I think that the breathing rate is a big one. You want to make sure the dog isn’t having any difficulty or labored breathing. Monitor their activity level. Does the dog respond to you? Are they aware of what's going on? Those would be two big ones that would be a little more obvious than others.

One of the most important things is to keep them in a quiet, less stressful environment. You staying calm will help them stay calm. If you're worrying, they might become more anxious because of that. Make sure that you ask all the questions before you take your dog home. Sometimes it's hard to remember all those questions, so write down any questions you might have. We tend to write down go-home instructions because when we talk to you, and when people talk to me, I don't always retain that, so I like to have a piece of paper just like this, where I can reference and look at it. That has important information on how to take care of your pet. You want to make sure that if they had an incision or any stitches, they're not licking or chewing at those.

They might be drowsy; they might be a little drunk. One thing that we talk to clients about is we think about if we're in pain, if we were hurt or we have pain, we might be vocal about that. Pets aren't necessarily vocal when they're in pain because they want to hide that, and so if your pet goes home. They’re very vocal; that might be a side effect of the anesthesia where they don't necessarily know what's going on, and they're more vocal because they're a little confused versus that they're painful. That's one thing that's important to remember.

We don't take anesthesia risk lightly, so we would only recommend that if necessary, and that might be in the procedures that we talked about, whether it was surgery, certain types of radiographs where we might need them sedated stitches, or sutures.

Yes, and we have a way to assess that and a grading system that grades the risk of anesthesia of each pet, whether there is little to no risk or high risk. If they have any underlying conditions or diseases ahead of time, whether that's maybe a heart murmur or heart disease or if they are overweight—those are risk factors. Then other things might be if they have any breathing difficulty or kidney problems. All of those things are increasing their risk for anesthesia.

We want to make sure that those diseases are controlled. Many times these diseases that I just mentioned aren't curable, but they're managed. We want to make sure that they're under control before we anesthetize the pet. The other thing that we haven't mentioned yet is the type of anesthesia that we choose would vary depending on the pet's risk. We might choose quicker-acting anesthesia that they go under quickly and then recover quickly.