I'm starting this thread to let people know (if not already aware) about the dangers of injectable anesthesia in cats.
I'd like to ask if anyone knows of any study comparing injectable anesthesia with gas. Although I'm not very hopeful it exists. There seems to be a huge mess in this whole subject. How come? Even searching for articles about mortality rate of injectable anesthesia in healthy cats one gets results from various studies ranging from 0.01% up to almost 1% ( depending on how we describe healthy I suspect it may be as high as 4.5% - this is my interpretation).
Could I have avoided this whole problem by going to a different vet that uses gas anaesthetic? I not sure, but I might have.
Below is how a visit to a vet has hurt my cat Razes far worse than what we went to the vet with in the first place.
First let me say I don't want to discourage anyone from going to a vet. If you have to go you have to go. I didn't have much choice yesterday, it was an emergency, but I should've found a vet that actually uses the best equipment he has for more than marketing photos for his website.
Yesterday, my healthy, approx. 6 years old, extremely full of energy cat Ramzes, got chased up to a tree by a dog being walked by an owner with no leash. This is the kind of a tree that has dried, sharp, short sticks sticking out of its trunk and Ramzes ripped the skin on his stomach open as he was climbing up. There wasn't much blood, but the wound was very large (4in or 10cm) across his abdomen, thankfully there was no penetration into the abdomen and muscles didn't seem damaged (yes, they were visible).
This was Sunday evening, we took him to the closest city with a 24h vet clinic attached to a local university. All the way there he was miaowing to let him out of his transporter and he was clawing at it as usual in the car. He is very pain sensitive, but he didn't signal pain at the time.
We got to the clinic and they could look at him straight away. The vet looked at the wound and said he should be fine, there is no penetration to the abdomen and asked me to sign an injectable anaesthesia release form.
I had a cat react very badly to opiate based injectable anesthesia before(morphine) and that clinic had the equipment for gas anesthesia so I wanted them to use that. Sadly, they have the equipment, but they are not trained to use it, so they can't use it.
I told them my concerns with my previous cat having severe reaction to morphine before, to which I was assured "no one uses morphine, it is an old fashioned method, this is completely different, not opiate based and much safer" so I agreed. He is 5.9kg and he got torbugesic with dexdomitor to sedate him mixed with convenia(antibiotic) - in an about 1.2ml injection (I can only guess the actual amounts, because the vet report says 10ml,which is 10x too much, I saw him being given half of a 2.2ml syringe, so definitely not 10ml of anything)
Then 10 min later he got 10mg of ketamine IV and he was out in a couple of minutes.
They took him to be operated (owners are not allowed in) and some 25min later the doc comes out and says, he is alive, but his heart stopped and we had to resuscitate him. So I asked some questions, what is the exact drug used, how was he resuscitated, how long was he in cardiac arrest etc(with adrenaline - they resuscitated him immediately). I was told the details and that he got "half of a dose" so it shouldn't happen . That a healthy cat shouldn't react like this and he most likely has HMC and that "it's very common" (so which is it, if HMC is so common how can this anaesthesia method be safe?!) Then they did USG and they said he has "slightly enlarged heart wall" and this is the most likely cause. Here, let me say he never had any symptoms of being easily tired and he always had 10x the energy of my other cat Seth. All other organs were fine other than "shock bowel - small intestine". This they told me was a result of the cardiac arrest and it should resolve itself in few hours.
They wanted to keep him overnight, but upon asking what exactly would they do if his heart stopped again and learning he should be fully awake in 2h(they gave him antised - no idea about the dose, at the end of the surgery) I decided to take him home after about 2H. (when they said "yep, he is waking up as predicted" after he opened his eyes and was looking around).
I was told to keep him warm, leave his postoperative cloth on for 10 days, wash the wound daily. I was given an oral painkiller to give him in 24h and 48h, and to have my vet remove sutures in 10 days.
The trip home took almost 2h and he was out the entire time. Then he was mostly out the entire night (just waking up for few minutes, walking a little with no purpose and lying down to sleep). Now it has been 20 hours since he got the anaesthesia and he is still not fully awake. He gets up, walks a bit, when he walks he looks almost normal, then he stops, lies down and when he is down he looks really bad - pupils dilated, eyes half open, just lying there, then he wakes up walks for a bit and so on. He is improving, but 10x slower than he should based on the doses of these drugs he got. If he isn't back to normal at least drinking water by himself by tomorrow morning I'll have to take him to our local vet. Another stressful trip for him, probably IV liquids and more unknowns. He hasn't ate anything yet, and had only a pee. (I was hoping there would be a sign of normal bowel function by now).
So this is how I went to a vet to have a superficial (but large) skin wound sutured and I came back with a cat on the verge of death (again, but that's a different story).
