Our Surgery

When comparing prices on spays and neuters – always insist on comprehensive quality care for your family member.

Our surgeries include everything we would do if it was our own furry family member:

1. A comprehensive physical exam looking at all aspects of your pets health – eyes, ears, mouth, gums, throat, lymph nodes, musculature, lungs, heart, abdomen, joints, skin, feet and rear end. This is necessary to make sure your pet is healthy prior to anesthesia.

2. A blood chemistry panel that verifies kidney and liver health to make sure your pet is a good candidate for an anesthetic procedure. It also checks for diabetes and electrolyte imbalances which can affect anesthesia.

3. A Complete Blood Count (CBC)  which checks for anemia, inflammation, or infection. These conditions can also affect the anesthetic procedure.

4. Pain control – we are very aggressive about pain control here at Animal Care Clinic. We always give pain relief prior to surgery, during surgery and we dispense medications for pain management at home. We routinely use nerve blocks over the surgical site so your pet does not feel the incisions. You need to insist on complete pain control anywhere you go. It has been shown that pain relief facilitates recovery and healing, reducing infections and complications with surgery and minimizing stress to the body.

5. Intravenous (IV) catheters are placed to allow us to administer the injectable drugs for anesthesia and it allows a port for emergency drugs if needed. We also use it during surgery for fluid support. Fluid support is usually an intravenous solution mixed with a pain relief drug. The fluid support administered by a fluid pump helps maintain healthy blood pressure, speeds recovery from anesthesia and reduces the likelihood of organ damage while under anesthesia.

6. Sevoflurane anesthesia is the type of inhalant anesthesia used at Animal Care Clinic. It is the most advanced, safest inhalant anesthesia available and is commonly used in human pediatrics. The animals recover from it quicker and there are less side affects. We intubate all pets with an endotracheal tube in order to control your pet’s airway to deliver the inhalant anesthesia. The endotracheal tubes also prevent inhalation of foreign material during anesthesia.

7. While under anesthesia your pet is lying comfortably on a padded surgical table with a warm water bed. The padding and the warm water bed help reduce trauma to the pet when it is lying for an extended length of time and helps prevent hypothermia (low body temperature). Hypothermia affects metabolism, slowing recovery and increasing the odds of infection and complications.

8. There are several ways to monitor your pet under anesthesia to make sure it is doing well. Not all of these parameters are routinely monitored in all veterinary practices. During the procedure, our state of the art monitor is closely tracking the vitals of your pet. It includes the following:

   1. Electrocardiogram (ECG) measures the heart electrically; it tells us the heart is beating normally.

   2. Pulse Oximeter – this tells us the amount of oxygen in the blood stream so we know if your pet is getting enough oxygen and it also tells us if there is a physical pulse. This information combined with the ECG tells us that the heart is beating physically and electronically.

   3. Blood Pressure – Monitoring blood pressure while under anesthesia ensures that there is adequate pressure to maintain circulation. This is important because if the pressure drops, the body will try to increase pressure by limiting blood flow to less vital organs. This can cause kidney damage which may go unnoticed in a young animal until much later in life or may cause kidney failure in an older animal.

   4. End tidal CO2 and respiration rate are measured as well and these tell us if your pet is breathing adequately and normally. This is an early indicator that there may be a problem.

   5. Body Temperature is monitored constantly to keep your pet warm so they maintain the ability to metabolize the anesthetic drugs.

9. We are the only American Animal Hospital Association certified hospital in the Wilsonville area and as such we adhere to higher standards for our surgical suite. All surgeons wear a surgical cap, mask, shoe covers, sterile gown and sterile gloves. 

10. We use a newly sterilized surgical instrument pack for each pet and use high quality suture material for all procedures. 

Our equipment and procedures are routinely evaluated to ensure that we are providing the most current and optimal surgical care for all pets.

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