Mermaid Veterinarian: The Moth Podcast

The Moth

This episode of The Moth features two heartfelt and humorous stories from Birmingham, Alabama Story Slams. Veronika Kiklevich recounts her experiences as a veterinarian

Key takeaways

• Pets can ingest surprisingly bizarre items, highlighting the importance of pet safety and supervision.

Main topics

• Veterinary medicine
• Pet behavior and safety

Notable quotes

"I had to leave because I had not only broken the statue, I had broken my mother."

Conclusion

Both stories reveal how seemingly trivial events—whether a dog eating underwear

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:03) Welcome to The Moth. I'm Suzanne Rust. On this episode, we're featuring two stories that involve a pair of underwear and a glass mermaid, respectively. Because you never know what type of tale you'll be hearing at The Moth. They can be funny, sad, life-affirming, or just involve underwear and mermaids. First up is Veronica Kiklevich, who told this at a Birmingham Story Slam where the theme was busted. Here's Veronica, live at the mall. Speaker 1 (0:33) Well, I'm a veterinarian, and I'd like to talk about things animals eat. Cats tend to be fairly eclectic in what they eat. They're finicky. They're finicky. And mostly they limit themselves to long, stringy things. Like a classic thing is tinsel, Christmas tinsel. Dogs, on the other hand, don't eat anything. I mean, they will eat toys. They will eat your money. They will eat your shoes. They will eat your neighbor's kid's toys. And basically, if you can think of it, a dog has probably ingested it somewhere. And they'll eat things that aren't good for them. I had a little schnauzer one time, and she had a really, really painful abdomen. And her mom had brought her in. The four little kids were all standing there. And I said, did she eat anything? Is there anything she could have eaten? No, no, no, no, no. We're very strict with her diet. She never eats anything off diet. So we went up and down. And then all of a sudden, this dog started heaving. It started, mm-hmm. And you just know something's coming back. So we all took a step back. And sure enough, an entire order of French fries came up on the table. And the lady looked at me in astonishment. And then she looked over at the kids, and they were busted. They were very busted. And I kind of knew it. They looked at it. And then shortly thereafter, I had a conversation. A couple weeks after, I had a little 35-ish pound dog come in. The guy called up and said, my dog gained 18 pounds overnight. So we took an x-ray, and his abdomen was kind of pendulous. It was full of rocks. I mean, stem to stern. It was just full of rocks. And I went in, took all the rocks out, and couldn't quite figure that out. When I was talking to the guy, he said, well, I threw some bacon grease out next to the house. And there's a bunch of rocks over there. So the dog had just gone out and filled himself up with rocks. So these are the kind of things that we get to see. But my favorite one is a standard poodle mix, and his name was Benzie. Benzie as a puppy was kind of all over the place. He would eat gloves. He ate nuts. He ate pretty much anything. whatever he felt like, but most of the time it was small stuff. As he developed, as he got older, he would find his tastes a little bit. He sort of narrowed things down to pretty much undergarments is what he liked. Socks, t-shirts, bras, panties, you know, night shirts, nice night shirts and things like that. And so the first time I actually had to take something out of him was a pair of pantyhose that he'd eaten. And the pantyhose, the body of them had balled up in the stomach, and the legs were kind of going down the intestines. So he couldn't really get it