Will my cat be in pain after surgery?

Again, it depends on what the procedure is. In my mind, when I hear surgery, I think of cutting. I think I'm making an incision somewhere, and so yes, anytime you do that, there will be some form of pain.

The good news is though, is we have a bunch of different modalities to control that pain. There are anti-inflammatory drugs that we can use. There are other analgesic drugs like opioids that can control pain quite well.

So, if it's a procedure that warrants any kind of pain control, and most of them do, there are many very effective and user-friendly modes that we can use to control pain in cats.

We are very aggressive with our pain control at the Animal Hospital of Statesville. And so, we do what's called multimodal pain control, which involves different ways to control pain. That may be medication that we give while they're at the hospital, like a K-laser type of additional pain management. And then we will usually send home pain medication as well.

The pain level your cat experiences depends on the procedure they had. We use a lot of preemptive pain management. Before we do something painful to your cat at the surgical site, we will preemptively give them pain control using pain reliever medications and local nerve blocks. We will also give your cat pain medication to take home, so that they continue to have pain control therapeutics at home. However, surgery is surgery, and it evokes pain. We can't take all pain away, but we do our very best to reduce it. We want you to know what kind of pain relievers your cat is having, and how we help keep them comfortable and keep them moving forward in their recovery at home.

If the surgery is performed correctly, your cat shouldn't be in severe pain. We provide multimodal pain control to manage discomfort post-surgery. They are given pre-surgery medications, medications during surgery, post-op pain medications, and medications to go home. In certain cases, we can use laser therapy to help alleviate pain as well.