Last week my article was about things we see as important when it comes to getting your pet desexed at the Bunbury Vet Clinic. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to discuss in a bit more depth why each of these points is so important.
1. We give pain killers to every animal. We believe every animal undergoing desexing surgery needs good quality pain relief, so we include it in the price we give you. Remember that the pain from surgery lasts for more than 24 hours, so your pet will have some pain killers to take at home.
Good quality pain relief is so much more important than just making the animal comfortable. Pain relief starts before the surgery even begins with your pet given a powerful opioid pain killer (same class as morphine and pethidine) around 30 minutes before the surgery. For the particularly painful parts of the surgery (we judge this by changes in the animal’s heart rate and breathing) we also give more opioid pain killers into the vein for very powerful pain relief. This allows us to keep the anaesthetic as light and safe as possible while keeping the animal comfortable.
There is a condition called “pain wind-up”, which basically means that once an animal is feeling pain it is much harder to make it comfortable again. That is why we are very careful to give good pain relief right from the start.
We also use a different type of pain killer called a Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug (NSAID), which is given by injection while the animal is still asleep, and can then be given orally at home. This works to both reduce inflammation and provide powerful pain relief.
By keeping an animal comfortable, it has been shown that they recover from surgery faster, they are more likely to eat and drink normally, and are less likely to lick or chew at the surgical wound. All this on top of the obvious benefit of not being in pain.