How to Give Cats Subcutaneous Fluids

Video Transcript

"I'm just going to demonstrate how to give sub-cutaneous fluids to a cat. Generally, we give fluids under the skin to cats who are dehydrated because of kidney disease or severe illness. And, sometimes they need fluids for several days in a row. So, your veterinarian may instruct you to give some fluids at home. So, usually we give fluids in this area. This kind of scruff area, right above the shoulders. There's a lot of extra skin, so there's room for the fluid to accumulate under the skin as you provide it through the tube. And it will actually look like a bubble. And then, as gravity works and the fluid gets absorbed, the bubble will kind of go down along the side of the cat, and eventually disappear as it gets absorbed into the skin. Now using the sub Q equipment here, there's a couple of important things to remember. You want to make sure that you always have a clean and sterile needle that hasn't been used before. This needle is a fairly thick gage, because we want the fluids to run through into the cat fairly quickly. It takes three or four minutes for the fluids to be administered. And that's a long time for a cat to be patient. You want to make sure that there's fluid in this little drip set here, that you can see. And when you turn this up, it loosens and you can see the drops coming out onto the drip set. You want to make sure that there aren't air bubbles in the line here, and that the fluid is flowing freely out of the needle. Then what you would do, is, pick up a little bit of this scruff area, find the little dent where the skin has room to go under. You would insert the needle there, and then hold the skin like this, and turn on your drip set, and let the fluids run in. I'm not going to administer fluids to Ace right now, because he doesn't need them. That's how we give subcutaneous fluids."