What to expect on your first visit to our clinic
1. Make an appointment.
First of all, congratulations on your decision to come see us. You are already doing great. To make that appointment, you can either call our office to schedule or self-schedule with our online booking tool. We are typically booking out 2 months in advance for new-patient consultations. If your pet has an urgent problem, please ask to be on our waitlist, and we will do our best to see you sooner.
2. Register.
Please fill out our new patient registration form.
3. We'll get your records.
When you register (see step 2), you will have given us the names of the veterinarians that have pertinent records for your pet. Our office will contact theirs and get your records sent over to our office.
4. Prepare for your appointment.
If you think your pet will need a procedure at the first visit, please have your pet fasted for 6 hours. If you need to cancel or reschedule your appointment, please do so 24 business hours in advance. If snow is forecast and you don’t like to drive in the snow, please prospectively reschedule your appointment, as we are here rain, shine, or snow. Clients who no-show their appointments or cancel at the last minute will have the honor of joining of our special club of clients that are required to pay a $100 no-show fee and a deposit to book future appointments. Please don’t join that club!
The price for a new-patient consultation is $275, and cytology will typically also be needed, which costs $80 – $135. The typical total cost for a new patient visit (including consultation, internal and external diagnostics, minor procedures if needed, and medications) is $500 – $1,000. It will be worth it!
5. Come to your appointment.
Our address is 47 Nichols Ave. in Stratford, CT. We make every effort to stay on schedule, so please be on time. Please budget in time for traffic on I95 or on the Merritt. We drive in it every day ourselves and don’t like it any more than you do :(.
When you get here, please park in our front lot, facing Nichols Ave, unless you need our handicapped parking spot/entrance, which is in the rear lot/rear of the building. We have a grassy area for your dog to go and a doggy pickup bag station.
6. Get treated
Our philosophy is to treat the root cause of your pet’s skin conditions, and we will do as much as possible to make your initial visit as productive as possible. Please budget 90 minutes for your new-patient consultation.
7. Check out and book your recheck appointment.
To pay for your visit, we accept all major credit cards, cash, check, and Care Credit. Before your next recheck visit, please fill out the existing patient update form.
8. Read your discharge instructions carefully.
We spend a lot of time writing detailed discharge instructions for you. They are not boilerplate or generated by an AI bot but written with great care by us, just for you. Please give these discharge instructions the same love that we gave them when we wrote them.
You have spent your time and money coming to us, so keep up the momentum and abide by your treatment plan. We get a lot of follow-up emails from clients saying, more-or-less, “My little Fluffy’s antibiotics were working well at first, but then I decided to swap them out for kombucha extract pills that I bought from my SoulCycle instructor. I hope that’s OK.”
No, that is not OK! Please follow your treatment plan unless we or another veterinarian tells you not to.
9. Refill your medications.
We offer several great options for refilling your medications:
- You can directly order them from our e-commerce platform Unleashed Vetmart. We ship all orders for free, or can have them ready for pickup. We price medications very competitively with anything that you can find online.
- You can call or email us for a refill (shipped or pickup).
- You can buy them from our partner pharmacy Vetsource.
- You can request that we send the prescription to another one of your veterinarians.
- You can pick up a signed prescription, or we can send one to you in the mail, and you can fill it at any pharmacy of your choice.
We take great pride in offering some of the lowest prices available anywhere for the medications that we prescribe. Thanks to our low prices and convenience, most clients end up buying their medications straight from us using options #1 or #2. Should you nonetheless prefer to use a third-party pharmacy, you are welcome to do so — in that case, you will just have to submit your own prescription authorizations. Learn more about our prescription refill policy.
10. Stay in touch.
Hopefully your pet is now on the mend, and if so, congratulations! If all is going well, we still love to get pictures and updates, and feel free to post a picture of your pet on our Google profile or our Facebook page. You can also write us a review.
Alternatively, if something is not working, please let us know. You can contact us by email or phone. If you need an urgent recheck, but we are not showing any availability, please call our office, and we will make every effort to squeeze you in.
