Hospital Services

What to Expect the Day of Surgery | What to Expect the Day of Dental Cleaning

What To Expect The Day of Surgery:

The night before your pet’s surgery appointment, we will ask you to withhold food after 9:00 pm (they can still have water).The morning of surgery a doctor will examine your pet and admit him/her for surgery. You will be requested to sign a consent form giving us permission to perform the requested procedure as well as choosing optional blood work for younger animals undergoing routine procedures (older pets or those undergoing non-routine procedures will be required to have blood work done first). Blood work allows us to assess kidney and liver function and the ability of your pet to handle the anesthetic. At this point the technician will draw blood from your pet and run the sample in our lab.

After the doctor has reviewed the blood work and made sure everything is normal, the technician will administer a premedication to your pet. This is a combination of drugs to start to help your pet relax and an initial pain medication. Once your pet is relaxed, we administer a fast acting induction agent to put them to sleep quickly, we intubate them (put a tube in their airway) and connect them to a gas anesthetic and oxygen. The technician then attaches them to an EKG (to measure heart activity), a pulse oximeter (to measure oxygen in the blood) and a blood pressure monitor. We use this monitoring equipment to make sure your pet is responding to the anesthesia appropriately.

The next step is to clip and clean your pet for surgery. While the technician is doing this, the doctor is scrubbing his hands, putting on a cap, a mask, a gown and sterile gloves. Your pet is moved into the sterile surgery suite, placed on a heating pad, given a final prep and then the doctor is ready to begin surgery. The technician also stays with your pet through the whole surgery watching the equipment as well as checking your pet’s pulse, watching their breathing pattern and assessing their mucous membrane color, all to be sure the monitoring equipment is working correctly.

When the doctor has finished the surgery, your pet will be recovered from the surgery. We keep these pets in cages that are in our treatment area so that we can monitor them carefully while they are recovering from surgery. They are given additional pain medication during the day and depending on the surgery either go home that night or the next day with more pain medication. If they have skin sutures in place they will be set up for a suture removal in 10–14 days.