Vet has worked on animals large and small
By Kathi Welch
Growing up on a small farm in rural upstate New York, Dr. Thomas J. Noone spent much of his teenage years around a close family friend who was the hometown veterinarian.
The friend allowed Noone to follow him around to visit and treat cows at the local dairies and to help at the small veterinary clinic.
“I initially wanted to go to vet school and specialize in dairy medicine and production but became involved with exotic animals and spent five years working in the zoo field before entering vet school,” says Noone, who worked at Trevor Zoo at Millbrook School in Millbrook, New York. “Throughout vet school I worked in the exotic animal department as a lab and research assistant with the hope of eventually becoming zoo veterinarian.”
That changed, however with a surgery at vet school, his first exposure to orthopedic surgery. “In my third year of vet school, I had the opportunity to assist in a surgery to repair a fracture in a white tailed deer,” he says. That surgery created his interest in orthopedics. “It was career-changing experience, and the rest is history.”
Noone is a board-certified small animal surgeon and has been a part of the Veterinary Referral Surgery Practice in Roswell since 2001. He attended the University of Vermont and received his bachelor’s degree in animal science in 1988. He continued his education at the Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine where he was a member of the Phi Zeta Honor Society. He was awarded his doctorate of veterinary medicine in 1997 and then completed an internship at Rowley Memorial Animal Hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1998 and a residency at the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine in 2001.
In 2001, he was named a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Surgeons. A member of the Veterinary Orthopedic Society, the American Veterinary Medical Association and the Georgia Veterinary Medical Association, Noone has also been published in the American Journal of Veterinary Research.
Noone, who has a rat terrier named Touille, started working at Veterinary Referral Surgery Practice directly out of residency in 2001 and has not left, which is unusual in his field. But he says one of the most rewarding aspects of his job is to see a pet patient 10 years after a major surgery and recovery being active, painfree and happy.
“The most fulfilling aspect of my job is restoring the quality of life of my patients by addressing their debilitating conditions and guiding their recovery with the hope of regaining as much function as possible,” he says. “Guiding my clients and patients through circumstances that have terminal and tragic outcomes is obviously the most difficult aspect of my work. It is during those difficult times I continually find myself relying on my training as a surgical specialist to treat my patient in ways that result in the best outcome possible.”
For more information, visit veterinaryreferralsurgery.com.
