You Can’t Just Take It On The Chin-Chilla

(It’s a Saturday evening. We are at home trying to have a relaxed evening when our chinchilla starts having a seizure. She has had them before; her liver is severely damaged because of pain medication she was on some years before. Our vet told us that if she had a seizure again, we would have to put her to sleep. Because the cramps stopped after about an hour and a half the last time this happened, we decide to wait and hope she’ll get better soon. But after two hours pass and there is no foreseeable recovery, we decide with a heavy heart that this will be her last evening. Because we don’t feel too comfortable driving to a vet with a wriggling chinchilla in our hands, we start looking for an emergency vet who does home visits, to have her put to sleep. I find one and give the telephone number to my dad. He puts the phone on loudspeaker so we can help him explain.)

Vet: “[Vet].”

Dad: “[Dad] speaking. Good evening. We are having problems with our chinchilla. It is having—”

Vet: *interrupting* “I’m not handling emergencies anymore. Call [Animal Clinic], instead.”

Dad: “They don’t offer emergency services anymore. Please, we just need to have it—”

Vet: *interrupting again* “Go and call [Animal Clinic]. Good night.” *hangs up*

(We just looked at each other in disbelief. Desperate to relieve our poor pet, we had no other choice but drive over 20 miles to a different vet that had emergency services, in the middle of the night, in a snowstorm, with a severely cramping chinchilla in our hands. To this day, I can’t believe that a vet, who explicitly offers emergency services on both his website and answering machine, refused to even listen to what we wanted.)