Donna Fassilis

Review of Animal Emergency & Referral Ce...

If you treat your pet like a member of your family...

If you treat your pet like a member of your family, taking them here is the equivalent of shipping them off to the morgue. In late March of 2019, I lost my beloved German Shepherd of 12 years, his name was Moses, and the traumatic experience at the hands of this vet and their staff left me so grief stricken that I have not had the strength to write this until now.
Moses, a senior but healthy and well taken care of dog, had been experiencing some distress the entire day. When I noticed his labored breathing, I rushed him to the nearest veterinary clinic, if you can even call them that. While my husband drove, I cradled his head in my lap and tried to comfort him. Somewhere along the mere 6 mile drive that seemed to last forever, he looked up at me with those gentle eyes that had stayed with him since he was a puppy, as if to say "I love you, mom. It's okay" and then let out one final breath. I knew in that moment that my Moses had passed, and the only thing I noticed over the breaking of my heart was the absence of his breathing as we pulled into the vet's office.
He was dead upon arrival, but they insisted upon lifting his limp body onto a stretcher. What I saw next has haunted the memory of my sweet boy for months.Staff stuck his corpse with needles and pumped saline into his stalled veins, as if feign some sort of last ditch effort to save him, and wheeled him away from me. When I demanded he be returned to me so that I could bury him, they handed me a bill for $250.00, citing their end of life attempts to save him, and refused to give me his body unless I paid. They took his body hostage and held it for ransom, which I paid on the spot. I would have paid anything to get him off of a cold, metal table.
And they knew that. They exploit the love people have for their animals. To throw an extra bit of salt in the wound, I opened my mailbox a few weeks later to a scripted, insincere sympathy card from the staff. It's not their prices that inspired this review or this review. It's their callousness. If they had half the compassion split amongst their entire staff that my Moses had in his whole body, they would not have treated his death the way that they did. They took an already awful experience and made it worse, all just for their profit.