The Client Who Named Her Cat After a Discworld God

Pulled a chart for a routine annual exam a couple months back and the cat’s name stopped me mid-sentence. Om. Just Om, no explanation on the intake form, which for a second I assumed was some kind of yoga thing until the owner came back to the exam room and I actually got to ask her directly. Turned out she’d named the cat after Small Gods, specifically after the tortoise-shaped god from the book, which she said fit because the cat had shown up scrawny and half feral and now, a year later, was this enormous, imperious, mostly indifferent house cat who acted like he’d always been in charge of the place.

We ended up talking Discworld for a solid five minutes while I should’ve been finishing the exam, which almost never happens at work, most small talk in an exam room is about the pet’s diet or whether the shedding is normal. She’d read most of the series and had opinions about which ones actually hold up, we argued a little about whether Small Gods works better as a standalone entry point than the books everyone tells you to start with instead, and I walked out of that room in a genuinely better mood than I’d been in all morning.

I think about it more than the interaction probably deserves, honestly. Not because it was some profound moment, it was five minutes about a cat’s name. But it’s a good reminder that the stuff I write about here isn’t some separate compartment from the rest of my life, it leaks into actual days at actual work in ways I don’t always expect. I didn’t bring up board games or books to her. She brought Pratchett to me, through a cat’s chart, completely unprompted.

Om the cat is doing fine, for the record. Good bloodwork, mildly judgmental about the whole visit, exactly as advertised by his name.

She’s rebooked for the follow up already, which almost never happens this early, most clients wait until the reminder postcard shows up. I half suspect part of it is that she wants to keep the conversation going, which, fine by me, it’s not like I get a lot of chances at work to talk about a book I actually liked with someone who’s also read it. Most days the extent of my personal life leaking into an exam room is somebody noticing the dog hair on my scrubs and asking if I’ve got pets of my own.

What sticks with me about the actual moment with the client, though, isn’t really the argument about entry points. It’s that for those five minutes neither of us was performing our assigned roles, she wasn’t a worried pet owner and I wasn’t the tech reciting bloodwork ranges, we were just two people who’d read the same book arguing about a tortoise-shaped god in a hallway that smells like antiseptic. That doesn’t happen often in a day built around fifteen minute appointment slots. Most of what I say at work is some version of the same reassurance delivered slightly differently depending on the animal and the owner’s face.

I’ve started half hoping other charts have something like that buried in them, a pet name that’s actually a door into something, and I’ve started paying a little more attention to the intake forms because of it. Probably won’t happen again for a while. Worth noticing when it does, though, and worth writing down before I convince myself it was less interesting than it actually was.