Prevention. We’re all about prevention. So by preventing the problem initially through monitoring and blood work before surgery, we can catch things ahead of time before they become problems. For example, we may leave that intubation tube longer in some of our English Bulldogs to help with breathing.

We always worry about our brachycephalic breeds, which, if you don't know that big term, are the smush-faced breeds. These are your English Bulldogs, your Pekingese—dogs that don't breathe well before surgery and anesthesia, and so, during recovery, they might be at higher risk.

There are always risks that their blood pressure could drop, or their heart rate could drop too low. We want that to be under control during anesthesia, and that's why we monitor those things. In most of our procedures, we’ve also taken the next step in placing an IV catheter and having the pet on fluids to support them. So we try to minimize those risks with monitoring and by doing some preventative measures. We also use multimodal anesthesia. So, again, I mentioned pre-medication. So by giving multiple steps along the way, we can reduce the overall load of sedation that we give.

That's a great general question. So it depends on what type of surgery that is. We wouldn't recommend a surgery unless we thought it was effective for whatever the problem would be. But of course, some prognoses are better than others.

We hope to be able to control that pain. Surgeries are painful procedures by definition, but we control that pain by giving them pain medication before surgery. We call that our pre-medication. We provide them with pain medication during the surgery, and then we send them home medication afterward. We also control pain through our cold laser, our K-Laser, a non-medication, but it is a pain control.