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By Linda Flanagan
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When my son flopped down on my bed with tears in his eyes, I knew I was in trouble. "Mom, one of my baby rats needs to see the vet," he said. A week before, the female rat—way too young, in my naive view, to be sexually active—he had brought home from the pet store had given birth to 10 hairless babies, each the size of a pistachio. One baby was in distress: a teeny hair, invisible to the naked eye, had wrapped around its toe and cut off circulation. A local veterinarian could see him/her immediately. Ninety minutes and $85 later, we returned home with our recovering patient, hair gone. Just apply Neosporin to the infected toe, the vet said. But keep an eye on the injury; if it gets worse, we might need to amputate.
Leave aside, please, the issue of why any mother would let her child purchase a pet rat. (In addition to dogs and cats, we've also been through a chinchilla, three goats, a horse, a couple of sheep, three leopard geckos, one tortoise, six hamsters, and too many fish to count.) What happened to the days when taking care of a household pet meant an annual visit to the local vet and a simple backyard burial when things went awry? Thanks in large part to new technologies—as well as to animal owners' persistent demands for better care—pets now are eligible for many of the same lifesaving treatments as humans.
Ten minutes from my home, Murray Hill Veterinary Associates in New Providence, New Jersey, relies on an $85,000 digital X-ray machine to diagnose ailing cats and dogs. If the X-ray proves inconclusive, despite the machine's ability to change exposures and play with parameters, vets use ultrasounds to uncover the problem. A heart monitor ($6,000) and surgical instruments made for humans are used during surgery. The equipment proved critical for Clover, a sick young tiger cat with a rubber nugget stuck in his small intestine. An X-ray didn't identify the object—just as it wouldn't spot the usual suspects pets ingest, including corncobs, socks, or "somebody's underwear they've swallowed," says Chris Bukata, a director in the practice—but an ultrasound did. After surgery, Clover rolled around in his cage, mischievous and bored.
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When the sophisticated offerings of even the best local vets aren't enough, pet owners can turn to university teaching hospitals and referral centers of veterinary specialists for intensive care. The UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine in California, for example, can treat pets for kidney failure (renal dialysis and transplantation), periodontal disease (root canals, teeth extractions), cataracts and glaucoma (surgery), cancer (chemotherapy, radiation, radioactive iodine therapy, surgery), and brain tumors. Stem-cell procedures are also available, as well as DNA testing for dogs and cats to rule out inheritable diseases. Pet owners can receive counseling on the tests' outcome.
Along with veterinary hospitals in Japan, London, and Colorado, UC Davis also provides open-heart surgery for large dogs. Opening a dog's chest and repairing its heart requires a highly specialized veterinary team— including two surgeons and a half-dozen other technicians—who must be acutely knowledgeable about every step in the four-hour surgery. As for the procedure itself, it's "exactly the same as open-heart surgery in humans, down to the fact that we use exactly the same equipment and exactly the same materials," says Leigh Griffiths, the lead cardiac surgeon. The operation costs between $10,000 and $14,000.
Cosmetic surgery is also available for pets. Not all of it is strictly to improve looks: bulldogs with skin folds, for example, can develop dermatitis, so they benefit from having extra skin reduced or removed. Then there are testicular implants for neutered cats and dogs. Neuticles, manufactured by CTI Corp., are silicone testicles that willing vets surgically implant in an animal's scrotum during a neutering. Available in four models that vary in firmness, the artificial animal testicles are available in 25,000 veterinary clinics around the world, according to Neuticles.com, to help a pet "retain his natural look and self-esteem" and aid "in the trauma associated with neutering."
Love, affection, pride, vanity, guilt, and a touch of madness compel many of us pet owners to do what's medically possible for the creatures who depend on us for their well being. How else to explain rushing a rat to the vet? The little guy/gal made it, by the way, his tiny toe intact. And I'd do it again. Just this week our three-year old shelter cat, Rusty, received good news from his cardiologist. An echocardiogram ($375) revealed that Rusty's occasional panting and lying about were not due to heart disease, as feared, but rather to benign and treatable allergies. Or maybe just to his being a cat. Still, I worry about his bad teeth and worse breath, brought on by gingivitis. Dental work may be in order.
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