Find your nearest 24 hour emergency vet now, while nothing is wrong

Regular vets close. Emergencies happen at 11pm on a Sunday, because of course they do. And the worst possible moment to work out where you're going is while you're holding a dog who just ate something. Takes ten minutes once. Look up the closest 24 hour emergency vet and confirm they're genuinely 24 hours, because a lot of clinics advertise emergency and then shut at 10. Call and ask what hours they take walk ins, whether they want a deposit up front, and roughly what the exam fee runs. Save the number and the address in your phone as a contact and get the drive route into your head. Then do a second one further out, because ER vets go on diversion when they're full and that happens more than people realize. Poison control, put both of these in your phone too. ASPCA Animal Poison Control is (888) 426-4435 and Pet Poison Helpline is (855) 764-7661. Both charge a consult fee, somewhere in the 75 to 95 dollar range. Pay it without thinking about it, because the case number they give you lets the ER treat off an actual toxicology protocol instead of guessing, and they're who the ER would be calling anyway. Then the money question, which nobody enjoys. An emergency visit commonly runs several hundred dollars before anything actually happens, and overnight care with surgery gets into the thousands quickly. Decide now how you'd cover that. Insurance, a dedicated savings buffer, CareCredit approved in advance, whatever fits. The reason to decide now is that financial decisions made in an exam room at 2am are uniformly terrible, and "let me think about it" costs time the animal might not have. One last piece. Know your pet's normal. What color their gums are when they're healthy (pink and moist), how fast the color comes back when you press on the gum with a finger, what their breathing looks like resting or asleep. Thirty seconds of paying attention now, and it's the first thing an ER is going to ask you about.