What’s new at Companion Pet Care of Littleton, Inc.

Please note the new hours on our homepage.  Dr. Billie has made what she has described as a “quality-of-life” decision to close the clinic on Saturday mornings.  With two little kiddos at home, she feels that being away from them every day of the work week, and Saturday mornings as well, is just too much.  After investigating the situation, and realizing that virtually all other professional offices are closed on Saturdays, and almost all of our own veterinary emergency call group as well, she decided that it would help her provide better quality of care during the week if she closed on Saturdays as well. 

Never fear, though.  We have made some accommodations for our clients who cannot get away from work during the week for routine wellness care for their pets.  We have decided to stay open late on Wednesday evenings so folks can come after work if needed.  We will be in the office until 8PM on Wednesdays, and will be seeing many of our normal Saturday patients for scheduled appointments in those evening time slots.  We will occasionally have Saturday hours, on Saturday mornings that we are on emergency call for our call group.  If you need to schedule a wellness appointment for a Saturday morning, please call the office to find out when the next available Saturday appointment might be.

Our emergency call group, which includes our clinic, St. Johnsbury Animal Hospital, Dr. Steen’s Animal Hospital, North Country Veterinary Clinic, Danville Animal Hospital, Ryegate Small Animal Hospital, and East Haven Veterinary Clinic, is available to see emergency cases on Saturday mornings, just as it is on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. 

As always, we reserve appointments during the day for sick patients belonging to our regular clients, and we can arrange for convenient drop-off appointments for established patients.  For those who are unfamiliar with drop-off appointments, in many cases we can provide day hospitalization for a patient to allow us to spend more time on observation and diagnostics, and for convenient drop-off and pick-up times for the client.  Please understand that most drop-off patients will be staying with us until late afternoon.  Many of our evaluations and diagnostic tests will be done during our “lunch break”, and treatments will be determined during the afternoon.

If you have visited the clinic on Thursdays, and more recently on Monday mornings, you will have noticed a new face around the office.  Dr. Anne Hansalik has joined us as a relief/associate veterinarian, and helps Dr. Billie out two days a week.  She also helps fill in when Dr. Billie is out of town. 

Dr. Anne graduated from the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University over 20 years ago, and has practiced in Texas and New Hampshire.  She and her husband live in the Franconia/Sugar Hill area, and are raising 4 wonderful children.  She is a very kind, caring vet, and all of our furry and fuzzy clients have been very impressed with her!  Please welcome Dr. Anne when you come by the clinic!

You are all familiar with our technician, Jen.  On December 21st, she presented us with our newest little technician-in-training!  Miss Ella Leigh was born at about 2:30 in the afternoon, and weighed in at a whopping 8 pounds, 15 ounces.  Wow!  Jen just returned to work on Monday, so please tell her congratulations when you stop by!

Your much neglected blog has finally been updated!  We have much news, but we’ll start with the fact that at the end of last October, our American Animal Hospital Association accreditation was renewed!  We spent several months preparing for our accreditation visit, and, once again, we passed with flying colors.  We are so very proud to be associated with a group that requires that we meet more than 900 standards over and above what is required by law.  You can be assured that when you visit our clinic, you are being served by a group that provides the very best quality of care possible.  You can visit AAHA’s web pages to learn more about this impressive group of hospitals at http://www.aahanet.org

Companion Pet Care has just gone a little greener (and we hope our colleagues will be green with envy!)  We have just acquired a brand-spanking new digital x-ray system which allows us to dispense with harmful developing chemicals.  We simply take our radiographs using special digital x-ray cassettes, which are read directly into a computer, and we have the images within a few seconds!

We can make exposure adjustments after the images have been taken, allowing us to take far fewer radiographs while trying to get the exposure just right, thereby exposing your pet to less radiation.  We can also communicate our images to specialists for review simply by sending an e-mail instead of trotting down to the post office with our precious one-of-a-kind images and sending them away.  We can even copy images onto a CD-ROM for clients if they need to hand-carry them to a specialist for referral cases, or look at them at home on their own computers.

We’ve been using our new system for about 3 weeks, and are very pleased with the ease of use and the quality of our images.  Feel free to ask about our new equipment next time you’re in our office!

Quite belatedly, I’m announcing that Dr. Lambert has decided to leave Companion Pet Care and make her way south to Tennessee to be near her sister, who just became a new mother last summer!  We wish her the best in her new endeavors, and we miss her presence in our clinic. 

