Surgical Information Form

At ASL Vets, we use a combination of pre-anaesthetic medications and injectable and/or inhalant anaesthetics to obtain optimum levels of anaesthesia for your pet. For short procedures, an injectable anaesthetic is given alone, which produces an appropriate plane of surgical anaesthesia with a quicker recovery time.

For most procedures, your pet is anaesthetized and then intubated (insertion of a tube into the trachea or windpipe). This ensures your pet is able to receive oxygen at all times and prevents aspiration of any fluids into the lungs. Anesthesia is maintained with a gas anaesthetic, Isoflurane, which is very safe and metabolized by less than 1% of the liver. Inhalant anaesthetics allow us to have better control over anaesthetic depth in our patients.

Patients under anaesthesia are monitored in two ways. First, a veterinary assistant is with your pet from the introduction of anaesthesia all the way through recovery. Second, your pet's' pulse, heart rate, oxygen level, ECG, respiration, and temperature are all tracked and displayed on a computerized monitor.

Being in pain is no fun. We take all necessary steps to ensure your pet's pain is appropriately managed before, during, and after surgery. This will often include prescribed pain medication to take home post-operation.

We place an IV catheter and use IV fluids during almost all anaesthetic procedures, with only a few exceptions. These allow for quicker recovery from anaesthesia, as well as provide quick access to the circulatory system in case of an unforeseen emergency.