Emergency vs. Appointment..

Do you think an emergency trumps a regular scheduled appointment? The answer is yes, yes it does. Not because your time, your pet, or whatever the reason for scheduling was for is not important but because your pet is thankfully stable and not critical. I know it’s frustrating to wait and see the clock ticking further from your appointment time, to see your pet get more anxious sitting there, maybe you arranged to get off work to make that scheduled appointment. There’s always going to be something and life has its own plan sometimes and that we’ll never be able to predict. But one thing for sure, someone is walking through those doors experiencing the unimaginable. All we ask is for a little grace and compassion because if the roles were reversed you would want that same care.

Behind the scene

Sometimes the owner will call to let us know they’re on their way and a brief run down of what they’re experiencing. It’s nice when it works out this way cause it gives us time to prepare and set up. At this time we let the doctor know what’s coming down and start to set up the 02 machine, set up to place an IV catheter, have the monitoring equipment ready (spo2, ECG machine, Doppler blood presser). It doesn’t always happen seamlessly like that when we don’t get a heads up before coming, which is not the end of the world, just nice to have the second to mentally and physically prepare for what’s coming. Once the owner and pet arrive, a technician goes up, grabs the pet and brings them to the doctor to assess and there’s usually another set of hands from either another technician or an assistant. Then a separate technician goes into the room with the owner to get additional information. What happened, when did it happen, how long have the symptoms been going on for, is the pet on any medications currently, and go over a baseline quote for what they’re spending just for us to assess. Once the pet is stable is when we can get a better treatment plan for diagnostics. We don’t have x-ray vision, we can’t tell what’s wrong with your pet so these tests are necessary to do cause it gives us a piece of the puzzle that we get to use to piece together what is wrong with your animal and what could be causing it. At this time when it has calmed down is when the extra set of hands can go back to seeing regular scheduled appointments that have been waiting, sometimes patiently and others not so patiently.

Diagnostics

Treatment

Discharge