I’ll be looking for a new associate and hope to find just the right person to fit into our practice sometime over the next few months.  In the meantime, our schedule seems to be full all the time, so please have patience with us as we try our best to accomodate all of our clients and fit everyone in in a timely fashion!  Receptionists Jackie and Diane are doing an excellent job of triaging sick patients and scheduling their appointments appropriately.  Technicians Becky and Jen are keeping up with client communications and helping me with my callbacks as much as possible.

Please be assured that we will NEVER compromise our high standards of patient and client care, no matter how busy we may be!

On July 2, this lovely display ad was published in the Littleton Courier:

We appreciate this acknowlegement so much!  We consider it a privilege that we were able to provide care for Bailey, and we continue to hold the Gilpin family in our thoughts…

Hard to believe that all this time has flown, but young Lucas is now about 8 weeks old, and star technician Jen is back at work, drawing blood and doing labwork, providing the excellent care for your pets you’ve come to expect from her.  Welcome back, Jen!  We’ve missed you!

Our own ace technician, Jen, gave birth to a strapping, healthy baby boy at 10:49 PM Friday evening, April 25.  I believe the official measurements were 21″ long and 8 pounds, 7 ounces.  Mom and son are doing great, and we’ll soon have a new technician-in-training at CPC.  Congratulations, Jen and Eric!!!

Now that the snow is gone, the ticks are out.  Many people out walking with their dogs this week have come home to find ticks on their dogs, and themselves!  Ticks, in and of themselves, are not really very dangerous.  Their saliva does contain irritating substances that can cause an inflammatory reaction at the site of the bite, so after removing a tick from yourself or your pet, you may notice redness or swelling at the site, and that may persist for several days or even longer.  It is very unusual to develop an infection at the tick site.

The biggest concern with tick bites in our geographical area is the ability of ticks to transmit the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria, which is responsible for lyme disease.  In the northeastern United States, the primary vector is considered to be the Ixodes scapularis species of tick, also known as the deer tick, or black-legged tick.  In other parts of the country, other tick species are responsible, and there is growing concern that the American Dog tick may be a vector for the disease as well.  The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services recently released their 2007 Lyme Disease Bulletin, and they reported that the incidence of lyme disease rose by 43% from 2006 to 2007.  They also reported that over 50% of deer ticks in southern NH are infected with the bacteria causing lyme disease. 

Lyme disease is a growing concern in our pet dog population as well, and we know from our own screening tests that more and more dogs are exposed to lyme disease every year.  In dogs, we do not typically see a “target” rash at the site of the tick bite, but we may note a fever, swollen or achy joints, and in severe cases, signs of kidney failure.  (At this point in time, there is no evidence that domestic cats can contract lyme disease.)

How do we reduce the chances that our dogs will contract lyme disease?  There are several things we can do:

• Exercise good tick surveillance: If your dog has had any opportunity to be exposed to ticks, while roaming outdoors, or even while walking on a leash at your side, check them over carefully at least once every 24 hours.  Ticks like the head and neck, but can be found anywhere on your dog.
• Use a topical parasiticide such as Frontline or Revolution: Even the best of us may miss a tick or two on our dogs.  Frontline and Revolution are designed to kill ticks within 24 hours of contact with your dog, and can help diminish their chances of transmitting lyme disease.  None of the commercial products have any tick repellant activity, but there is a collar, called the Preventic collar, which is impregnated with a slow-release formulation of Amitraz.  This chemical does help repel ticks, and the makers of Revolution will provide the collars free with the purchase of 3 or 6 month supplies of Revolution.  The collars may also be purchased seperately. 
• Lyme vaccination: For those dogs who are potentially going to be exposed to ticks on a regular basis, vaccination against lyme disease can help reduce the incidence of clinical disease if they are bitten by an infected tick.
• Lyme screening: The Idexx SNAP 3Dx test we recommend yearly to make certain dogs are free from heartworm disease also screens for exposure to lyme disease.  It has been shown that treating dogs with antibiotics appropriate for lyme disease can help keep your dog from showing clinical signs of lyme disease if he or she has been exposed to it.

There are also environmental treatments that can be used in your yard to help reduce the tick population. You can check with your local garden center for recommendations.

The Centers for Disease Control has a very nice collection of web pages discussing tick-borne illnesses in humans and control and prevention. It’s worth a look if you are interested in learning more.

Feel free to stop by the office and pick up a brochure about lyme disease, or purchase a dose or two of Frontline. If you are having trouble controlling the ticks on your dog, and would like to consider vaccinating for lyme disease or treating for possible exposure, please call our office and discuss it with one of our receptionists or technicians. They will help you determine the next best step, and may suggest a consulation with one of our veterinarians.