As I'm finishing writing this he is running around and looks fine. I hope he stays like that.
I'd like to ask if anyone knows of any study comparing injectable anesthesia with gas. Although I'm not very hopeful it exists. There seems to be a huge mess in this whole subject. How come? Even searching for articles about mortality rate of injectable anesthesia in healthy cats one gets results from various studies ranging from 0.01% up to almost 1% ( depending on how we describe healthy I suspect it may be as high as 4.5% - this is my interpretation).
Could I have avoided this whole problem by going to a different vet that uses gas anaesthetic? I not sure, but I might have.
Below is how a visit to a vet has hurt my cat Razes far worse than what we went to the vet with in the first place.
First let me say I don't want to discourage anyone from going to a vet. If you have to go you have to go. I didn't have much choice yesterday, it was an emergency, but I should've found a vet that actually uses the best equipment he has for more than marketing photos for his website.
Yesterday, my healthy, approx. 6 years old, extremely full of energy cat Ramzes, got chased up to a tree by a dog being walked by an owner with no leash. This is the kind of a tree that has dried, sharp, short sticks sticking out of its trunk and Ramzes ripped the skin on his stomach open as he was climbing up. There wasn't much blood, but the wound was very large (4in or 10cm) across his abdomen, thankfully there was no penetration into the abdomen and muscles didn't seem damaged (yes, they were visible).
This was Sunday evening, we took him to the closest city with a 24h vet clinic attached to a local university. All the way there he was miaowing to let him out of his transporter and he was clawing at it as usual in the car. He is very pain sensitive, but he didn't signal pain at the time.
We got to the clinic and they could look at him straight away. The vet looked at the wound and said he should be fine, there is no penetration to the abdomen and asked me to sign an injectable anaesthesia release form.
I had a cat react very badly to opiate based injectable anesthesia before(morphine) and that clinic had the equipment for gas anesthesia so I wanted them to use that. Sadly, they have the equipment, but they are not trained to use it, so they can't use it.
I told them my concerns with my previous cat having severe reaction to morphine before, to which I was assured "no one uses morphine, it is an old fashioned method, this is completely different, not opiate based and much safer" so I agreed. He is 5.9kg and he got torbugesic with dexdomitor to sedate him mixed with convenia(antibiotic) - in an about 1.2ml injection (I can only guess the actual amounts, because the vet report says 10ml,which is 10x too much, I saw him being given half of a 2.2ml syringe, so definitely not 10ml of anything)
Then 10 min later he got 10mg of ketamine IV and he was out in a couple of minutes.
They took him to be operated (owners are not allowed in) and some 25min later the doc comes out and says, he is alive, but his heart stopped and we had to resuscitate him. So I asked some questions, what is the exact drug used, how was he resuscitated, how long was he in cardiac arrest etc(with adrenaline - they resuscitated him immediately). I was told the details and that he got "half of a dose" so it shouldn't happen . That a healthy cat shouldn't react like this and he most likely has HMC and that "it's very common" (so which is it, if HMC is so common how can this anaesthesia method be safe?!) Then they did USG and they said he has "slightly enlarged heart wall" and this is the most likely cause. Here, let me say he never had any symptoms of being easily tired and he always had 10x the energy of my other cat Seth. All other organs were fine other than "shock bowel - small intestine". This they told me was a result of the cardiac arrest and it should resolve itself in few hours.
They wanted to keep him overnight, but upon asking what exactly would they do if his heart stopped again and learning he should be fully awake in 2h(they gave him antised - no idea about the dose, at the end of the surgery) I decided to take him home after about 2H. (when they said "yep, he is waking up as predicted" after he opened his eyes and was looking around).
I was told to keep him warm, leave his postoperative cloth on for 10 days, wash the wound daily. I was given an oral painkiller to give him in 24h and 48h, and to have my vet remove sutures in 10 days.
The trip home took almost 2h and he was out the entire time. Then he was mostly out the entire night (just waking up for few minutes, walking a little with no purpose and lying down to sleep). Now it has been 20 hours since he got the anaesthesia and he is still not fully awake. He gets up, walks a bit, when he walks he looks almost normal, then he stops, lies down and when he is down he looks really bad - pupils dilated, eyes half open, just lying there, then he wakes up walks for a bit and so on. He is improving, but 10x slower than he should based on the doses of these drugs he got. If he isn't back to normal at least drinking water by himself by tomorrow morning I'll have to take him to our local vet. Another stressful trip for him, probably IV liquids and more unknowns. He hasn't ate anything yet, and had only a pee. (I was hoping there would be a sign of normal bowel function by now).
So this is how I went to a vet to have a superficial (but large) skin wound sutured and I came back with a cat on the verge of death (again, but that's a different story).
As I'm finishing writing this he is running around and looks fine. I hope he stays like that.
