General anesthesia is very scary for us, but we do it very routinely. We know that monitoring is part of the safety of general anesthesia. The doctor that's overseeing your cat while it's here for dental care will be overseeing anesthesia along with a trained pet nurse and a wonderful electronic monitor. So there are about three different ways we're monitoring your pet under anesthesia.

When we do teeth cleaning, we use a lot of water and a dental x-ray unit, so we need your pet to be very still during its cleaning so that we can do a thorough assessment. So that means general anesthesia is needed.

Yes, you can. You can let us know if your cat is apprehensive and scared when it comes into the pet hospital. We can prescribe your pet some calming medications so that when they come in for their dental appointment, they're already premedicated, which helps us, them, and you feel more comfortable when they come in for a general anesthesia appointment.

In my opinion, yes. It is a better option as it's significantly less painful, less invasive, and there's a quicker healing time. The pet can return to normal activity, like chasing a ball and running around the backyard in significantly less time than with traditional open surgery. We can more readily perform diagnostic procedures that might otherwise be too cost-prohibitive because open surgery for obtaining biopsies is more expensive or just too invasive for clients to agree to. This minimally invasive keyhole laparoscopic procedure to obtain biopsies or other diagnostic procedures often presents a much lower barrier for clients. They more easily say, "Yes, I want to understand what's going on better so that we can treat my pet more appropriately." In many different ways, it is a better option than open surgery.

With that said, there are limitations. We still need to go into the abdomen with certain surgeries because the laparoscopic minimally invasive technique is not enough. For example, if we have a splenic tumor and we need to remove the spleen, it can't be done effectively through a small port incision. It will require a full open surgery to get the best outcome. So there are certain situations where it's not better, but in most common procedures, it provides a great alternative because of all these discussed reasons.

It depends on what we're trying to accomplish. If we're talking about a spay, laparoscopic surgery is curative compared to traditional surgery. It's completely effective at removing all ovarian tissue and getting the job done. Another thing that we would use this equipment for is a liver biopsy, for example, where it won't be curative because it's a diagnostic tool. We use the equipment to access the liver with a minimally invasive technique rather than opening the abdomen up, but it's not curative in the sense that we're curing the disease. We're getting tissue samples from the liver so that we can try to get an answer as to what's going on inside. That would require us to do major surgery if we didn't have this laparoscopic equipment.

So it changes the way that we approach a lot of these common issues we come across. Whether it is something as routine as spaying a dog, removing the ovaries, or something more complicated, like a pet with significant liver problems. It's maybe not even significant liver issues at the moment, but there may be evidence in the blood suggestive of something problematic. We were often left guessing before we had liver biopsies. Performing biopsies using this technique that doesn't require major surgery provides an opportunity to get a definitive diagnosis. That's the hope with the biopsies. We can treat that disease directly. It's not a cure, but we can manage it more successfully with a definitive diagnosis, which you don't always get without a biopsy. This equipment and minimally invasive technique allow us to operate more efficiently and perform appropriate therapy directed at the underlying problem with less trauma for the pet.