How We Do Anesthesia
Monitoring a patient under anesthesia
Comfort
Your pet's comfort is maintained during anesthesia by keeping them warm and pain-free. Your pet is placed on a recirculating warm water pad and/or under a warm air blanket to keep them warm. This helps to maintain normal body temperature and speeds up the recovery from anesthesia. Also, your pet is monitored to ensure they do not feel any pain during the procedure.
Types of Anesthetics
The anesthetics and sedatives that we use in our hospital are the same as those often used in human medicine. Each animal patient has his or her anesthetic regime tailored to their own specific medical requirements and life stage.
Monitoring
During the anesthetic procedure, our patient's vital signs (temperature, pulse and respiration) are regularly monitored and charted to ensure that the respiratory and cardiovascular systems are functioning well, and to catch any sort of impending problem prior to it jeopardizing that patient's health. Both a trained and licensed Registered Veterinary Technician (RVT) as well as a veterinarian are overseeing your pet's anesthetic.
Monitoring devices such as a pulse oximeter (oxygen level in the blood), respiratory monitor and blood pressure monitor all help to provide the RVT and veterinarian with information regarding your pet's status.
Pain Relief
Finally, we provide your pet with analgesia (the relief of pain). This includes preemptive analgesia (blocking the pain pathways before the painful procedure starts), peri-operative analgesia (analgesia during surgery) and post-operative analgesia (pain control after surgery). Analgesia is often an essential part of your pet's anesthesia.