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09/22/2021 08:30 AMThe practice that brought Dr. Don Mullen to Guilford is the same one he’s leaving in good hands when he retires Don’s last day on Nov. 19 will wrap up 43 years of providing compassionate care to shoreline pets and their families at Guilford Veterinary Hospital (GVH). While he’s bidding a fond farewell to GVH, Don plans to remain a part of the Guilford community he calls home.
“I grew up in Bloomfield, and the interesting thing is I may have never been in Guilford before I came up to interview in 1979. I’d been to Madison, because of Hammonasset,” says Don, who moved to the shoreline soon after he was hired at GVH in 1979.
That may be hard to imagine for so many who have come to know Don through the years. He loves this shoreline area and can often be seen out and about enjoying the Guilford Green, visiting the Guilford Free Public Library, or tromping along the coast at Hammonasset while birdwatching, with The Sibley Guide to Birds at the ready.
“I love this town. I love the shoreline area. People travel thousands of miles to come to spend time here in Guilford, and we get to live here,” says Don.
In fact, there are quite a few interesting turns along the road that led Don to his work in Guilford. As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, he studied reproductive physiology for two years, but found his calling when he came across the school of veterinary medicine and its students.
“I was very impressed,” says Don. “The students knew what was going on in the world. I mean, they knew the price of milk—half of them had come off a dairy farm. They were collectively working together, and that very much impressed me. So I applied.”
Unlike many who aspire to be a veterinarian, Don had no pets as a child, he notes.
“So being a veterinarian was not a career choice I had desired from the age of 8,” he says. “But the miracle is, the vet school accepted me. And it was one of the best things that happened to me.”
Don earned his veterinary degree at the University of Pennsylvania School for Veterinary Medicine in Philadelphia in 1979. He was hired that same year as an associate at GVH, and counts Dr. Ralph Schoemann as his mentor. Don became a partner at the Saw Mill Road practice in 1982.
“We became a partnership, and remained a partnership, even through now,” says Don of GVH, which grew from 5 to 40 employees during his tenure.
In 2018, Don stepped down as a partner, as a step toward retirement, while continuing to practice on a reduced schedule. Today, GVH is led by three partners, Dr. Anthony DellaMonica, Dr. Anita Soucy, and Dr. Morna Pixton. Over the years, Don hired them all.
“I really do have a feeling like it’s in safe hands,” says Don of leaving GVH. “Those partners are going to continue to operate in a way that I feel good about. I know that I can walk the Town Green without worrying about people saying, ‘Oh, it’s so different.’ It’s not different—it’s better. I really am comfortable with the idea that the management and all of the veterinarians are so competent.”
As well as the partners, GVH has five additional vets working together with its staff. Don curated GVH’s professional family to include people who would want to “become part of the fabric of the town, part of the community,” he says.
“That’s what people allowed me to do,” he says of the community he’s come to cherish. “I didn’t know, when I first moved here, that we would have this special town library, and this special Town Green.”
A member of the American Association of Feline Practitioners (AAFP) since 1979, Don found his niche in canine and feline surgery and well care at GVH.
“I love what I do. I love the connection that we have,” he says. “I love the medicine with the patients. But a lot of why I was able to do this for 43 years is the connection with the families. Children who were tiny when I first met them, I’m now seeing them with their children, so it’s multiple generations of families.”
After initially moving to Guilford, the Mullen family quickly grew to include three sons, and outgrew their home by the early 1980s. They built a house just over the town line in North Madison (Don notes it was closer in proximity to downtown Guilford than the family’s former Guilford home). Today, Don and his wife of five years, Christine, are Guilford residents.
“What an amazing town we live in,” Don says of Guilford.
He’s also seen the town change a bit over time, as well as the clients coming to GVH.
“In 1979, Guilford’s population was smaller,” says Don. “We were a little more rural, and a very large percentage of the clients would come here for the summer to their cottages. So a number of clients had New York addresses.”
The standard of care has also changed over the past 43 years, as Don has witnessed. Things that didn’t exist when he first started practice, such as ultrasound technology, have now become the norm.
“In my practice now, we have color Doppler ultrasound. It sits on a cart smaller than my desk. That’s part of the technological revolution,” says Don, adding that now, if a pet needs an MRI or CT scan, “there’s at least three scanners within half an hour’s drive of my practice. That technology did not exist when I started.”
Don’s also seen the discipline transition from a male-dominated field to one that welcomes and values the rise in the number of women practicing veterinary medicine.
“Thank God that the profession has figured it out. It took decades of my practice time to get that to happen,” says Don.
Currently, 6 of 8 GVH veterinarians are women.
Specialists were also few and far between when Don began at GVH.
“To find a specialist was an exception in private practice. So we weren’t just the primary care providers, we were also the orthopedic surgeons, we were the cardiologists. If you needed help beyond us, you had to go to a university [or] the large practice in New York City that had specialists,” says Don. “That whole system has evolved, like it has in human medicine. The number of specialists has increased. And that’s wonderful for our patients.”
It’s also meant the cost of care has gone up, which is why Don recommends taking pet insurance for your pet when it’s very young, because pre-existing conditions are not covered.
“I think much of what my job is now is education, and following my patients through the stages of their life,” says Don.
Sadly, one of life’s stages brings clients to GVH to provide their pet with compassionate euthanization. It’s not an easy part of the work, but “a necessary part of the job, that requires empathy and consideration for my patient,” Don says.
“Pets have changed,” he adds. “It used to be there were dogs who were outdoor dogs; there were cats who lived in the barn. They weren’t beloved indoor family members. It would be the exception to find an outdoor dog now, or a cat that doesn’t rule the house.”
When Don started at GVH, he met some area practitioners with careers stretching back to the 1930s and 1940s, when vets were often called upon to make farm visits to assist large animals.
“These guys went on to the farms and sometimes they couldn’t get their cars up there, so they’d go by horse and wagon. They were large animal veterinarians. They would treat the dog, but they were really treating farm animals,” Don describes. “As the farms disappeared, they later made the transition over to small animals, or now what would be known as companion animals.”
Since his graduate school days, Don’s family has always included companion animals, with at least one Labrador retriever always among them.
“My first pet was a female yellow Labrador retriever, when I was in graduate school. And somehow, that imprinted on me. So I’ve had many Labradors, not just consecutively but overlapping, sometimes more than one. And I also have a particular place in my heart for cats and for feline medicine,” says Don, who currently has two cats in the family.
However, as Don shared in a note to the GVH family of clients, working with companion animals is physically demanding, especially over many years.
“Four decades of lifting animals onto the exam table and getting down on my knees to examine big dogs resulted in my recent spine surgery and bilateral knee replacement,” he wrote. “Both surgeries were successful, but I’ll turn 70 in December and the time will have come to put down my stethoscope.”
Don knows he will miss his work. In particular, “...I love surgery. I think I will miss being in the operating room,” he says. “But as much as I’ll miss the clients, I think I’m physically ready to retire.”
He’s planning on spending more time with his grandchildren—currently ages 9, 7, and 1—with his fourth grandchild due to be born in early December.
“I hope to become part of the childcare team. So I’ll go from Don the vet to grandpa the babysitter,” he says, laughing. “I’m looking forward to that.”
He’s also looking forward to spending more time with Christine and enjoying their life together in Guilford, where he’s sure he will come across many of the friends and families he’s come to know through the years.
“I’m still going to be part of the town,” Don says. “I just won’t have the stethoscope over my shoulder.”