Textbook of Veterinary Emergency Medicine: Clinical Decision-Making, Emergency Stabilization, and Critical Care Strategies for Small Animal Practice ... Veterinary Clinical Medicine Library)

In emergency practice, the most important decisions are often made before the diagnosis is complete: recognizing deterioration, stabilizing the patient, prioritizing the next test, and knowing when immediate escalation may change the outcome. Textbook of Veterinary Emergency Medicine: Clinical Decision-Making, Emergency Stabilization, and Critical Care Strategies for Small Animal Practice is a premium clinical reference for veterinary students, interns, general practitioners, emergency clinicians, and small animal professionals who want to approach urgent canine and feline cases with greater structure, confidence, and precision. Built around the realities of emergency medicine, this textbook guides the reader from first presentation through stabilization, diagnostic prioritization, treatment planning, monitoring, communication, referral, and continuity of care. Rather than treating emergencies as isolated conditions, it develops the clinical reasoning needed to recognize patterns, identify the most dangerous possibilities early, and make disciplined decisions under pressure. Inside, readers will learn how to: • Stabilize the critical patient through structured triage, perfusion assessment, respiratory support, shock management, fluid therapy, analgesia, resuscitation principles, and immediate emergency priorities. • Interpret urgent clinical patterns across cardiovascular, respiratory, neurologic, traumatic, gastrointestinal, urogenital, endocrine, toxicologic, hematologic, infectious, and temperature-related emergencies in dogs and cats. • Use diagnostics with purpose through emergency laboratory interpretation, acid-base and electrolyte assessment, imaging, ECG evaluation, point-of-care ultrasound, monitoring trends, and reassessment during rapidly changing cases. • Manage the full emergency pathway with practical frameworks for procedures, hospitalization, critical care nursing, owner communication, prognosis discussions, transfer decisions, referral planning, and emergency quick-reference algorithms. Supported by focused appendices on emergency drugs, laboratory patterns, ultrasound checklists, procedure workflows, monitoring sheets, communication templates, and decision pathways, this book is designed to remain useful both during study and in real clinical environments. For the veterinary professional who wants to think more clearly when cases become unstable, Textbook of Veterinary Emergency Medicine offers a rigorous, clinically grounded framework for delivering faster, safer, and more deliberate emergency care.