental health cat food that we obviously paid for, some free toothpaste that probably cost us $20, a kit bag of free food samples including stuff for dogs we instantly threw away and some free flouride water supplement for cats that had a warning label on it so scary I wouldn’t feed it to Idi Amin.

< Note the flavour!

In short, we were ripped off north, south, east and west got good value for money.

What’s that you say? How do we even know they did what they said they did?

Well how’s this for proof (click them to enlarge):

Yep, they gave us printouts of the x-rays (and probably charged us $15 for the service)!

Yes yes, I can hear you all now: “Stop complaining Sir! You live a profligate lifestyle!” (that was a shoutout to Prof MacD if she reads this :))

But as Ueshiba never said: “Even the rich man values a single grain of rice.”

What that means in English is, that the god-damn $300 spent on Duckaluck’s teeth are better measured as the loss of (say) 60 used gamebooks on ebay. Or 42 Star Wars action figures. Or 5 Ps3 games. Or… well or just about anything!

Daisy I love you. You’re my Greet Queen and your fantastic. But after forking over $300 for your dentistry… well then after doing that my mental image of you is less the image at the top of this post and more like this one here: