Desert Cross Veterinary Hospital

09/14/2025

As a kid, I hated this picture because it was everything that I was embarrassed about myself. I had short stringy hair and while I loved doing animal things at home, I didn’t love it when around other kids because I didn’t know any other kids that milked cows by hand and whose clothes were covered in cow p**p. This picture was everything that was the best and the worst in my life at 11 years old.

As an adult, I love this picture. It is one of my most favorite pictures because it is such a foundational part of what made me who I am today. What was embarrassing as a kid became great strength to me as an adult. What I hated for people to know as a kid, I love for people to know as an adult. What I thought people would make fun of me for as a kid, created in me a strength and a work ethic that allows me to do what I do today. I would not change any of that for anything in the world.

Oftentimes those things that are the hardest, that seem the most miserable, that others do not understand or cannot fathom, those are the very things that make us successful if we let them! The difference is in the choice to not allow you to be a victim to it or to what other people say about you because of it! I do not care if it is milking cows by hand, cleaning up trash at a job, cleaning bathrooms, being the grunt, doing the job that no one else wants to do, picking up garbage in the parking lot, the jobs that no one else wants to do are the very jobs that create character and strength and a drive to grow and become more! Those are not the bad jobs, they are the best jobs! They are the jobs that lay a strong foundation and give one the ability to appreciate every step up.

We adults need to start sharing with the younger generations the jobs we did and how they helped us get to where we are today! Not as a poor me but as a this is what made me who I am today and you too can become great by doing things that no one else wants to do. The joys that come from working are what makes life fulfilling and worthwhile! Too many people are stuck on the lie of work/life balance but life is work and balance comes from learning to love what you do because what you do for work is what gives your life purpose!

I am proud to have been a kid raised on a farm and to have milked cows by hand, covered in s**t and all, for all of my school life! It taught me so much that is woven into all that I am today. I gave me a foundation and a love of getting stuff done and learning to be better and more efficient at it. Life is best when we stop complaining about the very thing that makes our life what it is.

09/11/2025

I did mobile large animal practice for almost a decade. It started out doing anything and everything because I was desperately broke and I silently begged the phone to ring every day. Thankfully for me back in the early 2000 there were only a few of us doing large animal mobile work in my part of the state and there was enough work for everyone even though back then people didn’t use a vet for large animals very much, at least not in the rural of all rural areas of Arizona.

I will be straight up honest with you and tell you that I am not a great vet for backyard horse people who don’t understand horses and can’t afford to feed them properly. I really struggled to be nice to them when they would call because the horse was thin and they thought it needed its teeth floated and there was a small bale of hay to feed half a dozen horses and they were all standing at the fence staring longingly at the hay. I just couldn’t not have a bitchy tone with those people and it damn sure was not a good business builder. To be honest, I am still not great with those people. I think even people whose budgets are super tight can buy the cheapest dog food and feed a dog but horses are not cheap to own or feed or treat and if you can’t afford to feed them as much hay as they need you should not have them! Period. And if you do and they are thin and you are feeding them one flake a day while you are eating everything and anything, I am going to not come across nice and I still don’t care because horses are special and they deserve more.

My practice ended up being mostly racehorses and race track and ranches. It was the perfect practice for me other than the racetrack guys didn’t pay and the ranchers couldn’t pay and so it made it tough to make a living and when I built the clinic and stopped going on the road, I had over $60,000 in unpaid invoices which was a heck of a lot of money especially when I was opening another business. I do not honestly know how I held it all together those first ten years other than God was faithful. I didn’t pay myself for the first three or five years. I did a lot of stuff by myself to try and keep the staff numbers as low as possible. I worked 7 days a week, on call 24 hours a day for 365 days a year for a really long time. It was not easy and there were a lot of tears and mental struggles and sometimes I wondered if it was even worth continuing to live.

