December 23, 2007
A remarkable vet: Dr. Lisa Tuzo
I've written before about the thoughtful care our geriatric sheltie Beau received from Baltimore mobile vet Dr. Lisa Tuzo: here in The Life and Times of Beau Belliveau and Dealing with Beau's end of life.My friend and soccer buddy Rachel sent me an interesting e-mail this week, it reads as follows:
Jeannette,
This past weekend, my cat had an emergency related to her heart condition and I was advised to put her to sleep. A friend of mine recommended I ask her vet (Dr Tuzo) to come to my house to put her to sleep instead of taking her to my vet's office. Dr Tuzo rearranged her schedule on Saturday and spent almost 3 hours carefully observing my cat & determined it was not time to put her to sleep. It turns out she was right.
I was incredibly impressed with Dr Tuzo's care.
I just "googled" Dr Tuzo and your Beau blog entries came up, and I can see Dr Tuzo also provided great care for him. So I thought I'd pop you a note.
So that's another vote of confidence in Dr. Tuzo. She seems to be quite a gifted veterinarian. Both Rachel and I highly recommend her especially for older and very sick animals. More on the situation with Rachel's cat:
My cat's condition last Friday was dire (blood clot resulting from her long-standing hypertrophic cardiomyopathy condition). I was told by both the hospital and my regular vet that there would only be a small chance she could pull through and it would require lots of tests/treatment & money with no guarantees of recovery. They recommended I put her to sleep soon. I decided it would be best to have her be put to sleep at home. A friend gave me Dr Tuzo's name - Dr Tuzo had provided exemplary end-of-life care for her dog when he was ill last year. Dr Tuzo rearranged her schedule on Saturday in order to come by my house.
In the meantime, my cat had miraculously started recovering on her own (this normally does not happen in her condition). I did not know she was recovering, but Dr Tuzo explained that she was. She decided the cat was not ready to be put to sleep. She carefully and patiently went to work like a detective. Pets can't tell you what's wrong with them - Dr Tuzo has all kinds of techniques to try to figure out what's wrong. She spent almost 3 hours observing the cat (the advantage of having a vet come to your house is they can observe the cat in their own environment - walking, eating, peeing, etc - can't do this in a vet's office). She was extremely dedicated. She gave me a plan of action to move forward with and pain medication to hold the cat over until she could be brought to the cardiologist. She touched base with me daily to check in & discussed the situation with the cardiologist first thing Monday morning.
The cat has been evaluated by the cardiologist and is on a new medication regime now & needs to be retested periodically. She is stable and happy now. There is a chance her condition can be put under control, although there is also a chance her heart could fail. We'll just have to wait and see...
I'm not sure what would have happened if Dr Tuzo did not come by on Saturday. There's a good chance the cat would have been put to sleep at my vet's office.
One of the problems is that I did not follow-up with some tests I had my vet do earlier this year. Lesson is: if you ask your vet to do a test, don't assume they will call you if the results are bad. They might neglect to call you. Call them back and ask them to look at the report & tell you what the results are.
Note how Dr. Tuzo provided followup care and a sincere interest in Rachel's cat. This reminds me, I have already used her twice for followup telephone consultations, for which she later invoiced me at my insistence, when our sheltie Pierre developed a limp. One great thing about this vet is that she will give you a solid 30 minutes or more of the kind of information pet owners crave but can't seem to get from a busy office vet, and she knows how to explain things simply or in detail, depending on your level of interest.
Information on how to contact her is at her Web site, Vet2Go, here.
- posted by jbelliveau at 2:15 PM in The Neighborhood
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