Max, "The One Testicle Wonder" Trujillo has just sauntered into my waiting room. Like any pint-sized prizefighter with a Napoleon complex, Max has no idea he’s being made fun of. The lone testicle dangling between his hind legs has a way of stimulating conversation—and a few laughs.

Max is a Dachshund whose retained testicle was surgically removed, leaving the other to dangle conspicuously in...

Epee is a diminutive blonde Pekinese with a sad little face and a belly-full of something mighty nasty.

This 9-year-old pooch was brought in by one of our long-time clients along with her friends, newly relocated to the area and currently lacking a trusted vet.

Epee had been acting strange ever since the move, over a week ago. She has been quiet on the long drive from up north and depressed ever...

Kliff (last name of parents, Spring) is the most adorable geriatric patient on the planet—perhaps on all planets for all we know (save Pluto since we now know it no longer deserves that designation). I love Kliff.

Kliff is a big, red Doberman. He’s been my patient for about eight years now. For all that time he’s never failed to be anything but a perfect gentleman. When I saw him on Thursday,...

"Doctor, you must to help us! Eet ees an emergency of truly vast proportions!"

Such begins almost every telephone conversation with Signora Gucci. Her perfect coif, impeccably white Fendi suit, pristine pedicures in YSL sandals…You know the type: think Sofia Loren á la South Beach. Beautiful, but a little too Britney for her age. And when you open the dictionary to the D's, you’ll find her...

Red finally succumbed to his disease(s). His owner, when faced finally with the inevitability of his impending death, decided it was time to let him go.

I should be thankful he didn’t elect to take him home—something he kept suggesting he might do. Somehow my pleas against this option were effective enough to keep him in hospital. My others, nudging gently towards euthanasia at every...

If you have not yet seen the funniest movie ever, please watch Best In Show. Like most great comedy, it’s especially funny because it tells the truth. This flick is a mockumentary detailing the lives of the owners and handlers of various gorgeous purebreds during the run-up to a major dog show.

One of the Best in Show couples, the Weimeraner duo, reminds me of Mr. And Mrs. Hysterical, longtime...

This is a good one. My first phone call of the morning:

"Doctor, I think that Sparky and Scruffy are pregnant."

This is an easy one, I think to myself. I neutered Sparky last month—exactly 45 days ago. And I neutered Sparky on the day Scruffy first went into heat. The client swears that Sparky and Scruffy were apart before this because of Sparky`s incessant interest in her.

On first blush, this...

In The House of God, an acclaimed account of  life and death in a Manhattan hospital, Samuel Shem used a phrase that would eventually enter the veterinary lexicon: train wreck. It was such an appropriate description of how some [usually geriatric] patients present (end-stage, multi-system disasters) that it easily jumped the tracks from human medicine to vet medicine.

Red is a train wreck. He...

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...

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...