Pre-Anesthesia Blood Work for Cats

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Dr. Greg McDonald and I am here for Expert Village.com. Today I want to talk a little bit about pre-anesthetic blood work that we do before your animal gets an anesthetic. Of course we are talking about cat and dental disease where they need an anesthesia to clean their teeth but this is the same kind of blood work that we do for any anesthetic. Before we put an animal under anesthesia, we draw a little blood sample of blood and that blood goes into our lab here and this is an on-site of blood laboratory machine that will take care of looking at your animal’s blood to be sure they are healthy. This is what is called a reflatron and we can look at an individual test here. We can look at the glucose, liver enzyme, kidney enzyme and a pancreatic enzyme. We can do those individual tests to check and be sure that your animal is healthy. Over here we have a product that is called a bacus unit. Here we take a tiny little sample of blood and you put that into the machine and this machine will check the white cell count and will do what is called a differential. There are several different kinds of white cells that can say if your animal is having some kind of disease and this will delineate the white cells that are normal and the ones that are not and we can tell if your animal is healthy or not to handle an anesthetic by looking at the blood work. So again every animal that undergoes an anesthetic always has pre-anesthetic blood work and we do that right in our own hospital. Animals come in and we draw little blood sample, a tiny amount of 1cc of blood is all that we need and we can tell if the liver or the kidney, pancreas, the whole animals body is working properly including the white cells count and the distribution of the white cells. So if your even had heavy parasitism for some reason it would show up in the blood work and we may control the parasitism first even before we did the dentistry. "