Herb River Animal Hospital (912) 555-0132

Sandfly · LaRoche Avenue · Savannah

Dogs and cats, seen the same day.

A full-service small-animal hospital on LaRoche Avenue — wellness and sick visits, surgery, dentistry with full-mouth radiographs, and a laboratory in the building.

Call (912) 555-0132 Hours and directions

Mon–Thu 7:30–6 · Fri 7:30–5 · Sat 8–1

  • Same-day sick appointments, most days of the week
  • A night line answered by one of our own doctors
  • Being looked at costs nothing — client or not
A hand lifting the upper lip of a dark brindle dog to look at the gum above the teeth, the dog calm and looking up.
Fig. 01 — the first look of every exam: pale gums are why we say come now
After 6 p.m.

The same building. The same people.

(912) 555-0148

What we do

Six rooms, one hallway, and very few referrals.

Almost everything a dog or a cat needs happens in this building, on the same day you bring them in. What we cannot do here, we say so on the first visit.

Wellness and sick visits

Nose to tail, and out loud. You hear what we hear as we hear it — gums, pulse quality, chest, belly, joints, teeth.

$68

Year-round prevention

Heartworm, flea and tick, twelve months a year. Georgia coast dosing, not the label on the box.

Dog under 50 lb — $41 a month

Dentistry

Full-mouth radiographs every time. Two thirds of what hurts a dog's mouth is under the gum line, where a light does not reach.

From $520

Ultrasound and internal medicine

Abdominal imaging in house, read the same hour. Dr. Odom does not send a picture out and wait three days for a sentence.

Same-day reading

Soft-tissue surgery

Spay, neuter, mass removals, foreign bodies. One technician stays on the monitor and nothing else, from induction to standing.

Estimate before, not after

Laboratory, in house

Blood chemistry, cytology, urine. Most answers before you leave, because a number tomorrow is a different animal.

Results the same visit

Who we look after

Dogs and cats, from Sandfly to the Isle of Hope.

Two doctors and two licensed technicians on the east side of Savannah. Most of our patients live within four miles of the building, walk the same creeks and come back with the same things on them.

Neighborhoods we see every week

  • Sandfly
  • Isle of Hope
  • Dutch Island
  • Thunderbolt
  • Georgetown
  • Whitemarsh
  • Wilmington Island
  • Skidaway

A dog that walks the creek comes back with the creek on it. Pluff mud, oyster shell and water that is saltier than it looks — we see all three in the same week, every week, and we know what each one does.

A dog's front legs on weathered dock boards, one paw caked in grey-black marsh mud under a stream of hose water, a tidal creek behind.
Rinsed on the dock before the ride in. Half of what we treat in summer starts on a dock like this one.

How an exam starts

The first thing we look at is the color of the gum.

Lift the lip. Press the gum with a thumb until the color goes out of it. Let go and count. If the pink comes back before two seconds, blood is still reaching the far end of the animal — and we know that before any machine tells us.

Mucous membrane — field card 1.8 s
010203040506

Press 02 — it refills in 1.8 seconds

Swatch 02 is the color of this page. It is also the color of a gum that is doing its job, which is why we picked it.

0.0 spressed
0.9 srefilling
1.8 sperfused
0 1.8 s 2 s 4 s
Anything past the line and we stop asking questions

Six readings, in the order we rule them out

  • 01  PaleAnemia, or blood that is not being moved. Hemorrhage until proven otherwise.
  • 02  NormalClay pink, wet, refilling under two seconds. Nothing else to do but keep going.
  • 03  Brick redVessels wide open. In August that is heat. Any month, it can be sepsis.
  • 04  YellowJaundice. The liver, the bile duct, or red cells breaking down faster than they are made.
  • 05  Blue-greyNot enough oxygen arriving. This one we do not finish reading before we act.
  • 06  MuddyShock. Tissue running out of oxygen at the far end. The worst color on the card.

Prevention · Chatham County

Down here the season never closes.

Six months of heartworm prevention is a northern idea. It was written for a state where the water freezes. On the Georgia coast the mosquito does not leave, the fleas survive the winter and the ticks work on cool days. Twelve doses. Every year. We are not selling you a seventh month — we are selling you the six the northern calendar forgets.

