Who monitors my cat while on anesthesia?

Here at family pet veterinary centers, we have someone dedicated and assigned to monitoring anesthesia throughout the entire time. Although anesthesia is known to be a scary thing, cats' risk of a problem is 0.11%. So it's not zero, but it is less than one. It is, in fact, very small. The reason for that is because we pay close attention, we tailor the drugs to the patient, and we do preoperative workups to ensure we have better outcomes. I think our chance of a problem occurring is less than that, mainly because of the BNP testing that we can do, because one in seven cats has a problem that you can't hear but only find with certain tests. Few clinics in the area can do the kind of testing that we can. It's relatively economical as well.

General anesthesia is very scary for us, but we do it very routinely. We know that monitoring is part of the safety of general anesthesia. The doctor that's overseeing your cat while it's here for dental care will be overseeing anesthesia along with a trained pet nurse and a wonderful electronic monitor. So there are about three different ways we're monitoring your pet under anesthesia.

In our case, it's my assistant and me, but we do that with electronic monitoring. Of course, we're watching your cat's breathing cycle and ensuring that his pulse oximetry is adequate, his EKG is doing well, his blood pressure is okay, and all that gets monitored electronically. So it's really safe, although it didn't used to be 48 years ago when I started.

The cat is monitored continuously while under anesthesia with equipment such as EKGs, blood pressure monitoring, pulse oximetry which measures the oxygenation. There's also a hands-on person, either the veterinary technician or the doctor, who is monitoring all the vitals and recording those during the procedure.