But, I didn’t give up, I kept working, I kept trying, I kept dreaming and slowly things started to get busier and I was able to add things to help me take care of the animals better. My first addition was the horse barn and it has been so nice to have and it made me feel like I had more to offer and a way to help the horse better. Then it was the first addition on to the clinic that allowed me to finally have an office and more kennel space. Then there was the cattle facility that gave me someplace to actually see and work cows and bulls and unbroke wild horses. And then there was the second addition on to the main clinic that doubled the number of exam rooms and gave us a euthanasia room and more surgery space and more offices. The mobile unit that allows us to go into the surrounding small towns and provide vet services. And last year was the mare motel that allows us to be able to hold more horses and help more horses and there are plans for another addition on to the clinic and another horse barn for more of an ICU type need. One day maybe even an equine surgery barn and some more stud stalls and a collection barn. Slowly and one thing at a time because that is how journeys are traveled with each addition paid for before the next one begins.

I am not the best at anything I do but I refuse to give up and I refuse to stop dreaming of how I can help more animals and more people. I am not super smart but I thank the good Lord that He gave me more common sense than the average Joe and that is how I work and go through life. I have taken many steps forward only to end up falling back and having to get up and regroup and restart and climb my way back again. I have screwed up and learned from my mistakes and chosen to work on humility instead of defending my actions with pride and anger. I will proudly say that my greatest accomplishment in my career is learning to humble myself and not take offense when people do not like what I have done or what I have to say or doubt my ability or question my judgment. That alone has brought me the most peace and mental stability!

You are the only one who makes your life good or bad. You are the only one who can choose to plan it out and work towards your goals and make them happen. It doesn’t happen all at once, it happens if you never give up! It doesn’t work if you build it all before you can pay for it or fill it, it only works if you work to grow it and have patience to wait for that growth. Racing ahead and then praying for it to all work out is the fast way to failure! The old saying, slow and steady wins the race, is true in probably 90% of all work that one can do. If you are looking at what someone else has and hating them for it, stop! They worked hard to get what they have and you can do the same.

In everything in life there are steps forward and then steps back. There is thinking you are doing good only to have all hell break loose and everything go bad. There good days and then there are really bad days. You can never predict everything that is going to happen and sometimes it feels like too much. Yesterday was one of those days for me but it is one more building block into who I am becoming and more learning on listening and then acting when my gut tells me to do or not do something. No one gets it all right. The people who succeed are the ones who never give up and never stop trying and always keep dreaming of something more.

09/10/2025

Post a morning selfie with your picture perfect pet and your not so perfect you!

09/07/2025

We have a lot of puppies currently that came from the reservation and need loving homes. We have kept them because there just is no other place for them to go. Two chihuahuas had Parvo and are now completely better and complete heathens and desperately need homes. Two are abandoned puppies whose littermates all died under a house with no mom and no one to care of them. And, the last one is the little puppy whose leg was broke and had bones exposed and maggots galore trying to eat all the dead tissue and now has only three legs and really needs a loving and caring home to help strengthen and rebuild this traumatized puppy that has known no love or care.

If you are looking for a puppy to add to your home and heart, come down and take a look at the puppies we have. We do NOT know how big they will get or what kind of dog they are!! We just know they need love and homes.

09/06/2025

I had a conversation with a professional breeder yesterday as I always appreciate her insight and knowledge of her breed that she cares for and trains and shows explicitly. She loves her dogs, she loves the breed, and she invests an incredible amount of time and money into testing and researching and trying to produce the healthiest dog she possibly can. This is truly how breeding should be done in my opinion and when I write about generalities related to breeding and spaying and neutering and general issues, I am not talking to or about the professional breeders. I am writing and sharing information with all of us, myself included, who are pet owners or purchased a dog and chose to breed it so that we could make some money because it felt easy even though it is not. I am not criticizing, I am just trying to educate, again myself included, so that we humans can do better by the dogs that we create and love.

With that being written, let’s talk about when to spay or neuter your dog. There is so much information out there and to be honest, I think that there are so many holes in the papers that it is hard to really back them as truth and the way things should be done. First, I have been practicing in the same area for almost three decades, the clinic has been open for just under 20 years, 20 years, that is crazy to me, and we see and care for a lot of dogs. It also means that we are here for a dog's entire life and we see and know what happens to them and the disease and conditions that our patients struggle with the most. As a two doctor practice we are in the top 10% of patients seen out of all the users of the software we use which includes speciality practices and very large practices with over a dozen doctors all over the nation. I don’t tell you that to brag because we do not do it because it is cool, we do it because there are that many animals that need us. We will never turn anyone away, no matter how busy, because the whole reason we exist is to care for animals not to turn them away to be sick or die at home without care.

