💾 Archived View for magda.cities.yesterweb.org › gemlog › 2024-06-29.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:24:35. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Health Update

It's been fouur days since my brief hospital stay due to a kidney stone. Unfortunately, my kidney still is rather irritated and anything involving bending my body over causes discomfort and mild pain. Although the weather is predcited to cool down next week, it's unlikely that I will get back to my field trips this soon.

In fact, my mental health really took a hit during the last days, which now are being exacerbated by one of my cats' health. Upon looking for a vet, I became fully disillusioned with local vet's recent srive for "work-life balance" that make it impossible to bring a pet to them even on working days because they either only accept appointments (even for emergency cases, where they will charge you up to four times the regular treatment costs, plus an "emergency fee" of €50 and VAT) or simply reduced their opening hours whilst charging the same ridiculous amount and demanding you to make an appointment before showing up.

There have been few reports on the extreme spike of vet costs starting in November, 2022, with only horse owners openly criticizing it. Reports about the growing amount of pets being brought to shelters almost always omit that a growing number of people suddenly can no longer afford their pets, especially poor and old people. Instead, mainstream media continues to imply that most pet owners just want to own a pet while it's "easy to take care of", only to abandon them once they get older. While those cases certainly exist, they do not make up the majority, and no one even dares to address the snooty behavior of vets online fully justifying their growing obsession with "work-to-rule", pointing out to a single statistics implying that vets are our times more prone to suicidal thoughts than "the average German". From what I can tell, all the new vets in my area not only live even more comfortable lives than the previous ones that already lived a comfortable life themselves, but they demonstrate no shame when pointing out that they even won't do their job during life-threatening emergencies, merely directing you towards a hotline to get told who's on call at the moment – check their homepage and they also will highlight charging over 400% if you dare to use their emergency services on weekends and holidays (and don't forget the appointment via phone).

I quickly came across a rather huge amount of horror stories from pet owners with small bank accounts that reported about how vet services actually got worse and more prone to mistreatments since the sudden spike in fees. Some vets unrelated to such stories, however, take them personally and don't shy away from insulting such pet owners, shaming them for "not having thought about that pets are luxury items that need to cost a lot". Another openly stated that they won't respond to any emergencies once their working hours ended, bringing up various unfitting analogies to justify their selfish stance. Accoring to them, they are openly jealous of physicians for making twice the amount of money, suddenly not addressing that they suffer from their own kinds of issues, as if they all do the bare minimum whilst making fat bucks. There is a drastically growing amount of hostility towards physicians and pet owners coming from vets that I now can only hope that my cat will recover on his own. Because my current state cannot afford any of this ridiculous bs from the rather huge amount of entitled vets.

Similarly, my family physician retired a while ago, as well. He was the only guy to suspect that I may suffer from "familiar tremor" and that none of my issues are of psychological origin – any other doc I visited so far immediatedly were sure of me being "just depressed" (and one even complained about me being a smoker and how "my clothes smell"). Mine didn't even want to retire, as he repeatedly claimed that "they would have to drag him out of his office, if they want him to retire", so it's fair to assume that he quit out of frustration with the current state of our health care system – he told me that he was barred from administering COVID vaccines due to huge bureaucratic hurdles, and docs are now punished with strongly reduced salaries if they refuse to connect their offices to a centralized telemetry infrastructure that has repeatedly been criticized for being needlessly expensive, wasteful and prone to data leaks.

Thanks, neoliberalism, I guess. All of this is of great help to us.