Desert Cross Veterinary Hospital

11/21/2025

11/20/2025

I realize in the big scheme of cold, Southern Arizona isn't cold and generally doesn't really get cold but for us desert dwellers and the animals that trust us to care for them, the cold season is starting. With this cold comes illness and disease that is a bit more unique than a lot of regions because we have such huge temperature variations that seem to set our animals up for more respiratory and just all over body struggles.

It is really important if you have older horses that are thin, because they are old and their teeth might not be great, to help them out a little bit as our temperatures start to drop down at night. While I am not a big fan of blanketing your younger healthy horses, I am a huge fan of blanketing your old thin horses.

Horses warm themselves with their digestive process and as they get older and thinner they have less fat to help them stay warm and it takes them more to maintain what they have. I have my old mare who is the very first horse I bought on my own right out of veterinary school. She is going to be 29 in February of next year and she is definitely showing her age more each year.

When the temperature started dipping down to the 40s at night, I started blanketing her at night. When the temps started warming up during the day, I took the blanket off! Leaving them blanketed to sweat under the blanket doesn't help them and makes them colder. Blankets are not a put on and leave on for the rest of the season. You have to manage them and that means taking them on and off, cleaning them, making sure that your horse is not suffering more because of them.

It has been cooler the past two days so I have left the blanket on old Funny because she is thin and needs the extra help staying warm. I brought her in and floated her teeth and found one that was so loose it practically fell out on its own, the rest were smoothed out and the high spots taken down and her incisors shortened so she could better chew her hay. I moved her and the other old horse into adjoining stalls so that I could feed her more and supplement her with some senior feed.

If you are going to keep aging horses, you have to invest more time and effort and money into them. Have a pen where you can separate them and feed them all the hay they can eat and add in some senior supplements. Have their teeth floated every 6-12 months. Keep their feet trimmed every 6-8 weeks to help them move better with the arthritis that they are bound to have. Purchase at least two blankets so you can rotate them and clean them and let them air out and dry out. Do not wait if they stop eating or start with a bogery nose or cough, get them veterinary care ASAP.

Our older horses need us to take care of them like they took care of us all those years. If you are not willing to keep them and feed them and care for them extra in their olden years, find them a home that will before they get too drawn down and lose their spirit and will to live.

11/19/2025

I have received phone calls, messages, texts and smoke signals from clients asking about what they should do regarding upcoming barrel racing and roping events in Arizona given the EHV outbreak in Texas.

*First and foremost, pay attention to your horse. If it isn't 100% DO NOT GO! Stressed or sick horses will be more susceptible to the virus.

*Monitor horses' temperatures twice daily.

*Watch for clinical signs such as fever, nasal discharge, cough, or neurological symptoms (e.g., ataxia, stumbling, inability to stand).

*Do NOT share equipment (buckets, tack, etc.).

*Sanitize hands, clothing, and equipment after handling different horses.

*Park away from other trailers.

**Do not hang out on your horse visiting with other women or men in large groups. Put your horse away and then go to the stands and visit.

*Isolate any symptomatic horses immediately and seek veterinary care.

EHV vaccines are available but are primarily for respiratory and abortive forms and are not considered effective for preventing the neurological disease (EHM), though they may reduce viral shedding.

If you are worried and your horse frequently gets sick, stay home. It is way better for your horse for you to be overly concerned and to miss an event than it is to go and have them get sick and possible succumb to herpes.

11/18/2025

Share with us your pets best pose!

11/16/2025

COLIC

The length from end to end of the average horse’s intestinal tract is approximately 100 ft.

With that much GI tract no wonder there are so many tight turns in the abdomen. All the turns are contributing factors to colic along the GI tract.

Colic can range from mild to extreme and is one of the leading causes of death in horses. Depending on the cause of the bout of colic treatment and recovery outcome can vary greatly.

GAS COLIC is the most common and can come from feed changes, weather changes and routine changes.
Impaction colic is when things just get stuck along the GI tract and this type can be quite severe. Dehydration and changes in feed can be causes.

SAND COLIC is when sand is ingested when eating and builds up over time in a low point along the tract and irritates the lining of the bowel.

DISPLACEMENT is when a loop of intestine is out of place.

STRANGULATION colic is when a twist happens and the blood supply is cut off to part of the intestines.

ENTEROLITHS—when a mineral build up happens around a foreign body causing a stone along the tract. They can get lodged along the tract.

Signs:
🐎Pawing
🐎Kicking or biting at flanks
🐎Sweating
🐎Laying down and getting up
🐎Rolling
🐎Straining
🐎Lip curling
🐎Restlessness
🐎Increased respiratory rate
🐎Increased heart rate

💥TREATMENT💥
🩺Pain management
At times sedatives are needed
🩺Passing nasogastric tube and giving warm water, mineral oil and electrolytes
🩺Fluid therapy
🩺Surgery

👓Watching your horses carefully and knowing their normal behavior is key to getting treatment started early.

