“She must have better insurance than I do.”
“Caleb—”
“Do you have to fight me on everything? I’ve done these tests three times just this week. I know what I’m doing, and you can trust me. Please wait in the waiting room. This will take ten minutes, tops.”
Lauren pursed her lips and looked at Sunday, uncertainty all over her face. But she nodded and left the room, passing Rachel on her way out.
Ten minutes later, Caleb had ascertained there was a bladder stone small enough to pass on its own, so there wasn’t much he could do. Usually, the treatment he preferred was blasting the stone with lasers to break it up, but he could already hear Lauren objecting to surgery, and it wasn’t necessary anyway. But antibiotics certainly wouldn’t do anything, so he wasn’t going to subject the cat to them.
“I better go give Lauren the good bad news,” he said to Rachel, who smirked.
“She means well,” Rachel said.
“I’m sure she does, but I don’t enjoy people telling me what’s wrong with their cats as if they have the veterinary degree and I don’t.”
Rachel filled a small bowl with water and put it on the table next to the cat, who lapped at it.
Caleb took a deep breath and walked back to the waiting room. “You can come back now.”
Lauren had clearly spent the last ten minutes working up a good amount of resentment toward him, and now she scowled and set her shoulders forward before marching into the exam room.
“Good luck,” said Rachel under her breath.
Back in the exam room, Caleb said, “She doesn’t need antibiotics. It’s a bladder stone. This one is pretty small and should pass on its own in a day or two and she’ll be back to normal. Try to make her drink as much water as possible. If you notice blood in her urine, bring her back and we’ll look into surgically removing the stone.”
“Surgery?”
“It’s a small stone, but it’s just big enough to block part of her urinary tract, which is why her symptoms read like a UTI. I doubt surgery is necessary. Give it a day or two, and if she’s not better, come back.”
But rather than thank Caleb for figuring out what was wrong with her cat, Lauren continued to glare at him. “Your bedside manner leaves something to be desired.”
He sighed. “What do you want from me? You marched in here and told me what you thought was wrong. I actually did the tests to find the problem. If I’d gone ahead and prescribed antibiotics without checking, she probably would have gotten better on her own, but you’d have to chase her around to shove a pill down her throat twice a day for no reason. I saved you from that. I’m the good guy here.”
“Are you this charming with everyone?”
He watched her pet Sunday for a moment. Sunday flopped onto her side and presented her belly to Lauren, who gasped.
“Did you shave my cat?”
“I had to for the ultrasound. Which is how I saw the bladder stone, by the way.”
Lauren grunted and rubbed the cat’s belly.
“Are you…mad I was right?”
“We’re not friends, you know.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, you don’t need to be this frank with me. We’re basically strangers, so you could be polite. The other vets here are far more friendly. Maybe you don’t realize the vet clinic and the Cat Café have kind of a symbiotic relationship.”
It felt like the moment when the sky suddenly got dark, minutes before the heavens opened and the thunderstorm began in earnest. Caleb spoke anyway.
“As you so aptly pointed out, I am new here, and I’m happy there’s a good relationship between the clinic and the café, but I’m also the actual veterinarian here, so I don’t need you to barge in here and tell me how to treat my patients. And I hate to point this out again, but if I’d just done what you’d said without actually examining the patient, I would have needlessly prescribed antibiotics.”
“Fine, but you don’t have to be rude about it.”
“I’m not, I’m…fine. Sorry. But still, you were arrogant enough to assume you knew what was best for your cat and tried to tell me what tests to run, so I’m not the only one who acted inappropriately here.”
