Sanctuary?

I’ve been seeing this sidewalk spray-paint stencil graffito appearing with increasingly regularity in various parts of my (and perhaps your) fair city.  It seems that as the economic news/reality gets worse, I encounter more of these public statements of discontent.

I know that things are bad everywhere, but it seems that San Francisco in particular is particularly volatile whenever the economy swings too far to either of the boom/bust extremes.  The rumblings of class war back in the go-go 90’s was an example of how things get when it swings the other way.

And if you’re not familiar with the lingo, Sanctuary City is a term for a city (like SF) that by way of policy does not aid enforcement of Federal immigration laws.  A somewhat controversial status.  I think that this is an interesting re-purposing of the term.

We’ll see how things go with this.  I really hope that this is not a return of that rage from a decade ago.

I saw this in my neighborhood. Please vote.

It was time for the boys to see the vet. It had been a little while and Daisuke had been itching a lot. We used to go to a place called Animal Health Network (now renamed Animal Hospital of Diamond Heights) up in Diamond Heights and we thought about going there but I understand that there had been a lot of turnover (not a great sign) and the two vets we really liked were gone. So I hit their review page on Yelp and was more than a little underwhelmed about the apparent current state of affairs. If that one review is right (you’ll know it when you see it) that place is no longer getting my business.

So one of the reviews mentioned one of the former tenured vets there that we used to like, a Dr. Calvin Lum. So I figured, why not search a bit and see if I can find where he is now. And lo and behold, it woudl seem that he’s currently running his own housecall-only practice called San Francisco Veterinary Housecalls. So I figured since this was not an emergency (we use Pets Unlimited for that), why not give it a spin. And to put my reviewer hat on for a moment, I will say I’m pleased with the results. He was as nice, attentive and good with the animals as I remembered and when I got the final bill, I can’t say that it was significantly more expensive than a normal vet visit (caveat: for multiple animals). There was a little extra hit since this was our first time and so we needed to do the new patient consultation. But after a checkup and a round of two shots for three cats and some over the counter drugs, the final result fell in line with a regular vet visit other than the $70 housecall charge. That charge was for the whole deal, not per-cat. I’ll easily pay that for not having to haul their three ungrateful carcasses around. And he was with us for two whole hours. Nice.

The only downside – which I certainly can’t blame him for – is that it’s just him and you, rather than him, you and a trained vet tech. Fred is getting old enough that it was time for him to get a blood panel so we attempted to get a little blood from him. He came prepared with specialized gear and said that 95% of the time, it’s not a problem. So we attempted to soldier on. Step one was getting Fred into the Cat Bag. This happened with mostly minimal hassle.

Fred (and his anger) in the Cat Bag.

The Cat Bag, as you see, is a nylon bag with a zipper and velcro collar that you somehow wrestle the cat into and then seal it up. This will demilitarize four out of five of their pointy parts. I foolishly thought that this would be the hard part but we were able to bait and switch him and get him in the bag. Step two was putting on the little kitty Hannibal Lector mask to seal off the fifth pointy part and to help control their head (they take blood from the jugular as it turns out).

As it turns out, that part was just not going to happen even with the rest of him in the bag and the two of us not. It was astounding. I am no stranger to handling the cats, but I am also not a vet tech. So we needed to bail on that. Dr. Lum said that his 95% batting average just went down this afternoon.

So, obviously anything involving medical machinery or the need of a vet tech aint happening in the home setting. But for everything else, this seems like a great service run by a cool vet, and I look forward to being a repeat customer. If anyone out there in the SF zone might be interested in such a service, he is worth trying.