5,000 stories in the naked city. This one's about iguanas.

May 12, 2017 8:54 AM

A day in the life of the Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine on the Upper West Side. They're the vets for your pets when your pets are a bit....unusual. (And less than 50lbs.)

Bonus round: Me and my llama.

posted by Diablevert (3 comments total)

This was so nicely written. I had to turn off the part of my brain that worries about these animals being kept in the city. But once that was out of the way, it was a great read.
posted by veggieboy at 9:28 AM on May 12, 2017

We are very lucky where we live, in the hinterlands, to have a local vet who specializes in exotics. We have parrots, and I've also kept rodents in the past. Having a knowledgeable, experienced avian vet has been really good for us, and part of the fun is that you never know what you see when you go in. Turtles, snakes, birds you've never heard of before.

I do look back on the choices I made about some of my animals years ago, before I had kids, and recognize that I wouldn't make the same decisions now. I once paid for surgery on a hamster! I once went thousands of dollars in debt getting chemotherapy for a dog, which extended her life maybe eight months or so. Now, with so many other obligations, I'd tend to go for palliative care in similar situations. Although the dog with cancer was very young, and that's always hard. If we had another beautiful four-year-old with cancer, I don't know for sure I wouldn't make the same choice again. I think I wouldn't. But you never know for sure.

We did just spend hundreds of dollars to treat an infection in my son's budgie. You can buy a budgie for under $20, but it's not about whether you can replace a beloved animal, but how much you love and need them around. Watching my son's bird slowly recover from her infection (she was on antibiotics for 45 days!) was a great joy. Like most budgies, she's 31 grams of bird with twelve metric tons of personality, and my son is very attached to her.
posted by Orlop at 10:07 AM on May 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

I love this place & took my ferrets there for many years. Not only that, but Dr. Pilny was the vet for my ferrets back when I used to take them to the Animal Medical Center, before he moved on to the Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine. I ended up moving to the CAEM myself after a budgetary shakeup at the AMC caused their entire exotics department to be eliminated for a period of time.

I can't say enough good things about the CAEM. My ferret Asher had congestive heart failure (somewhat common in domestic ferrets) and he was on a quasi-experimental drug regimen that enabled him to have a high quality of life for around four years post-diagnosis when six months is more usual. I will never forget the day one of my other ferrets died. Asher's normal vet was coming in to work at the same time my wife and I were coming out with an empty carrier. He mistakenly thought Asher had been the one who had died, and actually started to tear up about it because he had become so attached. In addition to the great veterinary service, it really endeared me to the Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine that they had people who would invest personally and emotionally in the animals under their care.
posted by slkinsey at 12:21 PM on May 12, 2017 [1 favorite]