Intravenous Fluids During Surgery
The second point I wanted to cover about getting your pet desexed at the Bunbury and Eaton Vet Clinics is
2. Every animal receives intravenous fluids during the surgery. With 85% of animals experiencing low blood pressure during surgery, intravenous fluids are important to help maintain blood pressure, making the surgery safer and the recovery faster. Low blood pressure can have wide-ranging effects on the animal, including causing liver and kidney damage, delayed wound healing, increased risk of infections and slower clearance of anaesthetic agents from the body.
This is something we started doing as standard around 12 months ago. Before then, we treated it as an “optional extra”. We now understand fully just how important intravenous fluids are.
There was a study published by Murdoch University which demonstrated that around 85% of dogs undergoing routine desexing will experience a degree of hypotension, with 46% becoming dangerously hypotensive, which put them at risk of kidney or liver failure.
Without good quality monitoring which includes blood pressure, it would be easy to miss these cases of hypotension, and without intravenous fluids it is very difficult to correct the problem.
We have found that by carefully monitoring blood pressure during surgery we are able to detect any early changes in blood pressure, and with the animal already attached to intravenous fluids we can rapidly correct any problems before they become life-threatening.
We have also noticed how much faster the animals recover from the anaesthetic when on intravenous fluids. Because many anaesthetic agents are cleared by the liver and kidneys, low blood pressure can affect the body’s ability to get rid of the anaesthetic due to poor blood flow to these organs.