What Is an Emergency Veterinary Service?

Many situations require emergency intervention including but not limited to:

• Physical trauma
• Severe bleeding
• Choking or difficulty breathing
• Eye injury
• Poisoning
• Heat stroke
• Severe vomiting/diarrhea
• Loss of consciousness
• Unable to walk/stand
• Unable to urinate/defecate

Emergencies can occur at any time, day or night and recognizing when your pet is in need of emergency care isn't always easy. If you think your pet's life is in danger contact us immediately for help.

What If It's Not An Emergency?

If your pet's condition is not life-threatening, but you feel they need to be seen before our next available appointment time, we also offer urgent care. Our caring, efficient staff will squeeze you in between scheduled appointments. When you arrive, we can usually give you an estimate for how long you may have to wait to be seen.

Veterinary Critical Care, like its counterpart in human medicine, is a specialized service for severely ill or injured patients requiring round-the-clock monitoring, a dedicated nursing staff, and doctors with training and experience focused on treating the most compromised pets.

Angel Of Mercy Animal Hospital’s critical care team is equipped with the best monitoring and treatment technology available. Equally important, our critical care specialists have immediate access to colleagues in other specialties such as cardiology, neurology/neurosurgery, and internal medicine. Patients treated by MedVet critical care will benefit from these integrated and collaborative resources whether their condition requires a short visit to the emergency service or several days in the intensive care unit.

Patients that may be treated by our critical care team include those with:

• traumatic injuries from car collisions
• bite wounds
• burns or smoke inhalation
• difficulty breathing
• blood loss or severe anemia
• difficulty urinating
• special nutritional support needs
• abnormal heart rhythms
• toxicities
• life-threatening neurologic diseases such as seizures
• complications from underlying diseases

The easiest way to get a picture of what veterinary critical care means is to compare it for a moment to human health care. Human patients who enter an emergency room have a huge range of problems – victims of a car accident or other trauma, a teenager who fell and broke his arm, someone weakened by vomiting and diarrhea that won’t stop, a man having a heart attack, or a crying child with a sudden and painful earache.  

It is obvious that some of these problems are more severe than others – some will be treated by the emergency doctors, prescribed medications, and sent home to heal.  Others have conditions that will require specialized care and will ultimately need to be transferred to other departments in the hospital – such as surgery, imaging (for ultrasound, CT, or MRI), or the intensive care unit (ICU).

General First Aid

Introduction: First Aid - Veterinary Partner

Wrapping Up First Aid - Veterinary Partner