Category: Thoughts

Life’s Unfair

When I was a child I used to complain, the way kids do, that things that hadn’t gone my way were just not fair.” And my father, of course, would often respond that life’s not fair.

But once he said something else that has stuck with me. He said life’s not fair, and it’s usually unfair in your favor. That is, not just “stop whining” but “count your blessings and stop whining.”

My family has lost some deeply beloved members recently – a great-uncle and a great-aunt – and it seems terribly unfair that they were taken from us. And so I think back about what my father told me.

It’s unfair to lose someone so great, that you love so much. But it’s also unfair that other families don’t get to have relatives that great, and don’t get to know the relatives they do have for as long as we got to know ours. It’s unfair that other families can’t travel to a funeral to comfort each other in times of loss.

To lose someone you love is not just a reminder that life is capricious, but often that it has also given you far more than it has taken away.

We have lost people, and it hurts. But the inverse of that hurt is knowing how rich our lives have been for knowing them.

What do we do today that will look as bad to future generations as slavery looks to us?

I saw Django Unchained last week, and there’s one moment that’s stuck with me more than a lot of the more horrific ones. It’s the moment one of the slave drivers in Django says “I’m a good guy!” as he’s gunned down.

It reminds me of a question I’ve seen posed before, although I can’t remember where or by whom.

You see, people tend to think of themselves in very positive terms. We all like to think we’re good guys, basically. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most white Americans in the 1800s believed themselves to be good people. They felt that way even if they owned slaves, of benefitted from the slave economy. Today we wonder how they could have stood by and let the whippings and sales and rapes and murders continue one more day. We struggle to justify Thomas Jefferson’s accomplishments as a president, educator, architect, and statesman because of the fact that although he recognized the wrongness of slavery he nonetheless owned slaves.

So, it makes me wonder: What do we do today that future generations will condemn us for?

Is it eating meat? Is it destroying the air? Mass incarceration?

What horrible things are we doing at this very moment that is so wrong we will seem like incomprehensible monsters to our grandchildren?

For some reason I thought this was spam

My folks sent me this GED promotion site, with no commentary, and I thought their email account had been broken into. But when I asked them, they said no, it’s something we actually thought you’d like.

Sure enough, it’s an excellent education marketing project. It’s funny and engaging, and the celebrity pep talks might actually inspire more than a few adults without high school diplomas to go back and get their GEDs.

Neat.

Budgeting for Vet Emergecies

Cross-posted from blog.saltmoney.org.

I never wanted to be the person who spent a ton of money on a pet. After all, as much as the Internet loves cats, providing world-class health care for kittens seems frivolous when actual human children can’t get clean water.

I never understood the sort of person who would spend a month’s pay or more to revive a sick and elderly animal. I figured if I had a pet, I’d take a hard look at the numbers, have my maximum, and not go over it.

Then my cat got sick, and I went way over budget.

DECLINING HEALTH

In my case, it began slowly. All cats throw up sometimes, but D’Artagnan, a.k.a. “Big D,” started doing it a lot. My wife and I noticed he looked a little thinner, but that’s not a bad thing for a 20-pound cat. And then he looked a lot thinner. He lost about 8 pounds—nearly a third of his body weight, or the equivalent of an entire average-sized cat.

His fur went dull, and he looked like a taxidermist had prepared him for mounting but forgotten the stuffing. You ever see those TV shows where a person loses 200 pounds and needs plastic surgery to remove the excess skin? He looked like that, only less life-affirming. We started calling him Skeletor.

The vet diagnosed hyperthyroidism and prescribed these chewable liver-flavored medicine treats twice a day. The diagnosis cost us a couple hundred bucks, and the medicine was about a dollar a day. He got better almost immediately, and we figured that was totally worth it.

Then he started fading again, and the vet suggested we add liver-flavored corticosteroid treats. Diagnosis and treatment cost about the same again, and again he revived almost immediately, even putting a little weight back on.

EMERGENCY

After about a year, we’d spent maybe $750 over and above the usual costs of cat ownership—food, litter, annual vaccines, and so forth. We didn’t mind. He was an exceptional cat, after all, and we could afford it. We set up a “Pets” budget on Mint.com, and it was all fine and manageable.

Then, last Friday evening, he seemed ill. Saturday, when the vet was closed, we noticed he wasn’t eating. Sunday, I went to check on him—he had urinated all over himself and our bed, and was struggling to breathe.

We spent the better part of Sunday at Boston’s 24/7 animal ER. They gave him oxygen for his labored breathing, electrolytes for his too-low potassium levels, IV fluids to flush out his inflamed kidneys, and insulin to reduce his elevated blood sugar. The vet said the kidneys might be inflamed because of an infection and chronic kidney disease. Or because of cancer. They’d need a biopsy to find out.

We decided against the biopsy and took him home.

WHERE THE MONEY WENT

I didn’t want the biopsy for several reasons, some of them simple and most of them not: I didn’t want to spend the money. I didn’t want to have someone cut yet another hole in my poor cat. We could find out by waiting: If it’s cancer, the antibiotics won’t work. Most of all, and maybe most upsetting, there’s not much point in knowing. If he’s got cancer, we probably won’t be able to afford to treat it.

D’Artagnan is at home now, and recovering well. We’ve got a table full of medication, including a bag of electrolyte solution we inject him with every evening. We’ve become the people I used to make fun of: We’ve turned our dining room into a makeshift veterinary clinic; we spent a month’s pay on one trip to the vet.

Just in case I hadn’t noticed that it was expensive, I got an alert from Mint.com warning me that I had exceeded my “Pets” budget by more than $2,000.

We don’t know how much more life we’ve bought Big D, but I’ve learned this much from the experience: Even if you think you’re pragmatic and tough about money and pets, you should still probably set aside twice what you think you’ll need for a veterinary emergency.