Remember Dorothy’s mantra as they followed the Yellow Brick Road through the forest?: Lions and tigers and bears…oh my! Whipping her crew into a frenzy of unfounded fear, it only made matters worse for the gang. After all, it was the flying monkeys they should have been worried about.

This is how I feel about the Greenies issue.

Dog owners across the US have gotten a heavy dose of...

We live in Miami. It’s a fact of life down here that a couple of days every year you’re going to have to shut down and abandon everything. Every business is different but we like to think veterinary medicine is extra-special. What do we do with our sickest patients? If the big one hits and patients are in the hospital with no one to care for them…we’re f-----.

So, every year, we clear them...

Monday, 4:00 PM. After an emergency-laden, pre-storm day in my Miami hospital, Hook walks in the door with his mom. Hook is a five-month-old boxer pup who can’t keep his mouth off foreign objects. A week ago he chewed up the rug lining his crate. Ever since, he’s been feeling poorly. According to his mom he hasn’t eaten anything in four days. It’s the afternoon before a [potentially major]...

This time I swear I’ll be more determined and definitive about her cat problem.

I often promise myself lots of things before I see Mrs. Straywell. She’s like the patron saint of lost causes—lost cases, is more like it. Every week there’s a new clutch of cats—the infected and the dying…the hopelessly beyond my reach.

This week it’s a pair of kittens. About four weeks old, I’d guess, and not...

Saturday. My colleague and office-partner has this difficult client. She’s one of the most mistrustful, loudly opinionated clients we have—the kind that walks into the exam room and announces that you must scale her German Shepherd’s teeth without anesthesia (I wouldn’t touch the dog without a muzzle, much less open its mouth and undertake an uncomfortable oral procedure). Because of this...

Woody is a Pekinese mix of undeterminable age. Although he has a puppy’s spunk his mouth is that of a more mature dog’s. In fact, his teeth are so worn and crooked they allow his tongue to loll lovably outside his mouth—always to the left. 

Woody had been found only weeks before wandering a neighborhood nearby. One of our clients, recently bereft of her beloved Bogey, adopted him just last...

I’ve been treating Bomag for six years or so now. He’s a huge black lab mix with a lumbering disposition and a sweet stare. He’s the kind of dog that will give you his huge paw when you need to take his blood and gaze deeply into your eyes as you lay him down to take an X-ray. In a word: lovable.

When Bomag was sick to his stomach last week I made sure to take an X-ray. Apart from the...

Yesterday I had a new client walk in as I was on my way out the door. Psyched that I was finally going to make it to my spinning class at least one day this week, I (only briefly) thought of telling the receptionist to inform the gentleman that I had already absconded. Guilt stayed my hand on the keys in the ignition. And when I saw what this new client had in his purple plastic kitty carrier...

Mrs. Stray loves cats. All cats. She’s what we would call (in our most uncharitable moments) a Crazy Cat Lady. At the hospital, we think of her as somewhat disturbed—rightfully, I think. But we also adore her—and not just because she brings in bizarre cases and often single-handedly seems to pay our bills.

I have (non-professionally) diagnosed Mrs. Stray as having what is known in psychiatric...

I’ve received so many personal emails from friends on Kitten’s amputation that I’ve decided to speak out in favor of three-legged animals as wonderful, loving pets whose lives are happy and whole in spite of their incompleteness, as it were.

Generally, they can still run, jump, and play like other dogs and cats. Their gait may be something of a lope and they may never win an agility contest,...

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past couple of months all you dog owners already know about the Canine Influenza (AKA Dog Flu) outbreak. It’s a disease that has emerged in recent months from kennels and shelters across the US. While its origins are still speculative, its potential for epidemic status is not.

Airborne and sometimes deadly, this virus closely resembles kennel cough...

Tongue-in-cheek title notwithstanding, the above is still an apt description of Friday’s frustrating healthcare crisis.

When my eight-year-old son’s braces became entangled with his frenulum (the fleshy tissue under his tongue), his orthodontist was not in his office—nor was anyone else (they’re closed Friday afternoons). An emergency page went unanswered.

My own efforts to dislodge the...

It seems to me we vets have a thing or two to teach the US penal system on the subject of lethal injection. Recent media coverage on this method of execution—and its cruelty—has led me to this conclusion.

Ask most vets how they’d like to die, given the three legal options (death by hanging, electric chair, or lethal injection), and you’d be hard-pressed to find one voting against the needle....

Finally, it had to come to this. Three months after sustaining a fracture, Kitten’s leg made its final exit from the world swaddled in a surgical tube sock. When we tossed it into the freezer (for cremation along with more complete examples of cat-dom) we did so ceremoniously, yet pleased to see the matter done with.

Kitten’s leg has been a sore subject around the hospital for weeks. None of us...

Dam Vs. Bitch. No, this is not the female pro-wrestling fight of the decade or any morning on Jerry Springer. Dam is the new-fangled word for bitch, as in, an intact (not spayed) female of the canine species. And now I’d like my turn on Jerry Springer (it was his ilk and our popular culture’s defamation of the word that has led to its decline in veterinary circles).

In scientific articles...

I wish I could lie to you and tell you that Piglet is out of his oxygen cage and doing well—but I’m a terrible liar.

