NEW YORK — As a city child, Amy Attas had big dreams of wandering the countryside, healing animals in James Herriot’s classic. “All creatures great and small.”
How it was? Good, the veterinarian has made it from Queens to Manhattan, spending the last 32 years roaming the streets of her hometown as a full-time house doctor.
And boy, does she have stories to tell, from escaping a huge, sick, territory-endangered Rottweiler with her fangs fully exposed, to three weeks of IV antibiotics after a nasty bite from a cat patient.
Then there are the misbehaving humans (“No dog of mine will be neutered!”) and the pampered celebrity-owned pets, including the beloved dogs of the late Joan Rivers, whom Attas counted as a friend. Cher once bared all to show Attas a rash after she adopted a dog with mange, and Billy Joel serenaded her on the piano.
“You’ll never guess what happened today,” was Attas’ nightly refrain to her husband. Now, she has brought these stories together in a juicy, compassionate memoir, “Pets and the City,” due out June 18.
Among her stories are tips and advice for animal lovers. (Forget him Easter Lilies, cat people.)
Pug lover Attas didn’t have much of a business plan for her City Pets practice when she packed up supplies and started traveling by subway and taxi. She had just left an upscale veterinary hospital on the Upper East Side and some of her clients, including rivers, I wanted to keep using it. She assumed the home visits would be temporary.
“When I started, it was new,” Attas said. “From day one I was busy.”
She has more company now such as concierge services in general, they have grown in popularity. Other veterinarians across the country do this full time as Attas, while some maintain traditional practices and provide home services for end-of-life care.
Meanwhile, Attas now has a private car and driver. She starts her day at 8am, accompanied by one or both of her nurses. She allowed The Associated Press to follow on a recent afternoon.
“I initially thought my office would be full of people who had difficulty getting to the vet and perhaps older people who had pets or people with physical disabilities,” she said. They seek it out, but, Attas said, “what I didn’t realize was how appealing it would be to all types of pet owners.”
Meet Puddy, artist Wendy Beyer’s beloved 19-year-old domestic shorthair cat. The black and white feline with arthritis has high blood pressure and requires monthly checkups. Beyer found Attas through an online search.
“It’s life-changing,” Beyer said of having Puddy cared for in the comfort of her own home, a cozy apartment full of sun and art in the Hudson Yards neighborhood. “He never liked being in a carrier. It’s so traumatic trying to get him into the carrier myself.”
Beyer also likes Attas’ no-pressure approach in his decision to let Puddy age naturally, without heroic measures.
“I think it’s helping to prolong his life. He is a very relaxed kitten. He’s not stressed,” Beyer said.
Head over to Fifth Avenue to see Cody, an adorable, boisterous white Maltese who, at age 8, is a bundle of fun energy. He is at the center of Lisa Healey’s life.
Cody has itchy allergies and a heart murmur. Attas, who helped the Healeys say goodbye to a previous dog, sees Cody regularly at the couple’s spacious apartment.
“This is our child and we would do anything for them, so it’s worth the cost. It’s worth every penny. I don’t even think about it,” Healey said.
House calls are a very different beast for veterinarians than regular practices. There’s the journey, of course, It’s no small feat in Manhattan. On a recent round, Attas and nurse Jeanine Lunz made the most of time in the car answering phone calls, working on scheduling and taking care of countless other tasks that most veterinarians do when they have a few minutes between exams.
“It takes a lot more time than just waiting for a patient to come in and go from exam room to exam room in a hospital,” Attas said.
The cost of transportation (it is only in Manhattan) is included in the fee. She charges an additional fee for viewing multiple pets at the same time. It’s less than making more than one trip to the vet’s office or what other vets might charge to see more than one pet in the same day, she said. Attas restricts his practice to dogs and cats.
In total, Attas said his services can be about 30% greater than traditional practices. It does not perform surgeries, but offers typical care, from vaccinations to blood and urine collections, and has specialists for problems such as serious heart and eye problems. She uses animal hospitals when large equipment is needed or for serious emergencies, when every second counts.
So far, Attas has seen more than 7,000 animals on his travels, including Joel’s pets, Wayne Gretzky,Steve Martin It is Kevin Kline. At a minimum, she or one of the other two veterinarians at her clinic visit 12 to 15 homes daily. His personal record for animals seen in one day is 23.
Attas and his human clients point to other advantages of home visits. Once customers are established, humans no longer need to be at home.
“Sometimes they tell the doorman to let us in. Sometimes the nanny or housekeeper is at home. And many of our customers give us the keys to their apartments,” said Attas.
Attas dispels the notion that his client list is filled only with the pets of the rich.
“I go to billionaires’ homes. I go to housing projects. I work with nonprofits to help seniors continue to live with their pets,” she said. “Some of my favorite clients over the years were people who really didn’t have much, but what they valued most were their pets.”
Attas never wants to be so busy that she misses the intimate value of home visits.
“When you’re at home, you experience how that pet lives,” she said. “I can’t even think of how many times I’ve been in someone’s home and seen something that is a complete danger to a pet. pet.”
That includes potential killers like open windows without screens, toxic plants and unprotected terraces. She ended one owner’s practice of serving large amounts of catnip after the cat went seriously crazy.
And she found an unlikely object inside a bull terrier that wasn’t coming out the way it came in: her human’s gigantic earbuds. The human wondered where they had gone.
“We couldn’t figure out how he consumed them,” Attas said.
She keeps a close eye on the humans who sometimes They need help.
“I’ve seen elderly people who lost pets and lost the will to live. In one specific case I talk about in the book, a lovely woman’s elderly dog passed away, and when I went to check on her a week later, she was a fraction of the woman I had seen the week before,” said Attas.
Attas brought the grieving 90-year-old client a senior dog adopt under the guise of adoption.
“She immediately had a reason to live again,” Attas said, “and she took care of that dog until the day she passed away.”
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