Parents of pets hate seeing their babies in pain. Like their human
counterpart, our dogs, cats, ferrets or birds can't tell us when their
bellies hurt from gulping too much kibble, or that
since their morning romp in the woods with all their ticky
friends, they have felt unusually fatigued.
This is why most people's relationship with their vet is sacred. It's a bond
pet parents have with the one who treats their mute child who can only
express themselves through licks and purrs; the person they secretly hope
becomes Dr. Doolittle once their beloved is led from the waiting room to
behind closed doors of Exam Room A.
You never really know what happens behind those closed doors, unless your vet
is Jeremy Gransky, DVM. Gransky shows you everything you miss sitting in the
waiting room chairs: he takes blood, gives shots in shoulders and rumps, all
while sitting on the floor and talking mildly to the animals, assuring them
the pain won't be so bad. You see this pet magic because he performs it in
your kitchen.
"It's something most people don't know about," says Gransky of vet
house call services. Which is why he has founded At Home
Veterinary, his new service for domestic and exotic pets, all in the comfort
of your pet's home. From annual exams to vaccinations to emergency
house calls, even the sad occasion of putting your baby to sleep in her
at-home bed, Gransky takes the jitters out of going to the vet ... for his
patients, and their parents.
The service is new to Gransky but Gransky's not new
to vet service. "Ever since I was 4, people would ask me what I wanted
to be," he says. That may have been a little young to start wielding a
syringe, but at 14 he volunteered at Englewood Animal Hospital near his New
Jersey home. Since graduating from Cornell for undergrad, Tufts for grad and
completing an intense internship at the Animal Medical Center in New York
City, Gransky has been a vet for eight years. During his internship he
learned the unique skills necessary to work with exotics like birds and
ferrets, which has come in handy with his client
base.
But building up a client base is a new thing for him. For five years he
worked at the Framingham Animal Hospital where every 15 minutes it was a
given that a new patient would walk through the door. Now that he's on his
own, his service area includes Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Framingham, JP,
Natick, Newton, Sherborn, Sudbury, Weston, Wellesley and Wayland. Many people
have made the move with him; he's up to about four clients on most days and
hopes to reach six to eight.
So, how is it with no smoke and mirrors to hide behind when doting parents
watch him treat their babies? "The owners really enjoy being a
part" of the examination, he says. "I do a lot of teaching, in
terms of how to hold a cat to keep from scratching."
More than that, the experience is far more personal with in-home visits.
"You just get to know the animal and client a whole lot more," he
says. "What you're used to in a veterinary practice is the [client]
calls the office, the receptionist refers them to a technician, then they
talk to the doctor, and maybe they get a call back." Now, he says,
"they call me, because it's just me."
Today's early-afternoon rounds include one in Framingham to care for client
Betty Rilling's seeing eye
dog, Vesta, and her other two dogs, Gizmo and
Cindy; the other in Wayland will check up on Carol Romanow's
dogs Pepper and Gilligan. Tomorrow's day it's off to JP to visit a woman's
sick chickens.
Cruising along in his on-wheels office—a shiny pickup truck with his
self-designed logo and company contact info—Gransky totes his medicine
bags into each appointment: bottles of this, swabs for that; small scales for
measuring birds, a soft-pack lunchbox to carry meds that must be chilled, and
lots of syringes, bottles and needles for blood samples that are picked up
nightly by a lab that draws up test results and e-mails them to him by 8 a.m.
the next morning.
Technology doesn't stop there: his officey case
sports a laptop with all of his patients' case info, a portable printer and
wireless credit card machine that keep his world nearly paperless, and help
him move swiftly to emergency calls he takes on the road without running home
for patient files. "I don't want to get to a situation where I get to
someone's house and I don't have what I need," he says of the abundance
of tools.
The bags are cumbersome for this 5-foot-4 journalist but easy for Gransky,
who has practice balancing more than just bags: he and his husband John
welcomed their daughter Natalie into the world during last January's
blizzard. Her arrival nearly 10 months ago helped push Gransky toward
self-employment five months ago; when John relocates to a law firm closer to
their Natick home, both doting daddies will be even more available to their
baby girl.
"God, he's wonderful," says Rilling, who
lives in a quiet development in Natick. "Some vets, I wouldn't take to
them. I don't like going to those big clinics where you have to sit and wait,
and sometimes they're not so good to them."
But both Rilling and her pets get the royal
treatment from Gransky, who in five months has become comfortable enough with
Rilling that he knows enough to ask how her son,
Michael, is enjoying his four-wheeling. Gransky is a throw-back to a simpler
time by taking an often difficult task of rounding up your animal (and human
children) into the car to coax them into going somewhere they really don't
want to go, and bringing his service into your home.
"Man, it saves a lot of time from waiting in the waiting room" says
Romanow at her sprawling Colonial home in Wayland.
"The fact that he's more available ... if I had a question about diet
[for my dogs], he's just one phone call away, not
three." Plus, she added, it's similar to visiting your primary care
physician: you always have the same person with Gransky. Animals respond well
to the repetition; adults do, too.
Is this only for people in the suburbs who have
special needs, be it sick dogs or less mobile themselves? No. Gransky's client base is throughout metro Boston, where
it can be just as hard to fight traffic out of Sherborn as it can be the
South End. And the service is particularly good for people with more than one
animal. Gransky's prices are comparable to your
local clinic, except for his $65 home-visit fee. But the price for an exam -
normally 30 minutes to an hour - reduces with each additional pet: the first
is $55, the second is $37, and it moves down accordingly. Gransky can arrange
for medicines to be shipped, as well.
Dollars and cents aside, it's all about making sick animals better, for
Gransky. "In order to do a good job I really try to look at things from
the animal's perspective," he says. "Owners have called me because
they want to do the right thing ... you want to give them all of the options;
just putting myself in their shoes. That's something I can do so much better
now because I don't have all the time constraints [of a typical veterinarian's
office]."
Jennifer Chase Esposito can be reached at jenniferelise@mac.com.
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