That depends on the type and length of surgery. At the Animal Hospital of Statesville, we try to get them back home with you the same day. And most of our surgery patients go home the afternoon of the procedure.

I'd say, most times, they do. And they will give you specific instructions on that. So water is usually fine, but food is not.

Getting them ready for surgery might involve simply withholding food before the day of the procedure. Other things would be getting them prepared by not letting them be stressed or upset. You can also train them to be in the carrier before bringing them in. That makes that event a little less stressful. And then, you want to prepare the home ahead of time for when they're going to come home and where you're going to keep them. For example, are you going to keep them in a particular room? And what's that going to look like?

We are very aggressive with our pain control at the Animal Hospital of Statesville. And so, we do what's called multimodal pain control, which involves different ways to control pain. That may be medication that we give while they're at the hospital, like a K-laser type of additional pain management. And then we will usually send home pain medication as well.

We do a combination, usually, of talking to you whenever you pick up your cat. But, we also try to have everything written down that we’d print out for you because we know that when you're there to pick up your pet, you may be very anxious, and even if you aren't, you may only hear half the things we say. And so, we write those down for you as well.

If it's general anesthesia, they will be intubated, and then they will be maintained on gas. Again, depending on the type of procedure, intubation allows us to control and protect the airway.