You will recognise eight situations that do not keep until tomorrow, know what to have ready when you ring, and know why ringing does not commit you to coming in.
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Most worries can wait for an ordinary appointment. A short list of situations cannot: these are the ones where a few hours change the outcome.
Repeated trips to the tray, long spells of straining, crying while straining, sometimes a few drops and no more: in a male cat above all, this one is counted in hours rather than days.
Do not wait until morning to see whether it passes. Ring, describe how many trips and the fact that nothing is coming out, and let the clinic decide what happens next.
A cat breathing with its mouth open at rest, an animal whose belly is pulled in on every breath, a neck stretched forward, gums that look pale or bluish: these signs travel together and they do not wait.
Ring before you set off, and travel calmly, without chasing it round the room if it struggles: stress makes laboured breathing worse.
Being sick, unpleasant as it is, is not the same as repeated retching that produces nothing. If the belly looks swollen and hard, if the animal paces and cannot lie down, this is a different situation.
In a large deep-chested dog, that combination is rung straight away. Describe the retching, the belly, and the time of the last meal.
Eye pain does not get postponed: an eye deteriorates within hours and mends badly. A half-closed lid, a cornea gone milky, a pupil that no longer matches the other side are same-day reasons to ring.
Put nothing in it while you wait, not even something prescribed during an earlier episode.
Thirst that clearly increases, with the bowl emptying faster and more urine produced, is the sign households let run the longest, because it looks like nothing at all.
This is not a middle-of-the-night emergency, but it is not a detail to save for the next vaccination reminder either. Ring during the day and ask how soon they want to see it.
A dog skipping a meal and a cat touching nothing all day are not the same event. In cats, a complete fast is not a small thing, even when everything else looks normal.
First make sure it is not eating somewhere else, at a neighbour's or from another bowl in the house. If the fast is real, that is a call, not a forty-eight-hour wait.
Plenty of people hesitate because they assume a call commits them to an appointment, a journey and a bill. The call exists to sort, and the sorting is done by people whose job it is.
Very often the answer will be to watch and write things down, with clear reasons to ring back. That is a real answer, and it beats a night spent comparing pictures on a search engine.
Its age, roughly what it weighs, the time this started, what it has eaten and drunk since, any recent treatments including parasite products, and anything it may have swallowed or chewed.
Add your videos and photographs. Ten seconds of footage replaces five minutes of description, and it still earns its keep when the animal looks perfectly fine on arrival.