Vet Stories, With Dave McKenna

If you’re a Pal-level subscriber at Defector, you get access to a premium weekday newsletter called The Cipher, which has a recap of the blog day, links to other sites, and extra takes and bits from staffers. You can change your newsletter preferences or upgrade your subscription at the My Account page. Here, from the newsletter archives, is a story told to us by Dave McKenna.

Me and my wife were at an animal hospital in the Friendship Heights neighborhood of D.C. in the ’90s, where we brought our poor cat Oscar, who stopped pooping. He’s in back with the docs and we’re all scared and in the waiting room and everybody around us is scared for their own reasons and an animal hospital waiting room is as sad a place as a real hospital waiting room ’cause nobody’s there for a party. Nobody’s talking, just waiting to hear how bad things are, and into this gloom the elevator opens up and some society woman in a mink coat and full Cruella de Vil ensemble steps out with a massive dog, like an Irish Setter or some shit, and everybody is immediately aware of some sort of activity. She announces real loud, in a voice that matches the aristocratic get-up, “Brutus has been attacked by thousands of bees!”

And by god, there’s a swarm of bees going around her, and while Brutus appeared to be taking everything just fine, Cruella is clearly all fucked up. But everybody in the waiting room treats her like an active shooter and just flies for the exits to get away from the bees. I’m among the bee fleers and from the other side of the glass i see the hospital staff jump into action and ignore the swarms. One grabs Brutus by the leash and the others sit Cruella down and call 911 ’cause bees had fucked her shit up for real and the paramedics showed up and gave her some shot and life returned to normal and I got back to the waiting room and they eventually brought Oscar out after manually unpooping his ass.

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