Anesthesia Service

About the Service

Our patient care mission is to provide safe, effective, comprehensive general anesthesia and acute pain management for all patients requiring surgery or diagnostic procedures. Our team’s sole responsibility is ensuring the well-being and comfort of your pet while under our care. We provide this service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week when general anesthesia is required.

What We Do

Our focus is the management of patients with significant disease or those presented for complex procedures that would pose an unacceptable risk in a general veterinary practice. We provide an additional level of care that is not possible in other facilities. Each patient has a minimum of a two-person anesthesia team whose sole responsibility is monitoring and maintaining a safe and effective level of anesthesia. All vital signs are continuously monitored and therapy is instituted as needed. At a minimum, every patient is monitored for heart rhythm, pulse rate, breath rate, temperature, blood pressure, oxygen saturation and carbon dioxide production. Every patient is provided supplemental warming as needed to avoid hypothermia, a common complication under general anesthesia.

We provide pain control for all patients undergoing surgery and aggressively treat any indications of pain during the procedure so that your pet wakes up pain free. We utilize the latest techniques in regional anesthesia such as epidurals, electrical-stimulation guided brachial plexus blocks and dental blocks. We use the same injectable pain medicines as you would find in a human hospital, such as morphine, fentanyl, and dexmedetomidine (Precedex®).

We utilize specialized anesthesia equipment unavailable in other facilities. We can conduct direct arterial blood pressure monitoring, central venous pressure monitoring, neuromuscular paralysis and monitoring and mechanical ventilation. We can provide constant rate infusions of general anesthetics, pain medicines, and cardiovascular support drugs with an array of highly accurate infusion pumps. We have access to a variety of blood products if a transfusion is necessary. We are able to fully monitor patients undergoing magnetic resonance imaging.

Meet the Team

The Anesthesia Service is composed of faculty anesthesiologists, anesthesia residents, veterinary technicians and veterinary assistants who are dedicated to providing anesthesia and pain management for your pet. All faculty are diplomates of the American College of Veterinary Anesthesia and Analgesia and have a combined experience of more than 50 years in the specialty. Each of the veterinary technicians and veterinary assistants have training and special interest in anesthesia and providing anesthesia is their only responsibility.