Field & Stone, opened October 12, 2009.
"Three doctors. Eleven thousand square feet. One belief — that the medicine should set the schedule, and not the other way around."
October 2009The opening year.
Marcus Whitaker, Eleanor Vance, and a now-departed third co-founder DVM bought the building at 2240 East Colorado in March 2009. It had been a furniture showroom. They gutted it that summer — concrete floors, bone-plaster walls, a single surgical suite at the back, three exam rooms in the front, and a small office for Marcus along the south wall. Three veterinarians, four technicians, and a receptionist named Vivian who is still here.
They opened on October 12, 2009 with one waiting client — a black Labrador named Calvin who needed a splenectomy. Marcus did the surgery the next morning, Eleanor managed the post-op recovery, and Calvin went home four days later. Calvin's family still brings their dogs to Field & Stone, seventeen years on. The first chart is in the archive room.
The opening premise was straightforward: a surgeon and an internist working at the top of their training in a building they owned, with no corporate management telling them how long an appointment could take. Marcus had spent the previous eight years at a corporate specialty hospital in West LA and had watched the appointment template shrink from forty-five minutes to twenty. He was done. Eleanor agreed.
The first calendar year produced 1,840 patient visits, 72 surgical procedures, and a 4-figure loss after debt service. The second year produced 3,100 visits and broke even. The third year hired Dr. Wallace, the first GP DVM, and we have not had an open hire-no-takers position since.
What we did not do, in those opening years, is take a marketing call. We don't take them now either.
The ExpansionThe build-out.
The second surgical suite came online in 2014. Reema Sandhu, who had finished her orthopedic residency at Ohio State the year before, walked through the door looking for a partnership and we built her an OR with C-arm fluoroscopy. She has performed roughly 240 TPLOs every calendar year since 2018.
The CT scanner went in during summer 2017 — a Toshiba 16-slice unit refurbished from a human hospital. The radiology software is the same software the cardiology service at UC Davis uses. Eleanor reads every abdominal scan personally; complex cases get sent to a board-certified veterinary radiologist for confirmation.
The ICU expanded from two beds to six in 2019, with full continuous cardiac and pulse-ox monitoring, dedicated oxygen, and a technician overnight on Wednesday through Sunday for inpatients. The dental-only surgical suite was built in 2022 — a deliberate move because most general practices share their main OR with dental cases, which means the OR is unavailable for emergencies during dental days. We don't share.
Dr. Ji-won Park joined in 2023 to formalize the oncology service. We had been doing oncology consults informally for years through Eleanor's internal medicine practice; Ji-won made it a real service line with proper protocol design and staging workflow.
Accredited 2012AAHA accreditation.
We pursued AAHA accreditation in our third year of operation. The site survey is genuinely demanding — a three-day on-site inspection that scrutinizes anesthesia protocols, drug-handling logs, surgical safety checklists, emergency response readiness, dental radiography, pain management documentation, and roughly twenty other operational categories. The annual cost is approximately $6,200 plus survey fees. We've passed three full surveys: 2012, 2015, 2019, and again in 2023.
Marcus is direct about why he thinks it matters. "AAHA accreditation isn't a marketing badge. It's a third-party that demands to inspect our anesthesia protocols, our drug logs, our surgical safety checklists, our emergency response readiness, and twenty other things, every three years. They have failed clinics. We've passed three surveys."
Roughly 12 to 15 percent of US veterinary hospitals are AAHA-accredited. The others either haven't applied, can't pass, or don't see the value in continuous third-party inspection. We see the value.
Fear Free PracticeFear Free.
The practice was certified Fear Free in 2018. In practice this means: pheromone protocols in every exam room, separate cat-only waiting area and exam rooms, a standing recommendation to families with anxious patients to administer pre-visit gabapentin (we'll prescribe it without an in-person visit if you've been a client for at least a year), and a refusal — on principle — to perform anesthesia-free "dental cleanings," which are pet theater and bad medicine.
Fear Free is real medicine when it's done well, and a marketing sticker when it isn't. The difference is whether the protocols are written, audited, and followed, or whether the certificate is hanging on the wall. We can show you the audits.
Our ScopeWhat we don't do.
We are not a 24-hour emergency hospital. Our urgent-care capacity covers most things during business hours — gastric dilatation-volvulus, lacerations, foreign-body cases, acute decompensation, hit-by-car triage. For overnight emergencies we refer to ACCESS Pasadena (Mission Hospital), which is open 24/7 and is two miles south of us, with board-certified emergency veterinarians and a full overnight ICU.
We do not perform radiation oncology. Dr. Park will design a chemotherapy protocol; for radiation we coordinate with UC Davis Veterinary Medical Center in Davis or with the radiation oncology service at California Veterinary Specialists in Murrieta. The handoff is paperwork-clean — we share imaging, staging workup, and the chemotherapy schedule directly with the radiation oncologist.
We do not perform veterinary neurosurgery. For cervical disc disease, brain surgery, or complex spinal cases we refer to VCA Animal Specialty Group or the neurosurgery service at the LA-area academic referral centers. Reema handles thoracolumbar hemilaminectomies; everything cervical or intracranial leaves the building.
Read about our specialty services → For referring veterinarians →