Anesthetic reactions are exceedingly rare. We take anesthesia exceptionally seriously here. The veterinarian first checks any pet going under anesthesia or having an anesthetic procedure. We'll do a heart and blood screening to make sure your pet is healthy. And then we'll address any issues if they’re not. We use processes and procedures with highly trained technicians. And your pet is monitored to the highest degree when they’re under anesthesia. We're monitoring EKG, oxygenation, carbon dioxide, and pulse oximetry, and respiration. And somebody is assigned to do nothing but that. They stand there with a clipboard, as your pet is having anesthesia, monitoring these parameters. And if anything is off, we'll know and can address it literally within seconds. I'm very confident our anesthetic protocols here and the staff we have do a great job.

Well, honestly, no. You might hear people doing anesthetic-free dental cleanings, but there's no such thing. They can break off the tartar, but that's not dealing with the problems under the gum line. Those instruments cause erosions in the enamel, making it easier for debris to build back up in the future.

It’s a reasonable question because you and I can open up and say, “Ahhh,” and let the dentist clean our teeth. Cats can’t do that. We have to have the mouth open to get a dental x-ray plate in the mouth to shoot the x-rays. We have to be able to clean under the gum line. The cat has to be sedated to truly do a good dental cleaning.

Cats can have broken teeth because they chewed on something they shouldn't have or took some type of trauma blow. They can have severe Gingivitis, as we had talked about. Tooth resorption is something that's unfortunately very common in cats. And it is a cavity-like syndrome that occurs underneath the gum line where the teeth slowly resorb, and it’s an excruciating process in cats. We see stomatitis, which is an inflammation of the gums. Once again, we see masses, growths, tumors, and foreign bodies.

We see some healthy mouths in young cats. We’ll see a nice, white, happy crown, the white part of the tooth with no tartar and no calculus. And more importantly, we see gums that are a happy, healthy pink—not that red, angry, inflamed tissue called Gingivitis. We usually see these very healthy mouths in cats that are two years or less.

Preferably, we deal with it all at the same time. If your cat is under anesthesia, we'd like to have one anesthetic episode with this pet, and I want to take care of everything we can at that point. Now, that being said, we periodically find more things than we had determined we might, so we always have your cell number so that we can give you a call and talk about what we found. And hopefully, we can deal with everything then. But occasionally, these procedures can last two and even three hours. It’s a very rare occasion where we will have to recover the cat and have them come back in two or three weeks to finish the procedure. The vast majority of the time, we deal with it then.

At a minimum, your cat’s teeth should be examined once a year. We examine a cat's mouth and check the teeth every time the cat comes to see us. That's twice-yearly for our wellness plan patients. And every time your pet is in here for any type of illness, whether it’s an ear or skin infection, we always check the teeth.