Because this is our “why” we are privileged to see and care for many animals their entire lives and that means seeing them from their first puppy shot to their final injection of peace that allows them to exit life without the suffering that often comes with death. We take care of animals for people who have no extra money to people who have whatever it takes to help them kind of money. Our county is the second lowest per capita income in the state so nothing we do is about money, it is all about trying to help the animals that help the people live better quality lives. We have the honor of treating and caring for our clients animals for their entire lives and it is an honor.

So, what does this have to do with spaying/neutering? I still and will always recommend spaying and neutering the average dog at the age of 6 months. "Why!?" You scream in your head, "when the “research” says it is bad?” Because in my practice where I see and treat an incredible amount of animals through, I don’t necessarily see what the people who worked the numbers say and I honestly do not believe that a 3-10% increase in potential for muscular skeletal trauma to be worth the huge increase in number of puppies we would get if people left their dogs intact for 3 years. We are being gaslighted into leaving our dogs intact by saying that they are at greater risk for hurting themselves all while being seemingly ok with the huge increase in euthanasias of unwanted dogs and puppies that will happen because dogs don’t care about the rules of procreation!

You buy your mixed breed doodle pup and you love it and you want to do what is best for it and you read in an article that you should wait until it is 3 to spay it and so on its first heat cycle while out in your yard going to the bathroom or just staying out there more because it bleeding all over your house is gross, some random, probably uncool and unsuave stray or even owned dog that doesn’t live in a fence smells your precious baby and comes and jumps your fence or even just makes love through the fence and in two months you now have 8 random puppies that you go to Walmart and try to guilt people into taking because you don’t want 8 more dogs. Then the six months later it happens again and then again and then again and by the time your dog is 3 and you decide it is now ok to spay her, she has produced dozens of unwanted puppies that most likely were not cared for and pawned off or left or killed at the pound because you wanted to do what someone said was best for one dog but cost the life of dozens of dogs. Is that really what is best for dogs?

I think that our dog food is more to blame for the increase in cancer and musculoskeletal disorders and injuries in our dogs than having their parts is if you want to know what I really think. It is proven in humans that preservatives and carbs and processing is horrible for us at a cellular level, dog food is so full of things that you can not even pronounce and our dogs live such shorter lives that the impact on their cellular health has to be so much greater. Humans that are couch potatoes and eat processed foods are at greater risk for muscular skeletal injuries and heart disease and metabolic disease and so are dogs and yet how many of us, again, myself included, let our dogs overeat processed foods and lay around like hippos? It is not the spaying and neutering that is causing disease and destruction in our dogs, it is the lifestyle that we are giving them. Let's also remember that the corporations that own most of the dog food brands now also own a lot of the veterinary hospitals.

You want your dog to live a long life, spay and neuter, get them exercise, feed them as close to a whole foods diet as you can afford, love them but let them be a dog, don’t throw balls and frisbees for them once a week after they have laid on the couch all week and are out of shape and fat! People get cancer and disease and muscular skeletal injuries at alarming rates and most of us have all our parts! I think the having the parts is the least of the factors that are killing our pets and taking the parts out has the greatest influence over how many dogs are unwanted and euthanized.

09/04/2025

I opened the clinic in October of 2008. I was recently divorced, I had two children ages 3 and 4, I was broke, in fact I was more than broke, I was buried in debt, and I was alone. I had no family living in the area not that it would have mattered as I had successfully run off my family over the previous decade as I lived my life in a way that was contrary to how I was raised and I knew it and I didn’t want to feel guilty about it so I pushed everyone away.

Every day was hard not because of the work, we only had a few clients a day, but because I was alone and carrying the weight of this business, this dream, and there was no one to help me. The kids were young and they needed their mother and they needed me to be there for them. The business was young and it needed me and it needed me to be smart and good and dedicated and I struggled, I struggled a lot.