Piglet’s appearance was improving hourly until 4 PM yesterday. He collapsed at that time—and died soon thereafter. This happens frequently to post-surgical cases. This is why we say the first 24 hours are critical. More than likely his body couldn’t process all he changes it had...

Piglet’s fever finally broke this morning with a 101 reading at 8 AM. The night had been rough with highlights including an episode of collapse and a 104.8 spike in his temperature early in the morning.

Today he spent the entire day in the oxygen cage at Miami Veterinary Specialists where he was under the care of Dr. Alvaro Larin. He looked positively healthy at times, especially when his...

Monday. Yesterday I spent my morning with a Piglet (that’s his real name). He’s not really porcine, just a pudgy little four-year-old Yorkie with a vivacious personality—but not on this Sunday morning.

I had seen him the day before during regular office hours for what we in the vet profession call ADR (as in, he ain`t doin` right, doc). Poor Piglet had a low-grade fever (103) and a slightly...

Pets in the US are too fat. Why? Two reasons: They exercise almost as much a we do (dream-running does not count), and they eat too much of the crap we give them. Not that pet food or "human food" is necessarily bad for them. "Crap," used here, infers simply that we tend not to think much when we feed our pets. Instead, we tend to feel when we feed them. In our culture, food is love and...

OK, I won’t presume to offer these reasons as fact, rather as ideas discussed within veterinary professional circles. I’ll throw in a few of my own opinions, too, since I can’t possibly be expected to keep these to myself.

1-We charge less for our services: In this theory, our womanly compassion is the culprit. Apparently this compassion extends way past the pet and into the clients`...

Friday. I was the first to arrive at the hospital today. Yesterday had been uncharacteristically busy with sick animals so I was trying my darnedest to get in early enough to check in with the previous day’s casualties before 9 AM. This way anyone needing immediate attention could be factored into the morning’s already-hectic schedule.

I made my first few calls without incident, everyone on the...

How is it that most pets in the US are overweight? Have our tendencies towards obesity been transferred to our pets? Um…let me think…YES!

Exactly how hard is it to say, "FLUFFY! STEP AWAY FROM THE FOOD BOWL!”??

This inability on the part of my fellow Americans is an alien concept to me. Of course, it is hard to lose weight—dieting is annoying and exercise can be time-consuming. But taking away a...

Why do men make more money in any job or profession (except lap dancing, of course)? To address these basic inequities thoroughly is a total tail-chaser—and not my job. Gender inequality in the workplace is a contemporary truism—unfortunately—and it often sucks. That’s as far as I can responsibly go—in general. I can, however discuss the specifics of my profession with candid glee:

Concepts...

More and more vets are electing to spend an extra four years (or more) to become board-certified specialists in a variety of fields within veterinary medicine. In small animal medicine vets can become board-certified as surgeons, internists, dermatologists, dentists, ophthalmologists, behaviorists, cardiologists, oncologists, neurologists, and radiologists.

With all these specialty services...

Sunday. Last night I received a phone call from a frantic client who wasted the first full minute of the call apologizing profusely for calling me at home (I’m listed). She finally blurted out the sordid details of her dog’s recent attack—on her houseguest.

Poor Juny. She’s dog aggressive and fear aggressive and just plain freaked-out whenever life does not follow its usual course. Her owner...

Here is a list of important questions to ask when your vet recommends your pet undergo an anesthetic procedure:

1-Is there another, non-anesthetic procedure that can effectively replace this one? (usually not, but it doesn’t hurt to ask)

2-What monitoring equipment will you use? (pulse oximeters , EKGs, temperature probes, and esophageal stethoscopes are all common devices—I recommend you never...

Everyone knows someone who has lost a pet under anesthesia. Most of the time there’s a reasonable explanation: underlying cardiac disease, organ failure, blood loss, and, most commonly, human error that allows for reversible signs of normal anesthetic effects to go undetected.

After these, we enter the realm of the aberrations, what we refer to as true adverse anesthetic reactions. These...

When I had my yearly physical this year my physician was not surprised when I asked her to test me for rabies. Since I’ve been her patient, eight years now, she’s taken a few extra cc`s of my blood every year to determine my rabies antibody levels. This test lets me know if my rabies vaccine, which I received about fifteen years ago (in a series of three painless shots), still offers me...

Even primitive civilizations eschewed the kind of inefficient slaughter committed in the Yunnan province of China over the past week (for the five-day period ending Tuesday). Local Chinese officials butchered an estimated 50,000 dogs—even as their owners held their leashes—in an effort to control the spread of a rabies outbreak.

The dogs were beaten to death—apparently in an attempt to spare...

Yesterday I made a pro-bono house call to a rescue organization’s home base. The sprawling melee of cages and runs—mostly open to the stifling Miami summer heat—left me cold. Is there nothing more we can do to help these unwanted pets? Does it have to come to hard labor under daunting conditions to deal with society’s failure to control pet overpopulation?

At this facility, the volunteer staff...

August 1st, 2006

Tuesday. Another day off (supposedly) with a morning full of doctorly duties. Some updates for you:

• It looks like my little stiff-legged kitty will have to have his leg amputated. His stiffness is not easily resolvable without severe, continuous pain. I have no stomach for the daily sessions and his parents have no funds for the continuous intensive care he needs. Even...