Does anyone else find the Sky/Virgin fiasco a bit embarrassing? For those not in the know, NTL/Telewest cable is now Virgin Media, and Sky One was taken off the service this week. If you phone up Virgin for information you get some Northern bloke wittering on about how Sky have “run home with the ball and don’t want to play any more” and Sky have put up billboards along similar lines. Childish little digs at each other in public. Not to mention annoying – I now have no way to feed my Stargate: SG1 addiction. You’d think they would have planned ahead and organised either a compromise or a suitable replacement – not have this gap. The only reason I got cable rather than freeview was for Sky One.
The hardest thing to tell someone? “There’s nothing we can do”. Very few people (understandably) can accept that yesterday their pet was seemingly healthy, and today they are being asked to consider euthanasia. Of course, their pet wasn’t healthy and hasn’t been for months now, but unless you know what to look for most people attribute it to “old age” or “slowing down”. And of course no animal suddenly gets organ failure – it compensates and compensates, maintaining a relatively healthy image, and then one day it decompensates; it doesn’t just overflow and become worse gradually – all the compensation that had masked the disease disappears and the animal appears to suddenly become very bad. And after decompensation there’s nothing we can do. The alternative? Routine blood tests in older animals, and strict medication/food based on the findings. That should hold off the disease, though it rarely prevents it. However, I have older cats, and I’ve no interest in doing bloods. I’d rather not know.
I’ve been listening to the theme tune of All Creatures Great And Small on repeat for about 2 hours now. Ah, for simpler times (but without the even sillier on call hours and with rectal gloves).