When I opened the doors there were two other veterinary clinics in town. A year or so after I opened one of them closed. I hired my first associate in 2014 and she left in 2015. The second clinic in town closed. I hired my second associate in 2016 and she left in early 2018. The clinic in the small town about an hour away closed.

I had been open for more than a decade now and business had grown more because I was now the only one, but I thankfully had started working on becoming a better human about two year prior and when you publicly start talking about being kind, you have to do a lot of internal work to get to where you back that statement up with your whole life. It isn’t easy! It wasn’t easy! It still isn’t easy but I thank God that He has never given up on me and He continuously reminds me of His grace and mercy in my life and it helps me to try and give that out no matter if it is deserved or not. At the end of the day, who cares if someone deserves kindness or grace or mercy, give it because that is who you are and not what they deserve. That is how one changes the world!

I remember when my second associate left and I cried every single day early in the mornings in the gym during my workouts. I didn’t know how I was going to carry the weight of everything that I had to do between the clinic and the kids and the community expectations. I did know that I wanted to keep getting better at all of it but it felt so overwhelming and almost unattainable. Is it possible to do it all? To be everything that you want to be? Everything that your family needs you to be? Everything that your community expects you to be? And do it alone because no one, not even those closest to you, have any idea the weight that you carry with a business that they do not understand and are not a part of.

Since 2018 the business has continued to grow, not because we are the only one but because I never gave up! Because I continued to work at figuring it out. Because I pushed myself and continue to push myself to become a better human first, a better veterinarian, a better leader, a better boss- this is a really hard one when things are crazy busy and there are significant generational differences in work ethic and idea and I have not got it figure out yet! We have clients come in from hours away and passing many other vet clinics not because we are that good but because we care and we are willing to see them and their animal and try to help no matter what!

I do not write this because I am anything great, I am not! Just ask my staff. I write this because life is hard, business is hard, success is hard, getting better is hard! But, but if you do not allow yourself to make excuses, if you determine to keep getting up every day, if you choose to work on one thing at a time to make it better, if you continue to dream dreams, if you continue to look in the mirror everyday and work on you, if you allow yourself to cry and then give yourself a pep talk, if you just don’t give up, you can make your life as successful as you want it to be but it won’t be easy and it often will not be good and it will always be hard! But YOU have to do it! No one else is going to do it for you!

There are still days when I cry in the gym. To be honest, every single day I feel alone even though I am surrounded by people. Every day I worry that I am not enough. Every day I feel like I am failing my clients, my staff, my family. Every. Single. Day. And you know what, every single day I get over it and I choose to try again and do better and be better because that is life! The best things in life aren’t things, it is the overcoming of the obstacles inside your mind! It is choosing to pull yourself up and keep going even when it feels like everything and everyone is against you. It is reinventing yourself over and over and over again to become the person that your dream needs you to be even if you have to start a new dream each and every day.

Life is the most amazing gift that we all have and yet so many throw it all away complaining and bitching and waiting for someone else to make it better. Well let me tell you something, no one is going to make your life better, only you! Pull your head out of your ass and work harder, learn more, be better, be kinder, give more grace, have more mercy, stop cheating, stop whining, stop expecting someone else to make it easier or better, be a better person not for what it gets you but because that is who you want to be! You can’t fight the demons in your head if you have given all the tools to other people because those people are not around when the demons come calling! You can do it, I believe in you!

09/02/2025

I got a phone call from a long time client and friend who lives over an hour away. They had recently sent down a young horse that had gotten sick and it was really sick and had some other significant issues and after trying to save it for over a week, I had to put it down. The only good thing is that this made them call sooner when the current horse got sick because the loss of the other one was so fresh.

One of the ranch hands brought the horse down and dropped her off and while she didn’t look like she was dying, one could definitely tell that she was sick. Her blood work showed high white blood cells and slightly low red blood cells and pretty much everything else was in normal range. Now one must always remember that normal range does not mean normal, it just means not bad enough to show up. I started her on some antibiotics and figured in a day or two she would be getting better but that didn’t happen.

