David Fleming has wanted to be a veterinarian since he was in the fifth grade.

While many children would change their career paths on a weekly basis, Fleming never did. The Texas native grew up wanting to help animals and recently opened a new 24-hour emergency hospital in downtown Redmond — the only one in the immediate area.

After a career in animal medicine for almost two decades, the Animal Emergency Hospital of Redmond (AEH) at 16421 Cleveland St. is a dream come true for Fleming.

“I’ve been wanting to open my own (hospital) in the last 10 years,” he said.

Fleming graduated from veterinarian school in 1992 from Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. He interned in Los Angeles for a year, where he met his wife. The couple moved to Dallas in 1994 for a while before returning to California where his wife completed medical school in Santa Barbara.

It was there that Fleming began working in animal emergency medicine. Once he discovered it, he was hooked.

“It’s just plain more interesting (than a regular day practice),” he said.

Fleming said what he enjoys about emergency medicine is the fact that even though his patients come in significantly sick and with serious ailments, his cases are always challenging. He likes being able to take really sick animals and make them healthy again.

“It’s a nice perk to make them happy and it makes us happy,” Fleming said. “It sounds kind of hokey, but it’s true.”

Because he works with sicker animals, Fleming said the downside of his job is that he does lose more patients than the average day practice. And delivering the bad news to the owner is never easy. But he said the positives outweigh the negatives and make his job worth it.

Throughout his career, Fleming has mostly worked with cats and dogs as those are the most common pets, but he has seen birds, reptiles and rabbits. And in the Pacific Northwest, another animal comes in from time to time.

“We see the occasional chicken,” Fleming said.

The most unusual animal he has worked on is a toss up between a frog and a goat — both of which he has worked on once.

When his wife completed her residency, they decided they didn’t want to stay in Santa Barbara. They moved to Renton in 2004 and have never left. His wife had never lived in this area of the country, but Fleming — who has lived all over the country, including in New Orleans, Los Angeles and Syracuse, N.Y. — had spent a few years in high school in the Seattle area.

Upon returning to the Northwest, Fleming worked in animal hospitals in Issaquah, Sumner and Seattle. His last two jobs before opening AEH were spent helping the practices expand to 24-hour hospitals.

Fleming decided in the summer of 2009 that it was time to open his own hospital. He began planning, studying demographics and laying the groundwork for financing. He decided on Redmond because there was a geographical need as there are no nearby 24-hour emergency hospitals north and east of town.

“Looking at the map, there’s nothing really out there,” Fleming said. “And of course, Redmond is just plain nice.”

He found the location for his hospital in November 2010 and was open for business on May 28. Fleming works mostly days at the moment, but there is always one doctor on staff at AEH.

Although Fleming knew his career path since he was a boy, there was a time in college that he wavered between becoming an animal doctor and a human doctor. He was actually accepted into medical school before veterinarian school. He turned down the former in hopes of being accepted into the latter.

“I just like being the advocate for the pet,” he said about being a veterinarian.

Fleming is confident he made the right choice because there are certain aspects of human medicine that he would not enjoy. One of them is the fact that there is also a high degree of specialization in regular medicine. Fleming enjoys the variety he gets from working with animals.

He added that people also lie to their doctors. They hold back information, embellish or make things up, which is not the case with animals.

“My patients, they may not talk to me, but at least they don’t lie,” he said. “Medicine is challenging enough without being fed misinformation.”

For more information, visit www.aehredmond.com.