Yes, your cat has to be intubated. When we clean the teeth, we use an ultrasonic cleaner. It produces a lot of water in the mouth, and we don't want aspiration into the lungs. Not to mention by intubating, we're getting oxygen in the gas anesthesia directly to the lungs. It's the only way to safely do a dental cleaning on a cat. There are injectable anesthetic drugs that you can use in a cat, but not for dentistry. The cat needs the tube to keep the airway safe during the procedure.

A dental cleaning for cats is very involved. You can check out our website for FAQs and answers about the procedure. Also, you can see our dental cleaning video. It's a two-part basic dental cleaning video. It's filled with dogs, but dogs have bigger mouths and teeth. So they're a little easier to see than a cat. But the technique and the procedure are virtually the same. Take a look at that video if you get a chance, and that will help answer your questions; even more, the crown is essential. We can determine the crown’s health by seeing the crown, but what we can't determine is what's going on underneath the gum line. You and I go to the dentist, and yearly, we get dental x-rays done. And we can tell the dentist this tooth hurts right here, but they still x-ray all our teeth because you genuinely can't assess the tooth’s health without an x-ray to see what's going on underneath the gum line. And we talked about kitty resorptive lesions earlier. And honestly, those are extremely difficult to assess without an x-ray. They stay hidden because the gum grows up and covers the tissue or covers the diseased tooth. And we need x-rays to be able to truly see what's going on in there.

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.