She wasn’t getting significantly worse but she wasn’t getting significantly better either. Her WBC were slowly coming down but not like they should have. She was kind of eating her hay but she was losing body condition like butter melting in a pan and she always had a fever and would break out in random sweats. After a few days I changed her to a different antibiotic regimen and thought for sure that this would start to make a difference, it didn’t, in fact, everything got worse. Her WBC started to climb again and her RBC plummeted and she was melting away right in front of my eyes.

Chemistries still remained normal and I knew that I had better figure out what was going on with this horse or she was going to die. Because of the drastic drop in red blood cells I drew more blood and sent it off of EIA and piroplasmosis because well, because sometimes obscure diseases find you. While this horse does not live on the reservation she does get ridden occasionally on the reservations and so I sent off blood for anaplasmosis and the following day sent one off for rocky mountain spotted fever because Dr Google said it could occur in horses. In my thirty years of practice in this one spot, I while I see tick disease in dogs from the reservation every single day, I have never once not ever had a horse that I thought might possibly have a tick disease but you don’t find what you aren’t looking for so I figured I had better at least look for it.

I had started treating her for tick disease because I had to change something as the current antibiotic regimen was not working. Within a day her RBC started going up so we continued the current treatment while waiting on results. Sunday when we got back from Alpine Emma checked the lab portal and the mare was positive for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Freaking crazy!
Every day of treatment and she has gotten better and better. Within just one day of oxytetracycline the look in her eyes changed. After three days her fever went away. After four days she quit breaking out in random sweats. She is eating and putting on weight and I am very hopeful for a full recovery.

Often times life we miss opportunities because we are too stuck on what we think we know. We judge people based on what someone else says and we dislike them or hate them for no other reason than we choose to remain ignorant and be open minded to the possibility that we actually don't know what we think we know. We don’t take a job because we think it is beneath us or not good enough or we don’t like someone who works there and we lose out on opportunities to learn and grow and become better. We keep our kids locked up with a phone or a screen because they might hurt themselves playing outside and we are afraid of the possibilities that might be present if we let them figure things out on their own. What are you missing because you are refusing to think outside the box that you know?

If I had just stuck to the normal things that I knew of and had seen, this horse would have died. You thinking only what you think you know, doing only what you are comfortable with, acting only how you feel like you need to act, what are you missing out on and failing at because you refuse to open up your mind? That person you hate, they are just a struggling human who has past that you know nothing about and maybe, just maybe they are not evil but just struggling like you are. The job that you think is beneath you, maybe it could be a stepping stone to the job you never dreamed of but is perfect for you. Letting your kid develop an imagination and learn how to navigate the outside world and how to not get hurt and how to get up again on their own when they fall, that is an investment in their future mental health!

You do not know what you don’t know so instead of getting mad or hating others who think differently or do differently than you do, maybe put a hole in the side of your box and allow some different thoughts to mix in with yours. Allow yourself to consider alternate ideas, it won’t hurt you and it doesn’t mean you have to change your mind but it might open up your mind to a whole new world of thoughts and ideas and you might just find that you enjoy your life a whole lot more.

Getting a diagnosis for that horse not only made me feel better about myself but it taught Emma to keep looking and to keep thinking outside what one knows and it saved the horses life. Just because you think you are right, doesn’t mean that you are and you might not know what you think you know so stop judging, stop looking down on everyone from your high horse, stop hating and open your mind to the sunshine and raindrops and growth of a life lived outside the box.

09/01/2025

08/29/2025

When I graduated vet school in 1997 I would say that there were at least 40% of us that were planning on going into mixed animal practice. The divide between disciplines was already started but a lot of us were still familiar with James Herriot and the quintessential view of veterinary medicine as portrayed in All Creatures Great and Small was strong within us. There were few specialty equine only brick and mortar clinic back then but there were a lot more vets that had brick and mortar clinics that saw everything. Dogs, cats, pigs, sheep, goats, guinea pigs, snakes, horses, cows and pretty much everything that walked in the door and they have the facilities to take care of all those things.