If you notice any changes or symptoms we recommend calling your veterinarian sooner rather than trying to walk your horse to death and waiting until after hours and not being able to get any help or having it be too late.

11/14/2025

Good morning! It is that time of year again for the World Series Team Roping Finale. That means it is time to get your updated Coggins on your horse, NOW. The last thing you want is to not be able to have your Coggins back in time to be able to go rope in the big one. Do NOT wait, come in NOW! We can no longer have coggins tests back over night so do NOT wait until the last day.

Also, very important to read the entire thing, because of Vesicular Stomatitis here in the great state of Arizona, your health papers on your horse have to be within SEVEN days of your arrival into Las Vegas. This means that you HAVE to bring your horse in a day or two before you leave so we can check their mouths and write your health certificate!

We can NOT write you a health paper the day we get your coggins back. We can NOT write you health papers without you bringing your horse in for us to see their mouths before writing your health papers a day or two before you leave! I know it is not convenient to have to add one more thing to do right before you leave for the big one but if you don't plan for it, you won't be roping in the big one anyway!

Your health papers MUST be written within SEVEN days of your arrival to Vegas and we MUST see your horse in person SEVEN days before you leave when we write you your health papers.

Thank you for being prepared and willing to do what you have to do in order to go and rope at the World Series.

11/13/2025

The beginning of the school year I received a text from the principal of the high school asking if I would give him a call. My initial thought was, what did Zac do this time, and then I gratefully remembered that Zac was not in school any more. I told the principal that I was very glad that my texts from him were no longer regarding something that Zac had done to a teacher. I am pretty sure that every year Zac was in school there was a call from the principal about something he had done with the very first one beginning with him trying to choke himself out with his hoodie strings. The principal made him pick weeds and I made him write 100 times, “I will not choke myself with my hoodie.” Raising kids is hard.

I called the principal and he asked if I would be willing to speak to the high school one morning for about ten minutes on being kind. Years prior at a different school this same administrator had had me come speak to his middle school regarding kindness and he felt like a similar message was needed. He gave me a couple of dates and I picked one and to be honest forgot about it until the week prior when he text me to remind me. Public speaking is an interesting thing. It creates anxiety and at the same time it also gives life a sense of purpose if one allows it.

You can talk to a person one on one and maybe or maybe not impact their life but the opportunity to speak to a room full of kids, you just never know if there is that one or two kids that are desperately alone and maybe need to hear what you have to say and would never have that opportunity if you didn’t push through the discomfort and put yourself out there. It doesn’t matter how old you are or what you have done, speaking in front of a group of people, is hard. You know that everyone is judging you and most are trying to find some reason to not like you or make fun of you for so that they feel better about themselves. Easy is to say no and just stay in your own little world but how does that help anyone else but you? Are we truly living if our life never impacts anyone but ourself?

I know that teenagers are hard to reach and they all think that they know more than anyone else. Being in high school was some of the worst times of my life. I just didn’t fit in and I didn’t know how to make friends and I always felt so alone because even with my friend I always felt like it was just more out of pity that she was friends with me and not because she actually wanted to be friends with me. Each kid in school is trying to find something wrong with everyone else to try and make themselves feel better about themself and it just makes it very tumultuous and hard. Much like the rest of life unfortunately because once you get out in the real world you find that your work place is not often much different.

I knew that to get the kids attention and have them actually listen to a message on kindness I would have to have something really impactful to say. That is not as easy as it sounds so instead I brought a couple of dogs with me. One of them was a ratty looking reservation dog named Pinky and the other was my big cool looking BoerBoel pup Qbert. I asked for volunteers and had about a dozen kids come down and stand around the dogs and asked them to call Pinky names and make fun of her for being ugly and scrawny and ratty. Not one of them would do it and they all looked at me horrified. I then asked them to make fun of Qbert because he had everything and he was the cool dog. The only kids willing to make fun of Qbert were the football players who of course called him fat because that is how the athletes do it, make fun of the fat kid.

The kids were not willing to pick on the dogs who would not even know what they were saying and would go back to the clinic and completely forget the experience but they spend their days making fun of each other and judging each other and trying to tear each other down when they truly know nothing about the life that one lives at home. So often we look at someone and we think that they are a jerk or a nerd or a show off and we decide that we are not going to like them because of it and we start looking for things to tear them down about and we have no clue as to what they have gone though that makes them who they are. Why is it that we are so willing to hate another person that we don’t know their past traumas and internal struggles?

