Our Doctors

Three veterinarians, one phone number.

There are three of us: Anna, who founded the practice in 2019; Wendell, who joined in 2022; and Mei, who joined in 2024. We share a single phone line, a single administrator (Sage), and a single set of beliefs about how this work should be done.

We all trained as general-practice small-animal veterinarians and made the choice — at different points in our careers — to leave that work and do this one. We are all certified or in process with IAAHPC, the International Association for Animal Hospice and Palliative Care. We do not wear scrubs to your house. We do not bring more than we need. We sit on the floor.

Founder · 2019

Dr. Anna Lindqvist

DVM · CVHPC · IAAHPC Certified

Anna grew up in Eugene, the kind of kid who carried injured birds home in cardboard boxes. She graduated from Oregon State's College of Veterinary Medicine in 2004 and spent ten years as a general-practice DVM at a small-animal clinic in NE Portland, working a steady rotation of wellness visits, dentals, and the occasional emergency. She was good at the work. She was also tired of the way it ended.

In 2016, her own cat — Birch, a black Maine Coon she'd had since vet school — was diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease and brought into her own clinic for euthanasia. Anna placed the IV catheter herself. Afterward she sat on the floor of the exam room and cried for an hour. The next month she started a one-day-a-week house-call euthanasia practice on her day off. In 2019 she went full-time, completed IAAHPC certification, and founded Threshold.

She believes the most important moment in a euthanasia visit is the moment the sedation begins to work — the moment, as she puts it, that the suffering ends — and that a doctor's job at that moment is to be silent and present. She believes that families almost always know when it's time, and that the doctor's job is to help them trust what they know.

Anna lives in inner SE Portland with her partner Jude (a high-school art teacher), Pearl (a 14-year-old gray-muzzled rescue mutt of indeterminate ancestry), and two cats — Cricket (a tortoiseshell, willful) and Salt (a white shorthair, less willful). On her days off she walks Pearl very slowly through Laurelhurst Park and reads a lot of Mary Oliver.

Associate · 2022

Dr. Wendell Okafor

DVM · CVHPC · IAAHPC Certified

Wendell graduated from UC Davis in 2017 and spent five years in emergency medicine at a 24-hour ER in Portland — the kind of work that runs entirely on adrenaline, where every shift is at least one moment that requires you to be the most useful person in the room. He was good at that, too. He also found, over time, that the ER had taught him every kind of grief except the one that gets to take its time.

He joined Threshold in 2022. He completed his CVHPC certification in 2023. He brings a kind of steady, careful-handed competence to the hospice work — the years of ER training mean he is unflappable in the moments when a family needs unflappable, and the years away from it have given him space to be quiet.

Wendell believes that the conversation before the visit matters as much as the visit itself. He spends the first ten minutes of every hospice consult listening, not examining. He has noticed that families almost always say something in the first ten minutes that they would not say later in the visit, and that what they say is almost always the most important thing.

He lives in St. Johns with his wife Naomi (a labor and delivery nurse) and their two senior pit-mix rescues, Banks and Marigold — both adopted as seniors, both grayer than they were when they joined the household, both in their own slow, very dignified retirement. On his days off he runs Forest Park trails and bakes the kind of bread that takes three days.

Associate · 2024

Dr. Mei Tanaka

DVM · CVHPC In Progress

Mei graduated from Washington State University in 2019 and spent four years in a feline-only practice in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood — a small clinic with a quiet front room, no dogs in the lobby, and a clientele of bonded cat families. She came to feline medicine because she found, in vet school, that she could read a cat's body language faster than she could read a dog's, and she liked the kind of slow careful examination that cats demand.

She joined Threshold in 2024. Her CVHPC certification is in progress and will be complete in 2026. She brings a particular specialty to the practice: cat hospice. Cats are a chronically underserved population in pet hospice — most hospice vets see 80 to 90 percent dogs. Mei sees more like 55 dogs to 45 cats, which is not a statistical curiosity so much as it is a statement about who knows how to make a hospice visit feel right to a fearful indoor cat with end-stage CKD.

Mei believes — and the IAAHPC research supports this — that cats are very often under-treated for pain in end-of-life care, because they are very good at hiding it. She spends a long time on pain assessment in feline hospice consults. She is patient with skittish cats; she usually waits ten or fifteen minutes for the cat to come to her, on the cat's own schedule.

She lives in inner NE Portland with her three cats — Sora (orange tabby, fearless), Tofu (black, philosophical), Mochi (calico, the boss). On her days off she draws, mostly cats, mostly her own.