• Each exam or emergency costs $45. We do NOT charge emergency fees on Sundays or any other days. We just ask for your patience in being fit in with people who have scheduled appointments.
• Complete in-house professional laboratory including a full CBC machine, chemistry analyzer, clotting time analyzer, and blood gas analyzer. These are key in finding out what is wrong with a patient quickly when time is of the essence.
• Complete ECG (electrocardiograph) machine capable of producing a very high quality professional study, with nearly immediate access to a board certified cardiologist and treatment recommendations.
• State-of-the-art high quality in-house ultrasound machine, available to help make immediate diagnoses. We also have access to a very experienced ultrasonographer, who is willing to perform more advanced scans, when needed.
• Best available Sound-Eklin digital radiology unit and a new X-ray machine. Given our commitment to the highest standard of care possible for our patients, we have partnered with a group of board certified radiologists, to review all x-rays we take at no cost to our clients. We are doing it because it is just better medicine, and we want to make sure we don’t miss anything!
• State-of-the-art digital dental x-ray machine and digital processor to take x-rays on a laptop during dental procedures. Dental x-rays in our animal patients are just as important as in people. Most of the disease process is happening below the gum line, and is easily missed with a visual exam only. The x-rays, along with the oral exam, allow us to develop the best treatment plan.
• Sevofluorane anesthesia for inhalation gas anesthesia. We have decided to only offer the safest anesthesia agents for our patients, in order to minimize the risk of anesthesia as much as possible. Sevofluorane gas is the standard of care in human medicine because it gets cleared faster from the blood, and therefore allows for a faster recovery and wake-up from procedures.
• We also feel that using an intravenous catheter and fluids with warming equipment are very important to your pets’ safety. These are standard of care for all humans having surgery as well. It allows us instant access to the vein in case of an emergency where immediate medications are necessary, and it helps to clear the anesthesia more quickly. It has also been shown to help us maintain good blood pressure levels during surgery. This is essential to prevent damage to kidneys or the liver or heart, if there are dangerous blood pressure dips.
• Comprehensive anesthesia patient monitors including ECG, blood pressure, oxygen saturation percentage, and constant temperature, as well as respiratory rate. Each value is used to carefully adjust the patient as needed to make sure that they are not in too deep a plane or “level” of anesthesia, as this is when organ damage can occur.
• We use some of the safest anesthesia injectable agents also, such as low dose propofol, midazolam, and alfaxalan
• Multimodal pain relief is defined as using different pain relief medications from different chemical families, as a way of making sure that pain is taken care of and controlled via varied chemical processes and pathways. This controls pain much better than using just one drug and one chemical pathway in the brain. For example, all dentals with severe dental disease or extractions will receive an injectable pre-anesthetic in one drug family, along with an anti-inflammatory injection if appropriate. We always perform regional dental blocks prior to extractions, as in human medicine, so that there is comfortable additional pain relief at the level of the mouth. The oral form of those same medications will often be sent home with the patients for post-operative pain relief. Staying “ahead” of the pain by using medications acting via varied pathways is now a well-known benefit to maximizing post-surgical comfort. That is our priority as well.
• Lastly, we are extremely proud to be one of only a handful of veterinary hospitals offering the absolute best in class IV cold laser therapy via Companion Laser. This is the same laser used at the U.C. Davis School of Veterinary Medicine chronic pain and rehabilitation center. We are using laser treatments after surgical incisions, dental extractions, to stimulate wound repair and cell growth, and for pain relief of arthritis or pain of joints, spine, or soft tissue. We include the treatment as part of the dental treatment protocol, and after surgery as indicated. It can also be purchased in group treatments for more chronic conditions.
• We decided to carry medications with the fewest side effects for our patients; in order to protect our patients’ safety, we are currently not carrying certain medications that may be involved in questionable adverse effect profiles with the FDA or pending litigation. To that end, we are choosing to carry antibiotics with fewer intestinal side effects when possible. We are also choosing to carry the safest vaccines and heartworm or flea/tick medications.
• For cats especially, we are proud to offer only the Merial PUREVAX recombinant vaccines which do not contain aluminum-based preservatives and are associated with an extremely low to nearly non-existent risk of vaccine-associated fibrosarcoma cancer developing at the vaccine location, as compared to the less expensive vaccines with the adjuvant.
We truly hope you will come visit us and let us show you the highest level of veterinary care for your furry ones! Come visit us! We look forward to meeting you all, reading your reviews and would truly appreciate any suggestions.