Friday, May 15, 2009

2009-05-05 #1 in #1


Dateline, Richmond, VA
Lat 37.604555
Long -77.56938

One of the most important reasons for my rebooting the trip was to get Shelby back to her terrific Veterinarian at Tuckahoe Veterinary Hospital.

Over the course of our last week in Kentucky, Shelby had several uncharacteristic "accidents" involving tinkling in inappropriate places. This is not a function of letting her out enough, and I was concerned that she may have some sort of illness, so got her back to town and was given an immediate appointment.

After an exam by the very friendly and personable Dr. Chris Kaloski, one of his talented assistants followed Shelby and I out into the parking lot to collect a urine sample. This involved following her (Shelby, not the assistant) around with a plastic soup ladle. When Shelby stopped to mark a location, the assistant was there on the spot and skillfully collected the sample.



I asked her (the assistant, not Shelby) if she ever thought while she was in college that she would be doing this as part of her job, she admitted she had not but we both agreed that this was at least better than working at Starbuck's.

After a quick analysis, Dr. Maloski called us back in and said she (again, Shelby) was fine and just needed to take a medication that would help her with sphincter control, an ailment fairly common in older animals.

I would not be exaggerating here if I admitted I was impressed that they can now engineer a medication that so specifically targets a specific area of a body. My only personal experience with this exact phenomenon was riding in the cars of very bad drivers, who tended to have that same effect on me.

So if you are ever in the Richmond, Virginia area and find yourself either in need of a great Vet or just want to see cute Vet Assistants following old dogs around parking lots with soup ladles, you would do well to pay a visit to the very nice folks at Tuckahoe Veterinary Hospital.

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