I spoke to the kids about how I had spoiled my son terribly because he had struggled so much with his mental health and how kids had made fun of him and were mean and rude to him because he had a nice car and got whatever he wanted. I told them that what they didn’t know was the horrible times at home when he was suicidal and the fear that I had that he would take his life and that I spoiled him because I wanted him to know that I loved him and that I was there for him and I was pay attention to what he wanted and needed. I didn’t do it so he could be better than anyone, I did it to try and have a lifeline to him. I am not saying it was the best thing to do but it was all I knew how to do.

That person that you hate, that person that you are making fun of at work, that person that you just can’t stand on social media because they are so needy and post selfies all the time and have a sense of desperation in what they share, you do not know the demons that they are fighting on a daily basis! You have no idea the pain and trauma that they have been through that has molded who they are. You have no idea how hard life might be for them on the inside even though they act like everything is great on the outside. We all need to learn to be kind! We all need to stop thinking that we have had it harder just because we know what we have been through! You have no idea what someone else has endured or how their mind has chosen to cope with the struggles in their life.

If you would not yell at and say horrible things to a dog, why are you so willing to do it to another broken human? Why is it that we humans are so hateful towards each other when we are all struggling with the same fears and anxiety and childhood traumas of all kinds? What if we actually started to choose to see each other as broken and instead of crushing the broken pieces, we chose to say something kind and be a bit of glue that helps to hold someone else together? We are all broken, when will we choose to stop throwing our broken pieces at each other and instead help each other heal? How can we help the younger generations if we are unwilling to heal and help each other?

11/10/2025

With the weather getting colder the feral cats are going to be coming around houses more frequently, especially ones with their own cats, looking for food and protection. This is a great time to trap the feral cats and bring them in to be spayed or neutered.

We have a feral cat program here at Desert Cross Veterinary Hospital. If you trap and bring in the feral inside the trap, we will spay or neuter them and give them a healthy ear notch and you pick them up and return them to where you trapped them. This helps to control the cat population and decrease the reservoir of diseases that can make your house cat sick if it comes into contact with an infected feral.

We do not charge for this service and we ask that you do not use it for your personal cats, regardless of how you acquired them. Just because you saved a kitten from outside doesn't mean that it is feral, it is your cat. We do remove a at least 1/3 of the tip of the ear to identify the feral that have already been fixed and to alert us to people who are misusing the feral cat program to fix their personal cats.

Please, only bring in feral cats to be fixed under the feral cat program. If you need help spaying or neutering your cat, we do offer ten free spay/neuter certificates the first business day of each month that you may come early, like before 5am and stand in line for.

If you have a personal cat that needs spayed the price is $115 and castration is $75.

11/05/2025

I generally try to sleep in to around 5 am on Saturday and Sunday. Sometimes I have ranch calls on Saturday and have to get up earlier and sometimes I am just to uncomfortable to stay in bed but I do try to get a few extra hours of sleep on the weekends. That being said, it is not the recommended sleep schedule according to the experts that say go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning. I just don’t think those doctors actually get up at 2:30 in the morning during the weekdays. Who wants to be up at 2:30 in the morning if you don’t actually have stuff you need to do?

The weather is slowly cooling down and most mornings it is in the low 40’s and gets up to the low to mid 80’s during the afternoon. It is not a bad time of year although unlike most people around here, it is not my favorite time of year. I love the warm and the hot and spring time is definitely my favorite time of year when it goes from being cold to warm! This kind of weather calls for a sweater in the morning and short to no sleeves in the afternoon so layered dressing is a must, at least for me.

We have had a barn full of sick horses and this past weekend Emma left to go back to Tucson on Saturday so I had to doctor the horses Sunday morning before church. I got up at 5 and did my morning routine and headed out the door a bit after 6 so that I could feed the chickens and take care of the horses in the barn before church. My chosen dress had no sleeves and the heels I had picked to go with it were really high and so I put on a zip up sweatshirt and some flip flops and headed out the door with heels in hand.

I walked over and fed the chickens first and then over to the barn to check on and care for the horses. As I was mixing the sulfa tabs and looked down at my sweatshirt over my dress and my big ol feet in my flip flops I thought about how different I looked right then to what I was going to look in about 30 minutes when I finished everything and stopped by Safeway to buy the cookies. As I went about doctoring the horses I pondered upon how much of what we put off to the world is not truth, we show the world the part of us that we want them to see and who we truly are is often hidden out of sight and out of judgment.

As a kid we were not allowed to leave our house to go out into public in sweats or dressed sloppily. We didn’t get to wear sweats to school or have holes in your clothes. You dressed presentable because you wanted people to respect you and you needed to be able to respect yourself. Our home clothes were often dirty and tattered and in my case covered in cow p**p but we chose our better clothes for public.

