How to Monitor Cats Under Anesthesia

Video Transcript

"Hi I’m Dr. Greg McDonald and I am here for Expert Village.com. We are talking about monitoring your pet while it is under anesthesia while having his teeth done. There are several things and several parameters that we want to pay attention to when your animal is under anesthesia. We want to be sure that the heart rate is good. We want to be sure that the teeth are being profused with oxygen properly and we also want to measure the respirations to make sure the animal is breathing out any carbon monoxide and breathing in the oxygen and the anesthetic. This is a machine that we use just to do that and it is called a ____________. The ______________ has a little clip that hooks onto the animal’s ear or their tongue and you can see this little clip here that actually monitors the oxygen content of the blood. This is another part that hooks up to the endotracheal tube and this monitors the carbon dioxide. As the animal is under anesthesia, the doctor and the technician are all paying attention to the anesedic while watching this machine and this machine will be beeping regular heart beats and also will give you an alarm if something is not right; if the heart rate gets too low, if the level of oxygen gets too low or if the animal stops breathing or the carbon dioxide gets too high. All of those have alarms in this little machine and it lets us know if problems are starting in your pet while it is under anesthesia. When your animal is under anesthesia we also monitor the EKG that is the heart wave form and shape) and we do it with a nice little anesedic EKG machine. We hook them up with these little clips that go to the legs and while the whole time they are under anesthesia we actually monitor the wave forms that are happening up here that kind of can show you if your cat is having some kind of electrical problem with the heart monitoring while under anesthesia. You can actually see some of the wave forms as I am holding on to it here but this is constantly monitoring your cat and it shows the wave form of the heart whether it is normal or not. Also shows you the heart rate and there is a little print out here that actually prints out so you can see what the heart is doing after the anesthetic is over. "