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.

There would be some type of anesthesia for surgical procedures, whether injectable or inhalant anesthesia, because we wouldn't want them to feel the pain of that procedure.

Depending on the type of surgery, some of the fundamental questions would be about recovery time, what to expect when you take your pet home, and how to best care for your cat. And you may also want to ask how to get your cat ready for the surgery that's coming up.

In my experience, I'm going to say no, because again, most of the medications I'm using to prevent are combination medicines that also do fleas, ticks, ear mites, heartworms, intestinal worms, and those kinds of things. I use things like Revolution, Revolution Plus, and Advantage Multi for Cats. Those are all things I've used. Full disclosure in answer to that question, yeah I have seen some cats that don't like it when you put it on. They act very irritably, and they may even get a little patch of hair loss in that area because you're putting it on the back of the neck. I've seen those kinds of side effects, but it's not specific to the heartworm preventative that's in it. Many of those products may be alcohol-based because that helps them to absorb through the oil layer in the skin and be absorbed in the bloodstream. I think more side effects have to do with the liquid itself or the carrier that the drug is in, and perhaps not the drug itself.

Any time you put a chemical in or on an animal, you always have the risk of there being a reaction to that animal, but it's not something that I routinely see in cats.

Respiratory issues—again, being a more serious condition in cats and how it normally presents, I guess you could say similar to dogs, it takes fewer worms to cause these. That's the most common thing that I see. A cat that might come in for hacking, coughing, maybe even open mouth breathing, or perhaps poor color. Maybe the cat was running around playing or just jumping around a typical day, and all of a sudden just collapsed, acute collapse. It usually presents as either cardiovascular or respiratory signs in a cat.

Every once in a while, you'll see vomiting, although I personally have not seen a cat come in for vomiting and then later be diagnosed with heartworms. It's always been the respiratory signs that I have picked up on.