A doggy dilemma

I took my dogs to the vet the other day for their routine annual visit. You know, just like a rabies shot, kennel cough vaccine, and an exam to make sure they're all good. I walked out of there $465 poorer. Mostly because I had to get heartworm prevention and flea/tick prevention. But seriously? $465 on dogs? I can think of many many things I'd like to buy with that $465.

And it doesn't stop there.

Juni, our lab, is abnormal in that she doesn't like to chew. Well, she did when she was a puppy (thus the huge bill we had to replace the carpet in a house we rented due to chewing a big hole in the middle of the living room carpet). But nowadays she won't chew at all, no rawhides, not even a big nice ham bone. What this means is that she has terrible teeth. She's 5 years old and they are very bad, so she needs to get them cleaned. Which means general anesthesia, which of course equates to dollars.

Okay, simple enough. Pay money so Juni can get her teeth cleaned. But actually, not that simple. You see, this year in her exam they discovered a heart murmur. A level 2 on a scale of 6. So not bad, just something to watch out for. But they won't give her anesthesia for teeth cleaning unless she has an echo cardiogram by a vet cardiologist.

So fortunately Virginia Tech has a vet school, so a vet cardiologist is right here in town. But I'll have to shell out a few hundred for the echo cardiogram, which I'm sure will show that her heart is doing okay and that she can get her teeth cleaned. Either that, I guess, or they'll say she can't get anesthesia in which case she can't get her teeth cleaned and will add on another health risk. I'm not exactly seeing the silver lining here.

The thing is, we all like Juni more than Bogie (good thing dogs can't read blogs) and I've never really envisioned a world where we had only Bogie and no Juni. So I'd like to do what I can to prevent that. If only money grew on trees...