Will my cat be intubated to have cat dental work done?

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.

You would want to because when we're cleaning the mouth, we're cleaning, polishing, and rinsing. "Dilution is a solution to pollution," so we rinse everything out at the same time. We want to make sure we protect that airway and make it very comfortable for the cats while also keeping things clean. In doing so, we need to have the airway protected with a tube. We numb the back of their throats a bit as we insert the tube, which helps them a lot.

Intubation is where we put a little tube down a pet's throat, specifically their airway so that we can protect their lungs. We want to deliver anesthesia straight into their lungs and ensure that all the fluids we use for cleaning are not going into their lungs. So intubation is necessary for this.

Yes. We use sevoflurane anesthesia, and we administer that through an endotracheal tube that we place when we induce the anesthesia with an iv.

Yes, we always protect the airway with an endotracheal tube or intubation. This is the tube that helps protect the airway, make sure that nothing goes down the wrong pipe, and also helps us to provide oxygen and the anesthetic gas that helps to keep the cat asleep during the procedure.