Emergency Medicine

Call first, and why it matters

Please telephone before you set off rather than simply arriving. A few minutes of warning genuinely changes what we can do: it lets us clear a treatment table, draw up what we are likely to need, prepare oxygen, and have the right people standing by rather than finding out at the door. In a real emergency, that preparation is not administrative — it is treatment time.

Tell us what you are seeing, when it started, and anything your pet may have swallowed. If you can safely bring the packaging of a medication or product, do. Please do not use online forms, email, or social media for anything urgent; those are not monitored continuously.

Signs that mean call now

Some situations should not wait to see how the night goes. If you see any of the following, telephone us immediately — or a 24-hour emergency veterinary hospital if we are closed.

• Difficulty breathing, choking, or continuous coughing
• Unproductive retching or a swollen, hard abdomen — particularly in deep-chested dogs
• Collapse, sudden weakness, or pale gums
• Seizure, or repeated seizures
• Straining to urinate, especially in male cats
• Known ingestion of a toxin, medication, or foreign object
• Uncontrolled bleeding, major trauma, or a fall from height
• Difficulty giving birth, or more than two hours between puppies

Trauma, wounds, and orthopedic injuries

Bite wounds, lacerations, road traffic injuries, and falls all need assessment sooner than they look like they do. Wounds that appear minor on the surface frequently involve far more damage underneath, and dog bites in particular carry infection deep into tissue through punctures barely visible in the fur.

We clean, explore, and repair wounds, stabilize fractures, and manage pain from the moment your pet arrives rather than after the paperwork. Where an injury needs a specialist orthopedic referral, we will say so and help arrange it.

Whelping emergencies and dystocia

Because reproductive medicine is one of our strengths, we see a good deal of whelping trouble — and breeders across Western New York know to call us early rather than late. More than two hours between puppies, thirty minutes of hard straining without producing a puppy, green or black discharge before the first puppy, or an exhausted dam are all reasons to telephone immediately.

Where a planned cesarean is the right answer we can often move quickly, and an emergency C-section on a dam who is already tired is a very different proposition from a planned one. If you breed, program our number into your phone before the season starts.

Who we can see in an emergency

Our first responsibility in an emergency is to our existing clients — the pets whose history we already hold, whose medications we know, and whose families we have a relationship with. If your pet is registered with us, call and we will do everything we can.

If you are not yet a client, please still call. We help where we have the capacity to, and if we cannot take your pet safely that day we would rather tell you straight away and point you to a hospital that can, than have you drive here and lose time.

The honest reason is capacity rather than reluctance. A practice this size can only run so many emergencies alongside a booked day without the care suffering, and we will not pretend otherwise.

When we are closed

We are open Monday, Wednesday and Friday 8am to 5pm, and Tuesday and Thursday 8am to 7pm. Outside those hours, please contact a dedicated 24-hour emergency veterinary hospital. It is worth finding your nearest one and saving the number in your phone now, while nothing is wrong, rather than searching for it at two in the morning with a sick animal on the back seat.

If your pet is treated elsewhere overnight, tell us. We will follow up, obtain the records, and pick their care up from there — continuity matters, and you should not have to be the one relaying medical detail between hospitals.