The Right Medicine for Sick Animals : Pets: About 500 trauma centers treat victims of car accidents, poisonings, shootings and sudden life-threatening illnesses. Care is often superior, but costs can be steep.

It’s nearly midnight and a tiny, wide-eyed mutt named Cochise is yelping in pain at a veterinary clinic in South Charleston, W. Va.

Cradled gently by his owner, Cochise watches uneasily as a young veterinarian in faded jeans and orange scrub shirt prods his dangling leg.

Minutes later, the shivering, screaming pup is under anesthesia. X-rays show his front left leg is snapped near the shoulder.

“We were running around and all of a sudden he was behind me and he lets out this god-awful scream. I guess I stepped on him,” his owner tells veterinarian Shawn Settee.

The injury will eventually require surgery, but tonight Cochise goes home in comfort with painkillers and a leg wrapped in festive red and green.

Cochise is one of thousands of animals to benefit from a rapidly growing number of emergency clinics for pets.

The Animal Emergency and Critical Care Society in San Antonio says more communities are turning to emergency care, spurred by the success of such clinics and the demand by pet owners for more rapid service.

Open late at night and around the clock over weekends and holidays, some 500 clinics nationwide are front-line trauma centers for animals involved in car accidents, poisonings, shootings and sudden life-threatening illnesses.

The resemblance to human emergency rooms is striking. The work is urgent. The injuries are often serious.

And because medical bills for even a moderately injured animal can quickly reach into the hundreds of dollars, wrenching life and death decisions about beloved pets are commonplace.

“We see families go through some very difficult times,” said Pete Gaveras, administrator of the Animal Emergency Center in Milwaukee, Wis.

“In a trauma center like ours, we see our share of pets that don’t make it,” he added.

In true emergency room style, veterinarians often invent a few of their own procedures.

Settee at the South Charleston clinic recently treated a critically ill dog whose heart had stopped several times despite repeated cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Settee eventually revived the dog, but it began having trouble breathing.

“There’s a drug we use to induce breathing in newborn puppies, but it’s not used in adult dogs,” Settee said. “I figured, we might as well try it.”

A large dose worked, allowing Settee to continue treatment. Still, the dog eventually died.

“It didn’t save the dog, but it gave us a chance,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”

Here, veterinarians patch up the worst problems and watch over pets until their regular veterinarians open for business.

Some clinics are more sophisticated “critical care” centers staffed by specially trained veterinarians, said James Ross, president of the American College of Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care.

Since 1989, Ross said his college has certified an elite group of animal doctors as critical care specialists under the auspices of the American Veterinary Medical Assn., the national governing body for animal medicine.

At critical care clinics such as Gaveras’ Milwaukee center, treating late-night injuries is only part of the job, Ross said. There’s also a heavy emphasis on treating diseases like cancer that require expensive equipment that traditional small animal practices can’t afford, he said.

The average fee for emergency care is about $250, and bills upward of $1,000 are not uncommon, Gaveras said.

About half of pet owners choose to pay, he said. The others have their animals euthanized.

“I think there’s a lot of similarities between what we see and what you’d see at a trauma center at a human hospital,” Gaveras said. “But pet owners and veterinarians have choices that you wouldn’t have with a human patient.”

Rebecca Golatzki, a veterinarian in Edgewood, Ky., says emergency clinics are a godsend.

“I don’t think until you’ve done it that you can understand how stressful it is just to carry a pager and never know if you will get to enjoy Christmas with your family, or even a whole movie, without being interrupted,” she said.

Still, many clients insist on waking her at midnight to treat their pets.

“It is amazing to me how many people will take their children to the emergency room and see a strange physician without a second thought, but absolutely balk at the thought of using an emergency vet,” she said.

“Some veterinarians leave the IV running, lock the door and hope for the best when they come back in the morning.”

Jane Butler of Elmsford, N.Y., credits a clinic there for saving her dog’s life.

Butler says she brought the dog in after noticing it bleeding profusely from the rectum.

“It looked like she was dying,” Butler said. “It was flooding around my feet and I thought we would lose her.”

But it turned out to be a relatively simple condition that, if treated soon enough, is not fatal.

Not everyone is so lucky.

Kyla Carlson of Foster City, Calif., lost two dogs to antifreeze poisoning.

Despite an entire weekend of high-tech emergency care and initial hopes that the dogs would survive, both had to be killed when it became apparent the chemicals had destroyed vital organs.

Not all of the cases are critical, said Steve Mehnken, one of two veterinarians at the South Charleston clinic.

A woman recently brought her Shih Tzu to Mehnken’s clinic in the middle of the night because it had been constipated for nearly a week. The dog finally got an enema and went home happy.

“It’s amazing what people will call with at 4 o’clock in the morning,” Mehnken said.

But Ross said pet owners are increasingly willing to demand immediate service and pay the price.

“They don’t want a dog,” Ross said. “They want this dog.”