The front desk phone at my clinic has a line for the treatment room, and at 10:40 on Tuesday morning it lit up. I'd been glancing at it for two hours. I knew it was about Mabel before I picked up.
"We've got the X-rays," our vet said. "Three teeth need to come out. Want to come back and look?"
How we got here
At Mabel's checkup this spring, our vet lifted her lip, looked for about three seconds longer than I liked and said it was time for a cleaning under anesthesia, with dental X-rays. Mabel is eight. She eats her dry food like nothing is wrong, which is exactly what cats do, and I hadn't noticed a thing.
The estimate ran from $650 to $1,900 at list price. If you've never seen a dental estimate, a range that wide looks strange, so here's the reason for it: nobody can see what's going on below the gumline until the cat is asleep and the X-rays are done. A healthy mouth means a cleaning and polish and you're on your way. Teeth damaged under the surface mean extractions, more time under anesthesia and more pain control. The estimate has to cover both possibilities. I explain ranges like that to clients several times a month. It felt different with my own cat's name at the top.
The day itself
Tuesday is one of my workdays, so Mabel rode to Princeton with me in her carrier, complaining for most of the twenty-five minutes. I checked her in at 7:15 like any other patient, signed the consent form and then walked around to my side of the counter and tried to act normal.
When I went back to the treatment room, the vet pulled up the X-rays and showed me the three teeth, two on the bottom and one on top, with damage below the gumline you'd never have seen just by looking. Leaving them in wasn't something she'd recommend, so I said yes, updated the estimate myself and went back to answering phones. Being on both sides of the counter at once is not an experience I'd recommend either.
She was waking up by early afternoon, wrapped in a towel and very offended by all of it. We went home at five.
The bill, line by line
Here's what the final invoice listed before my discount:
- Anesthesia and monitoring: $412.00
- Full-mouth dental X-rays: $226.00
- Cleaning and polishing: $244.00
- Three extractions, including closing the gums: $590.00
- Nerve blocks and IV fluids: $128.00
- Day hospitalization: $56.00
- Pain medication to go home: $34.00
That's $1,690.00 at list, toward the upper middle of the estimate. My staff discount is 30 percent at my own clinic, which brought what we actually paid to $1,183.00. I know how lucky that discount makes us. Most people at my counter pay the first number, not the second.
Why it came out of savings
I wrote in April about why Hank has pet insurance and Mabel doesn't, at least not yet. The short version: she's an indoor cat, she's never had an emergency, and because her routine care and dentals happen at my clinic with the discount, we decided to self-fund her through our pet emergency fund instead of paying a monthly premium.
This was the fund's first real test. On Tuesday morning it held $2,538. After the dental it holds $1,355. The bill went into the pet tab of our budget spreadsheet as "Mabel, unplanned," right under Hank's itchy-paws visit from May, and the $100 we move into the fund on the first of every month will start nudging it back toward our $3,000 goal.
Would insurance have covered any of this if she'd had it? I honestly don't know. Policies handle dental illness very differently, and what's in a pet's records before enrollment matters a lot. If dental coverage is part of your own decision, that's a question to put to the company in writing, with your pet's history in front of you.
What I do know is that the money was there when we needed it, which is the whole point of the fund. Mabel is home, eating soft food and pretending none of this happened. She's in the window hammock right now, three teeth lighter, with her back to me.
