Tales of emergency veterinary medicine
By Jennifer Farris
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The phone loudly hit the third ring, the maximum number of rings allowed before a vet tech had to answer it.
“Good evening,” I said and began to reel off the long-winded welcome that was intended to soothe anxious owners calling the ER clinic. Midway through the greeting, I was interrupted by frantic sobs and unintelligible words garbling through the phone.
“Take a deep breath. You can’t help your pet if you can’t calm down and tell me what’s wrong.” Again, the pat answer we were trained to deliver. As usual, this glib refrain failed to bring any level of calm to the conversation.
Finally, after several seconds of silence on my end and unrelenting sobs on the other, a high-pitched voice sob yelled, “I need help!” They then began a rapid-fire explanation of what was occurring that had reduced them to gibbering wails.
“My parents are on a date and on a dare I put my mom’s hamster in a balloon and now I can’t get it out!” This alarming statement was delivered without breath or pause and was definitely in all caps. After this utterly bewildering statement, there was profound silence. We were both breathing into the phone and trying to digest what had just fallen between us like a string of hamster pellets.
In my best customer service voice, I asked them to please hold so I could discuss it with the veterinarian on duty that night. Hamsters are incredibly fragile, and I was mildly concerned that popping the balloon would also pop the hapless creature’s heart. But, as suspected, the vet advised that the only recourse would be to pop the balloon.
I returned to the phone to hear the young person on the other end once again rapidly descending into panicked breathing and sobs. Once informed that they would need to pop the balloon, they stated, with a level of confusion I found disconcerting, that they had already deflated the balloon and they were concerned the hamster would soon suffocate.
“Okay,” I said, striving for a level of cool and collected that I was finding difficult to achieve. “I need you to find a pair of scissors.”
“I found them! I have scissors!” The young voice on the other end was celebrating, as if this was the end goal.
“Now, I need you to carefully lift away a section of the balloon so it isn’t touching the hamster. Then, we’re going to cut into the balloon so we can get it out.” This is a situation that I had never been trained for. Nobody told me I would be walking people through hamster/balloon surgery.
“I’m so scared! What if I cut the hamster?!?!”
“You won’t. Just lift a section away….” It was here that everything changed. I heard the clattering of the phone as it hit the ground. It was immediately followed by high-pitched wails that sounded like “I didn’t mean to do it! It was an accident!! Please don’t be mad!” I’m uncertain how putting your mom’s hamster inside a balloon is an accident, but here we were.
I waited patiently for someone, anyone, to notice the phone lying on the ground. It was the early 2000s, and not every kid had a cell phone. Landlines were still a thing.
Then. “Hello!” a deep male voice gruffed into the phone.
“Hello. My name is Jennifer. I’m with the emergency vet clinic. I was just…” He interrupted me with a breath of angry frustration.
“Look, lady. I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is I come home, and there’s a hamster in a balloon!” He was nearly shrieking by the end of this statement as though he recognized the sheer absurdity we were all living in at the moment.
By this point, I was fully convinced I was being pranked. But I also couldn’t take the chance that this was some bizarre customer service test, so I advised that they bring the intrepid balloon adventurer in to be examined.
Imagine my surprise when, 30 minutes later, my presence was requested in an exam room. There, I found the young voice from the other end of the line. And a happy little hamster none the worse for wear for his balloon adventures.
“All I know is that I come home, and there’s a hamster in a balloon!” became a standard refrain for me for quite some time.
Jennifer Farris Writer 