The manipulation of how you want people to see you starts very early! We women start wearing makeup to hide or change our facial appearance. There are entire companies built around shapewear that holds in your extra fluff and makes you look more put together and sleek. We alter our hair and we wear jewelry and fancy clothes all to change how we actually look into what we want people to see and hope that they will have a certain thought about us. It is truly saddening if one starts to think about it. Why is it that we train our children so young that who they are, what they are naturally is not enough?

Social media has made all of this exponentially worse. We see people’s filtered images and highlight moments and we think that they have everything we do not when all they really have is a better imagination and a deeper sense of insecurity that they are trying to hide with photos that reveal too much skin and well done makeup all topped off with a filter that makes it all smooth. It is even worse now with AI because everything can be made perfect and yet not one of us is perfect!

As I sit back and think about all that I am and all that I wanted to be, I am glad for what God gave me. Sure I have hated it at times in my life. I have struggled with all the same insecurities over weight and flawed skin and bad hair but now, now in this last half of life I have realized that learning to be ok with not being ok, it is the greatest gift that one can give themselves short of accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. It takes some work to try and be healthy but we are who God created us to be and we have the body that He chose for us and learning to love who we are and how we look, it is so freeing.

In a world full of fake, find a way to be real to who you are. You are beautifully perfect just as you are because that is who God created you to be! The makeup and the clothes and the fancy shoes and perfect hair, they are not who you are or what makes you special. You, the person inside the skin, the mind that worries about what others are thinking, that is beautiful and perfect and amazing. Start to love yourself and while I do think it is important to dress properly, how you dress means nothing if you haven’t done the work to care for and make your inside person beautiful and learn to love that person because that person actually shines forth greater and stronger than you realize.

11/03/2025

I generally do not read posts that we are tagged in but for some stupid reason I did this morning. I mostly dont read them because it is people complaining about us not being available to them 24/7 because they waited for days for their pet to get really sick before all of a sudden being worried that the animal might die overnight while they sleep or they put their pet outside and they don’t have a yard and it got hit by a car or attacked and it is our fault for not being available and not theirs for not going out with their animal to make sure it didn’t get into trouble. Or they complain because they think we are too expensive.

We opened in October of 2008. Our exam fee was $45. In 2014 I hired my first associate and raised the fee to $55 and now 11 years later it is still $55 even though I have two other doctors and about 20 more staff members and the cost of everything has gone up. I have not raised our spay neuter prices in at least 5 years and it was only then because my inventory manager showed me how much money we were actually losing because we were not covering our cost so I raised it to a break even point which is probably no longer a break even point.

When we opened our x-ray cost was $85, now it is $185 because my staff is more knowledgeable and better trained and they like you want to be paid for doing their job well and getting better at it. Bloodwork when we opened was $125 and is now $155, see above reasoning even though I feel like $30 over almost 20 years is not even keeping up with inflation. Our fees for vaccines has not gone up since 2014. Our fracture repair is still about $1000 which is the same cost that I was getting for them in 1997 when I moved to our beautiful valley. Instead of charging people more I have worked very hard at getting better at them so that I can do them more efficiently and effectively and try and save more legs.

When I moved here in 1997 there were two veterinary clinics with two doctors each. When we opened in 2008 there were three veterinary clinics with the other two have two doctors and us just having me. Now, now there is only us and thank the good Lord there are just now three doctors working full time. Population of only Graham county in 1997 was 30,000 and now is 41,000 and yet there are less veterinarians and way, way more animals. There were also two veterinary clinics in Willcox and now there are none. We didn’t do anything to put anyone out of business, we have just struggled and suffered and tried to get better so that we can help the animals that need us and pay our staff and our bills without raising prices.

I do not have to be here. This isn’t a threat it is just the truth. I have been practicing for a long time and I could readily take any one of the dozens of offers I get from corporations and sell the practice and move to Alpine and buy me a little house and open a small clinic where maybe people would be happy to have me there trying to help their animals. I wouldn’t have to work very hard and I could enjoy the outdoors and all my too many horses. The people of the Gila Valley would see veterinary prices quadruple or more in less than a year and then when no one could afford it and the practice closed because the corporation that bought it can’t get any veterinarians to move to the middle of nowhere and practice like we do, maybe people will look back and think that we actually weren’t that bad after all.

I know we are not perfect. I know it is not convenient to not be available 24/7. I know that my personality is not easy for a lot of people but I am still here doing what few people want to do and that is dedicating my life to animals in a rural town and working 60-70 hours a week doing it at the age of 53 when I could be sitting back and enjoying retirement or taking it easy and doing less instead of constantly trying to do more. So before you complain and make posts about all that we aren’t please just remember that we are still here and still trying to do our best to help all the animals that come to us at prices that are at least a decade lower than what they should be.

10/31/2025

All the kids have dressed up to play this Halloween day! Swing by and say hi!