"Compassionate Care for Quality of Life"
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Surgery
Monitoring anesthesia
Bladder stone visible on x-ray. These are painful!
The same bladder stone, after surgery.
External fixator on a broken leg: Radiograph (above), photograph (below)
Surgery is a significant component of any veterinary practice, and with advances in anesthesia, it is safer than ever before.
Nowadays, we can monitor blood pressure, blood oxygen, and respiratory carbon dioxide during anesthesia, making it much easier to adjust the doses of anesthetic drugs and gas to get just the right level of anesthesia. We also use local blocks ("freezing") so that less anesthetic is required.
Options for anesthesia have also changed so that we now use a combination of drugs to achieve "balanced anesthesia". Pain control is improved and the risk of a reaction to any one drug is reduced.
We perform a range of surgeries for patients at Nakusp Veterinary Clinic: Fracture repair using external fixation, abdominal surgery to remove tumours or foreign objects, bladder surgery and eye surgeries are just a few examples.
This bone tumour was extremely painful for this dog. Leg amputation was the only option we could offer: She recovered quickly with a greatly improved quality of life.