The “tracking” was starting to really take off when I entered vet school but it really only changed what one took as electives, everything else was the same regardless of if you wanted to work on birds or buffalos. When you graduated you were equally naive, I mean skilled, in all aspects of veterinary medicine and could do everything or pick one thing and go down that more narrow road. I had started vet school wanting to be a cow doctor and work on ranches doing cow/calf consulting, I dabbled some in equine my senior year but I knew that I was going to be able to do the most as a mixed animal practitioner helping all the animals even though my heart was truly for the large animals.

I spent almost four years doing mixed animal practice before making some stupid decisions and moving back and forth and not having any money so I started a large animal mobile practice. That is by far the cheapest and easiest way to get into practice for oneself. I drove all over the southern part of the state spending a fortune in fuel and time but I got to see a lot of neat country and meet a lot of cool people. My practice eventually filtered down into racetrack and ranches. It was truly the best of both worlds for me. The problem was, I was getting deeper and deeper into debt because I lost so much time on the road and I popped out two kids and I was always gone and they hated to ride in the truck and cried the entire time and I never saw them.

I knew that I had to go back to my roots. After almost ten years of driving and doing the mobile thing, I built a brick and mortar and chose to go back to mixed animal practice. To be honest, there is a huge pride thing for a vet to only do large animals especially as a woman. When I graduated there were not as many women doing the large animal thing and I felt like I was more cool because I was working on horses and cows. Going back to mixed animal practice made me feel like I was not as cool and I struggled with the mental aspect of that for several years. Is the mixed animal practitioner less than the one who does only horses or only cows or just large animal? Are we less cool? It definitely reveals ones struggle with pride!

At the end of the day for me the answer really didn’t matter because I had to be able to be around for my kids as I was divorced and had two children ages 3 and 4 and they needed their mother to be more available to them. It was a very slow start to the brick and mortar life and for many years it was almost all small animals with a few of my old clients bringing me horses for simple things. After being open for 7 or 8 years I was finally at a place where I could afford to build an equine barn and that seemed to make people feel like I was more legit. It didn’t seem to matter that I had only done horses and cattle for a decade, it was not until I had a place that looked like I did horses that people seemed to start trusting me to work on their horses. A few years after that the cattle chute and pens were added.

We have been open for almost two decades now and the horse and cow side of the practice has slowly and steadily been growing. The small animal side is very busy but dog and cat ownership is at an all time high and people choose to see their dogs and cats as their children so they bring them in for more stuff than they did two plus decades ago. Having been in the same area for almost 30 years has afforded me the ability to grow my reputation as a veterinarian, not a perfect one, not the smartest one, not the best one but one that will actually be here and will see your animal no matter what. That is what I take the most pride in today.

I no longer care, ok that is not true, I do care but I work at not allowing it to affect me, I do care that people think I am good at what I do and that I am equally good at helping horses, cows, dogs, cats, or whatever other critter they bring in. Even after 30 years I still want to be seen as “cool” and able to do all the things. I am not the smartest pick in the shed but I am well used and have seen and done a lot and can still get done what needs done and then some so I focus on that and improving myself so that I can continue to be seen as useful.

For most of us, life isn’t going to be the “dream”! Would I have loved to have been some hot shot large animal veterinarian? Heck yeah but the roads I chose did not take me there and that is ok. My life has been great being a mixed animal practitioner! As a mixed animal practitioner I get to do so many cool surgeries, I am home with my kids and husband and animals, I have established a reputation that has grown and is a vital part of my community. So while my life is not what I thought I wanted at the age of 24 when I graduated vet school, it is actually pretty damn amazing and I am grateful for it. It has taken a lot of time, a lot of dedication, a lot of struggle, a lot of poverty, a lot of hard work, more hard work, a lot of denial, more hard work, more denial, more hard work, a change in mindset, a new vision, a different dream but it has all been worth it!

Stop picking one dream and thinking your life will be miserable if you do not make it that dream. Life is fluid! Life is up and down and backwards and right and left and if you are a stick set firm, you will break instead of bend and flow and that is the worst thing possible. If you are a vet student, a young vet, an old vet, a young anything, an old anything, open your mind up to other things. Just because it doesn’t feel like the “cool” thing does not mean that it might not be the most amazing thing for you and the people who need you! Long live the mixed animal practitioner!