It can be very nerve wracking handing your furry little (and not so little!) ones over to us for surgery. We thought we would take you on a virtual tour of a typical ‘day in the life of a patient’, so you will be able to see what will happen to your pet when they spend the day with us for a procedure. Todays patient is a wonderful Labrador called “Braxin” from Albany Creek.
Admissions are between 8.00 and 9.00 in the morning and the patient will need to have an empty stomach if they are having a general anaesthetic. In the week before the operation, we will have sent out a letter to you, as a reminder of the upcoming procedure and also to go over a few things about the operation. When you and your pet come into the vet Albany creek clinic in the morning, we will get you to fill out an admission form, including your best contact phone number for the day. We will give you an estimate for the procedure and give you the option to request pre-anaesthetic bloods. These bloods will assess how the liver and kidneys will function under anaesthetic as to give us the best idea as to how your pet will handle the anaesthetic. They are highly recommended for all pets, but particularly our geriatrics (over 7 years of age). We will go through any questions you may have and try and put you at ease- as much as possible!
A nurse will take the patient out to the theatre and will give the patient a good check over. The heart rate, respiration rate and temperature are taken. At this stage, if bloods are required, we will take them and run them. If there is anything at all wrong with the results, we will call you and discuss our options. If everything is alright, we will give them some pre-anaesthetic drugs. This includes a strong painkiller as well as a sedative to calm them if they’re feeling anxious. These will also help to make their anaesthetic smoother. At this time, we will also place an IV catheter so we can give intravenous fluids during the surgery. These are important to help maintain the patient’s blood pressure during the anaesthetic.
The patient is then made comfortable in a cosy heated cage. We try to separate the dogs from the cats, as we find that some dogs will tend to bark more if they are placed next door to a cat! Some of our cat patients can be very nervous and so we can put a cloth cover over their cage so they feel more secure.
We start our surgeries around mid-morning. We use the same anaesthetic as humans, so it is as safe as we can possibly make it. An ET tube is placed in the airway to give anaesthetic and oxygen throughout the surgery. The animal is monitored using sophisticated anaesthetic monitoring equipment- and we also always have a nurse manually monitoring the patient throughout the surgery. With most procedures, the animal will receive a long lasting pain relief injection at this point- before they are conscious to any discomfort.
Once the animal is in recovery and is awake and sitting up, the vet will call the owner to let them know that the patient is awake. We put them in a heated cage with a blanket and hot water bottles, as an animal’s body temperature drops during surgery while they’re not moving. We like to keep the animal for a few more hours so that we can continue to monitor them. We will make a discharge appointment so that the surgical nurse who was assisting the vet during your pet’s procedure can sit down with you and go through some homecare notes. If your animal needs any further medication to go home with, we will also go through this with you. We will give you a handout outlining everything we have talked about because there is usually quite a bit to go through and we find most people are so excited to be reunited with their pet, that it’s quite easy to forget certain details! We also have free e books covering most of the important topics which we can e mail to you directly. This allows you to discuss the procedure more fully with the whole family at home. Our aim in this whole process is to make the day as comfortable and stress free as possible for both you and your pet and live up to our reputation as being the best vet Albany Creek has to offer!
We will give you a call the next day to make sure that everything is going well and to answer any more questions that may have popped up in your mind overnight. The nurse will ensure that a post-operative check has been made. This is a free check, usually ten days after the operation, to make sure that the animal is healing well and to take out any sutures if needed.
We hope that puts some of the worries to the back of your mind. If you are still feeling at all worried, we can schedule an appointment for you, in which a nurse can show you where the operation will be taking place and we can try to answer any further questions you may have.