| rev:text
| - My wife urged me to write this review in memory of our recently deceased cat. I didn't want to write a negative review. I joined Yelp to write this review.
We had an older cat who was very dear to us. She was fourteen. We wanted to get more years out of her. Our last cat died when he was over twenty, so we had hope.
She wasn't feeling well. She had bad breath. We took her to this vet. Our previous old-timer had all his teeth removed. So we were thinking along those lines.
The vet was courteous and the staff was helpful. Yes, our cat needed to have a couple of teeth removed. They would do blood work and take x-rays to see if she was healthy enough to make it through an operation. They called in a couple of days. She was good to go.
The operation was a success. It cost close to eight hundred dollars.
The next day the vet called me to see how things were going. She said that our cat had a cough in surgery. I asked her what I should do. She said to keep an eye on it, and bring our cat in if it got worse.
So we kept an eye on her. This is Phoenix. It's dusty. It's dry. There are air pollution alerts. People cough. Animals cough. She had a little cough. We didn't think much of it.
She gained a little weight after the operation. It seemed to do her good.
But six months later she was in bad shape. Her cough had worsened, she wasn't eating, and she was hiding. We took her in again.
The vet examined her and ordered blood work. It was close to three hundred dollars. It came back showing nothing except a very slight, borderline urinary tract infection. The vet prescribed antibiotics for the infection, and said that if they didn't work, the next step was x-rays. We bought the antibiotics, but a day later I felt like a fool. Our cat was clearly in bad shape. She was dying, and I was giving her pills for a urinary tract infection.
So we took her to another vet in the valley, a specialist in cats. Which one is not important. This is not an ad for that vet. The vet examined her, took x-rays, and told us that our cat had late-stage cancer. We were absolutely devastated. My first question was, "But how?" I told the cat specialist about our cat's recent history, and she ordered the x-rays from the tooth removal operation six months before. According to our new vet, the cancer was visible on those x-rays. Yet we were told nothing about it. I can't confirm that the cancer was visible, because I didn't see the x-rays. But I don't see why our new vet would have lied.
I tried to think of how this vet could have missed the cancer, if that is what happened, but I can't come up with a reasonable explanation. If the doctor was in a hurry pre-operation and didn't look at the x-rays closely, shouldn't she have looked after she noticed our cat coughing in surgery? And if she didn't look then, what about when we went back six months later? Wouldn't that have been another good opportunity to look at the x-rays?
Instead, it "looks like" we were not told about the cancer so as not to cancel an expensive oral operation. And when we went back, we had to pay for expensive blood work for an animal that the vet should have been able to tell us was dying. Palliative care was called for at that point.
It is possible that I am wrong. Since I didn't see the x-rays myself, I can't be sure. And I am not begrudging this doctor making money. She is in business. I understand that. We do not mind paying when our pets are sick. But we expect to be told the full story about our pets' health. On the other hand, maybe nothing could have been done to save our cat even if we had learned about it earlier. Maybe it was a blessing we didn't know.
I will say that the veterinary assistants here were awesome and caring. I'm sure that the doctor does excellent work for many animals on a daily basis. It is not my intent to damage anybody's business. They are open twenty-four hours, which is awesome. My wife and I consider our story worth telling, that's all. We don't demand perfection. We all make mistakes. But we were not satisfied with our experience here. It has been a couple of months since our pet's death. I waited to write this, so that I could give as reasoned and fair a review as I could. Best.
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