Hi Jerry et al.

No, I haven't been writing songs or collecting stories recently.   I was trying to adhere to the Mr. Ed school--"Mr Ed will never speak unless he has something to say."

And I've been too caught up in stuff at home--primarily dealing with a very sick cat. I have no idea if anybody would be interested in the rather graphic problems Fern has. She's been diagnosed as having severe anemia--even needed a blood transfusion. Her blood count is still way below normal. We're afraid she may have leukemia--and are both depressed and absolutely livid at the idea--since all our cats have been kept up to date on their shots--obviously including feline leukemia. We have left our old vet--who did the shots--and charged us $200 for taking one blood test and just telling us we needed to go to a pet emergency hospital--which then came up with a totally different blood count 2 hours later.

The old vet evidently has no emergency care available. Jan is really annoyed about that--she says that in her little town in England, the vet had emergency care available on-site--and seems to think this is standard in England. I have no idea. Any UK posters have info on that question?



We had to have the old vet do blood tests regularly--and they attempted to charge different amounts for the same test several times until I put my foot down--and told them that behavior would lose them customers---which I said very loudly in the waiting room so other customers could hear.

They also gave us appointments which they evidently never had any intention of honoring--we had to wait 2 hours recently for just doing one blood test.

If Fern does have leukemia, we may well sue the old vet.

Which is a real problem, since it's our local vet--and the daughter of one of our neighbors is one of the vets.

And Jan says the old vet's facilities seem to not have been cleaned for years---she doesn't want to go back just on that basis.

What a mess.

But we have a new vet--competent, friendly, informative, with clean facilities and reasonable charges.

So we'll see what happens.