We spoke with a 41-year-old facilities coordinator at his kitchen table in a split-level outside Dayton. His dog, Biscuit, an 80-pound lab-and-whatever mix, lay on a memory foam orthopedic bed in the corner wearing a cone. The man’s right cheek was visibly swollen. Transcript lightly edited for length.
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FRIED OCEAN: Walk us through the dog knee surgery financing.
MAN: Forty-two hundred. Twelve months, zero percent, and then it jumps to twenty-nine point nine nine and they come for the house, the truck, and probably the drywall. I signed on an iPad while a nineteen-year-old vet tech held my dog’s paw like it was a hospice situation.
FO: And the molar?
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MAN: What molar.
FO: The one you cracked in 2019.
MAN: That one’s being managed. I chew on the left. I’ve chewed exclusively on the left since before the pandemic. My left side is magnificent. I could crack a walnut with it, I could open a beer with it. The right side is a crime scene I have chosen not to re-enter.
FO: You’ve seen a dentist.
MAN: Once. He printed a treatment plan with the word “crown” on it and a number that looked like a used Corolla. My health insurance covers my knee, my liver, my whole screaming torso. It does not cover my mouth. Apparently teeth are jewelry. Decorative. I have a fifteen-hundred-dollar annual maximum, which in dentistry is called a coupon.
FO: What do you do when it flares up?
MAN: Orajel and bourbon, and I lie very still on the bathroom floor until I can hear again. It’s not pain exactly. It’s more like a smoke alarm going off in another man’s apartment. Nothing I can do about it, so I’ve made peace.
“He Limped. He Looked At Me.”
FO: Tell us about the knee.
MAN: Cruciate ligament. He blew it going after a squirrel he had no realistic path to. He limped into the living room, he laid down, and he looked at me. Nobody has looked at me like that since 2014. My wife looks at the general area where I’m standing.
FO: Your wife is on board with the surgery?
MAN: We don’t discuss money. Marriage is two adults agreeing not to open the same envelope. We share a streaming password and a mattress and a deep mutual silence about the credit situation, and honestly, it’s working. Twelve years.
FO: Did you have pet insurance?
MAN: I enrolled him in April. The knee went in May. They called it pre-existing. There is a man at that company whose entire job is proving your dog was already a dog before you bought the policy. The vet’s been bought by some investment group out of Charlotte, too. They tried to put Biscuit on a monthly wellness membership. The dog has a subscription. I have a punch card at a taco place and a tooth I’m waiting out.
FO: Let’s talk about the drywall.
MAN: He eats the corner by the laundry room. Same corner, three times now. I patch it, he gives it a week, he goes back in. He’s got a palate. He won’t touch the garage drywall — different mud, I guess. He also has strong opinions about the contents of the fridge, which we’ve stopped fighting.
FO: So you financed a knee for an animal who is actively eating the collateral.
MAN: Yes.
FO: Does that bother you?
MAN: My therapist — who I see on a sliding scale through an app, so really it’s a stranger in a parked car — she says I’m very good at loving things that can’t ask me follow-up questions. She said that in August. I think about it maybe four times a day, usually while flossing around the ruin.
The Plan
FO: What’s the plan for the tooth?
MAN: It’ll come out on its own. Things do. I had a cousin who lost one eating a soft pretzel and he said it was a relief, like getting fired from a job you were bad at.
FO: And if it gets infected?
MAN: Then it’s an emergency, and emergencies are covered.
FO: That’s a strategy.
MAN: That’s been the strategy since 2019.
[From the corner, the sound of the cone scraping baseboard, then crunching. He does not turn around.]
MAN: He’s rehabbing.