Surgery

20-30 minutes prior to the operation your pet will be given a premedication which includes opioid pain relief.

This allows your pet relax before and after they have their surgery.

Shortly before their anaesthetic they will also be given further pain relief and, where necessary, antibiotics.

We will then use a short acting intravenous general anaesthetic agent, which will allow us to slide a soft rubber tube into your pet’s airways. We use this to supply a mixture of anaesthetic gas and oxygen. This system allows us to monitor your pet and to adjust the supply of anaesthetic gas as necessary. With this we can maintain an appropriate level of anaesthesia throughout the operation.

A nurse will monitor your pet’s vital signs throughout the procedure and ensure that they are kept warm and comfortable using heated blankets. Intravenous fluids may also be provided during surgery if required.

Post-surgery, your pet will be returned to a warm, comfortable kennel.  We will do everything to ensure the procedure goes as smoothly as possible from start to finish.

Upon discharge a member of the surgical team will discuss your pet’s aftercare with you, and will provide you with written instructions.

We want to make the experience as positive and stress free for the both of you, and are readily available at all times to help you and your pet through the recovery stage.

Our team perform a wide variety of surgeries on a daily basis, and have gained a lot of knowledge and experience from this interesting caseload.

We have developed state of the art facilities and invested in high-tech equipment to ensure the safety and high standard of our work.

We use the most up-to-date anaesthetic protocols and each anaesthetic is monitored by a dedicated and experienced veterinary nurse, with the aid of advanced monitoring technology.

Our routine surgeries include:

• neutering
• tumour removal
• wound repair
• biopsy sampling
• ear care
• anal gland removal

When your pet has had an accident or a medical emergency, they will need quick access to an experienced and dedicated team who are readily available.

With a team who are on-call 24/7 to assist you, we provide confidence that your pet will receive any out of hours surgical care that is required. Our team have developed expert skills and knowledge in critical and potentially complicated cases, such as:

• caesarean sections
• gastric dilation volvulus (bloat)
• major road traffic accident injuries such as pneumothorax (collapsed lungs)
• internal injuries and bleeding

Many owners become very worried when they discover a lump on their pet. Many of the lumps or ‘masses’ found on cats and dogs are benign (non-cancerous) for example lipomas (also known as ‘fatty’ tumours), abscesses and sebaceous cysts. However there is the potential for a mass to be cancerous or ‘malignant’, so all lumps should be taken seriously until their composition is understood. You can help your pets by regularly checking their skin and body condition and having any lumps or changes in their health checked out by a vet as soon as discovered. Diagnosing cancerous masses early generally results in more effective treatment.

We have a number of techniques available to us to try to diagnose the cause and malignancy of a mass. We will discuss the options appropriate to the individual pet and outline exactly what is involved.

Fine Needle Aspirate – This is a minimally invasive biopsy technique whereby we insert a needle into a mass to collect cells. Often not requiring any sedation, we can sometimes even do this during a consultation. The cells are forced onto a microscope slide, stained with special coloured fluid.

Other Biopsies – Depending on the mass, it might be more appropriate to take a larger ‘slice’ or sample, to be sent to an external laboratory for analysis, or even to remove the entire lump. It is likely that sedation or general anaesthesia will be required; however often more detailed information can be gathered about the nature of a mass in this way.

We encounter a wide variety of cases on a daily basis where careful surgical intervention is required to ease or prevent suffering in pets.

Each of these cases tend to be unique in their own way and care is required in the planning and execution of the preparation of the patient,  surgery, the anaesthetic protocols used and post-operative care.

We have gained considerable experience managing these cases.

A few examples include;

Exploratory Laparotomy– this is surgical examination into the abdomen where other techniques have not provided a diagnosis, or to attempt a surgical treatment, for example removal of a tumour

Pyometra surgery– this is essentially a spay, but the uterus is massively infected and has swelled to many times it’s normal size. The pet is usually quite sick and their life is often in danger.

Foreign body removal– this is usually where a pet has eaten something they shouldn’t have and the object has become stuck in the gastrointestinal tract. This is frequently a life-threatening condition.

Hernia repair– hernias occur where there is a defect in the wall of the abdomen, allowing a bulge to appear under the skin. These can be quite large and may contain internal organs, most commonly intestines. The patient is usually not sick, but hernias can become a life-threatening problem if an internal organ becomes trapped in one of them, so we recommend repair.

Eye surgeries– the surface of the eye (the cornea) can often become injured or infected, due to accidents or conformation of the head. This may require surgery to protect the defect as it heals, or may even lead to the removal of the eye if so severely damaged that it cannot be saved. These are often amongst the most delicate surgeries we perform.

Ear surgeries – we perform a number of different ear surgeries from pinnectomies, where a part of the ear flap is removed, due to the presence of a tumour or a non-resolving injury, or Total Ear Canal Ablations(TECA), where removal of the entire ear canal is the only option to resolve a painful infected or cancerous ear.