Night Owls Welcome

Bibbles the cat is at the animal emergency room because she has been ill and is lethargic. But her owners, Warren Wyatt and Julie Hines, have symptoms too.

“It makes us nervous because we’re pet lovers,” says Wyatt, 42, of Fountain Valley. “When you have pets, you have problems.”

Hines, 33, blames herself for the situation and has a migraine from the stress. Three days ago, she waited too long to feed Bibbles, and the hungry cat chowed down on a towel, swallowing a piece of cloth. “I can’t believe she did that,” Hines says.

Wyatt adds: “Her regular veterinarian got her to throw it up, but she hasn’t eaten and she is not getting better.”

So cat and owners are at All-Care Animal Referral Center in Fountain Valley at 12:30 a.m. The center is one of several in Orange County that treat pet emergencies and illnesses 24 hours a day.

Though cats and dogs are the most common late-night patients, they aren’t the only ones. Staff members say they see turtles with cracked shells, ill iguanas, puny pot-bellied pigs, and occasionally a snake that has been attacked by its dinner.

“We get a lot of snakes chewed up by prey,” says Dr. Frank Borostyankoi, 36, a staff veterinarian. When an owner offers a pet snake a live mouse, the rodent sometimes attacks first. “If the snake is not hungry right away, the food gets hungry,” he says.

The hospital staff says business is more brisk on weekends and on nights like this one, when the moon is full. But nobody is blaming that for Bibbles’ problem. Dr. Robert J. Righter, 50, says cats often swallow foreign objects.

“I took two door stoppers out of a cat a week ago,” he says. “You can’t imagine why they would do it. I think what gets cats in trouble is they play with stuff.”

Dogs also get in trouble with foreign objects. Borostyankoi says he recently treated a dog who had swallowed a screw. And he once removed a comb from a dachshund’s digestive tract. (The comb, he says, was almost as long as the dog.)

When pets ingest razor blades, fish hooks, even articles of clothing, the symptoms seem to surface in the middle of the night, Borostyankoi says. Or maybe the owners just don’t deal with the problem until the wee hours.

“Night people are different,” he says. “You hear stories like, ‘This cat has been vomiting for nine days now.’ Some are without any money. They want to see if the animal is going to get better on its own.”

Freak accidents happen at night too. People watching late-night TV with small dogs on their laps may stand up suddenly to go to bed, and the animals fall and hurt their backs.

“It’s a common story that the dachshund jumped off the sofa and got paralyzed,” Borostyankoi says.

The dog patients this night have been in more traumatic situations. At 3 a.m., technician Gracie Alcantar, 34, is preparing a 150-pound Great Dane for surgery. The dog was on a walk when it was attacked by a Rottweiler--”brave Rottweiler,” Alcantar says.

The patient has a laceration on his back, so Alcantar shaves away the fur around the wound. Then she inserts an oxygen tube in its trachea and gives it an injection of anesthesia. As the dog drifts into unconsciousness, Alcantar and another technician place it on a stretcher and carry it to an operating table, where a veterinarian will repair the damage.

Meanwhile, there’s a crisis in the hospital’s critical-care unit. A 13-year-old collie named Layla is in cardiac arrest. Borostyankoi revives the dog, who is recovering from surgery, but the prognosis isn’t good.

“There’s a fair chance she will try to die again pretty soon,” Borostyankoi says. “The owners are going to come and see the dog and see if we should put her to sleep.”

Minutes later, the staff scrambles to revive a Lhasa apso named Chang. Borostyankoi massages the dog’s chest but explains, “This one has a heart disease. He’s not going to make it through.”

Chang does not respond. Meanwhile, Layla’s heart has stopped too. Borostyankoi has lost two patients at almost the same time.

Though saddened, he isn’t surprised. “It’s part of the full moon,” he says.