Anesthesia

During dental treatments and surgeries, the patient is under general anesthesia, which means it is on an intravenous drip and intubated (=it has a breathing tube). The patient is breathing oxygen and an anesthesia gas through the breathing tube. The anesthesia gases we use are sevoflurane and isoflurane and the patient is connected to a ventilator.

We use a multimodal technique, which means we use several different drugs and mechanisms to maintain the anesthesia and achieve pain relief. For example, we use dilute intravenously administered anesthetic/pain medicine solutions, local anesthetics/nerve blocks, and pain medicines that use different mechanisms to block pain.

In our anesthesia monitoring we use modern machinery to measure vital signs. Every patient gets their own anesthesia record and, most importantly of all, their own veterinary nurse to monitor the anesthesia. The recovery of each patient is supervised at the clinic until it is safe to go home. If necessary, the owner will receive the treating veterinarian’s on-call phone number for any overnight advice regarding the patient.