Diamond Mark: A vet worth every pretty penny

Our dogs’ vet is known as Diamond Mark. Sure, his mother probably doesn’t call him that but we secretly do, because that’s what we’ve spent on vet bills with him over the years, enough to have filled our fingers with diamond rings like Liberace.

Frankly though, we’d rather have healthy dogs. We had three. Now (whisper it) we’re down to one. My beloved Sasha, our oldest at 14, always lived life large, wagging her tail into trouble, running into trees, running up hills, running up bills… until last week she died quietly in my arms.

She slipped away in the evening on the couch that she wasn’t allowed to sit on, though she always did, snuggled up in front of the television, snoring quietly, her head in my lap, her velvet ears in my hands. Until her breathing gently stopped.

And Diamond Mark was there with his syringe of sedative and then his syringe of sadness to facilitate her passage to wherever doggy souls go, till we meet again on the other side. If there are no dogs in heaven, I don’t want to go either.

So that’s really why we call our vet Diamond Mark: because he’s a gem.

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Yes, when we drive past his home we joke that we bankrolled the east wing, and my bestie with cats paid for the kitchen refurb, and our friends with German shepherds funded the landscaping, but the fact that we all recommended him to one another speaks volumes.

Diamond Mark knew Sasha was never exactly the biggest fan of the vets so he came to our house at 8pm, after closing his practice following a 13-hour day, and gently did what needed to be done in Sasha’s own home so that she wouldn’t be distressed in death.

Funny that, how people go into veterinary medicine because they love animals, but then they are not loved by their patients in return. Instead, they are the giver of injections, the squeezer of glands, the one sticking a thermometer up a snarling dog’s bottom, and absorbing the tears of distraught owners. The man is a diamond.

The next day his nurse called to see how we were, and from experience I know we’ll get a hand-written sympathy card in the post. That’s more than we ever got from a human doctor.

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