Twelve doses, not six. The label was written for a colder state.

Close macro of fingertips parting pale fur while fine-point tweezers close on an engorged tick at the skin line.

One tick, in fur that hides it.

Ehrlichiosis, Lyme and spotted fever all arrive the same way and none of them announce themselves. The four-way panel is a drop of blood and twenty minutes, and we run it before the season people think of, not after.

Heartworm and tick-borne 4Dx panel — $52

Sago palm

Planted in half the squares downtown. The seed is the worst part of the plant, and one is enough to take a liver.

Oyster shell

A shell bank cuts a pad like a blade and the cut goes deeper than it looks. We flush those the same day, not the next one.

Creek water

A dog that drinks the creek drinks salt. On a hot afternoon that alone is enough to put an animal on fluids.

Ten to four

Bright red gums in August are not excitement. They are heat, and heat is the one that moves fastest.

After hours — (912) 555-0148

You will not get a recording.

Night: a person carries a towel-wrapped dog toward the single lit doorway of a low brick building, under a live oak hung with Spanish moss.
11:40 p.m., after a summer rain. The light in that doorway is not on a timer. Somebody turned it on.

A recording sends you forty minutes up the interstate with an animal on your lap. Ours is a phone that a doctor carries. Tuesday and Thursday nights, that is Dr. Ansley, who has spent eleven of her nineteen years working after dark.

  1. A doctor answers, not a service. If it rings twice, we are washing our hands.

  2. We ask four things: the gums, the breathing, the belly, and when it started.

  3. We tell you to come in, or we tell you honestly that it can wait until 7:30.

  4. If you come in, the door is unlocked and somebody is standing in it.

Call the night line

After-hours intake, established patients — $185

A stainless treatment table at two in the morning under one overhead exam lamp: a folded clay-pink blanket, a coiled line, a stethoscope and one forceps.
A folded blanket, a coiled line, a stethoscope, one forceps. Laid out at closing, every night, for nobody in particular.

What it costs

Being looked at costs nothing.

Gums, pulse, breathing, temperature. We do that at the door, for anyone, client or not. We tell you what we see before we tell you what it costs, and nothing gets added to an estimate while you are standing in the parking lot.

Call and tell us what you are seeing

No appointment needed to be looked at

  • Triage on arrivalNo charge
  • Wellness exam$68
  • Heartworm and tick-borne 4Dx panel$52
  • Year-round prevention, dog under 50 lb$41 a month
  • After-hours intake, established patients$185
  • Dental with full-mouth radiographsFrom $520

Estimates are written before anything begins and we call you before a number moves. Payment is due at the visit.

The people who answer

Four of us, and you will meet all four.

  • Dr. Marlowe Ansley, DVM

    Owner — emergency and critical care

    Nineteen years, eleven of them on nights. She carries the after-hours phone on Tuesdays and Thursdays and answers it herself.

  • Dr. Cassie Odom, DVM

    Internal medicine — abdominal ultrasound

    Scans in house and reads her own images the same hour. If she cannot see it, she says so out loud instead of ordering the next thing.

  • Tanice Deveaux, LVT

    Head technician

    Runs the treatment floor and the schedule that keeps it honest. She is usually the one who meets you at the door after six.

  • Wren Hollowell, LVT

    Anesthesia and monitoring

    One job during a procedure: the animal breathing on the table. Nothing else is allowed to take her attention.

Inside a stainless recovery kennel: a sleeping orange cat curled on a clay-pink fleece blanket with thin oxygen tubing, a hand resting flat beside it.
Recovery, a little before seven. The hand stays there because a cat that wakes alone in steel wakes badly.
A canopy of live oak branches hung heavy with Spanish moss, closing overhead.

Visit us

Where the road bends toward the river.

Low brick building on LaRoche, past the bend, before the bridge. Gravel lot, two live oaks over it, and the marsh smell that means you are close.

Sandfly crossroads at top left · the hospital at the bend · Herb River running south to the Moon

Call the front desk Email us
Low sun over a Georgia salt marsh, a tidal creek winding through spartina grass toward the horizon.
The tide runs out of the Herb River twice a day, and the smell of it is how you know you are nearly here.