Are issues addressed during my cat's initial oral exam, or do I need to schedule a follow-up appointment?

Most of the time a follow-up appointment is required. If I'm doing an exam and, say, I find that your cat has periodontal disease or maybe even a fractured tooth, it's very rare that I'm able to proceed and go and put the cat under general anesthetic and perform the procedure right then and there on the spot. We need to prepare, we need to have the animal fasted, we might want to run blood work before, those kinds of things. So typically we diagnose on the first visit and then have them come back for treatment on a later visit.

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.