General
Parap Veterinary Hospital is happy to be able to provide your animal with a broad range of surgical possibilities. We have experienced and competent veterinary surgeons who will, in most cases, be able to provide the surgical expertise required to treat your pet in the best possible way. Our range of surgeries varies from orthopaedics to soft tissue injuries and more.

Procedure
Before surgery
Obviously before doing surgery we need to have a diagnosis. Once that is obtained, we prefer your animal to be fasted for at least 12 hours before surgery. In some cases you are requested to make sure of this, in other cases we will do this while your pet is in hospital. In general, anaesthesia and surgery are very safe because of all the precautions we take (for instance, a constant oxygen flow), but to reduce the small risk even further, we have the option to do pre-surgery blood tests. In young dogs we will generally do a pre-surgery blood screen which will give us information about the effectiveness of your animal’s blood coagulation. As you can imagine, there can be complications if the blood coagulation isn’t good, as it can be in dogs with tick fever. In older animals we would also like to test the liver and kidney function, as these are the organs where the anaesthetics are being processed. Kidney or liver problems could cause anaesthetic complications.

Anaesthesia
As with people it is necessary to anaesthetise animals before doing surgery. We start with an injection of a sedative combined with pain relief to make the animal a bit more relaxed before the general anaesthesia and to minimise pain. After this ‘pre-medication’ we’ll start with the general anaesthetic. In most cases we’ll inject anaesthetics in a vein and your animal will go to sleep. Once sleeping we’ll, supply oxygen and anaesthetic gas through a tube that goes into the trachea (wind pipe).

Surgery
Before cutting anywhere we clip, clean and disinfect the area of surgery thoroughly. We’ll cover the unclipped part of the body with sterile drapes. For every patient we use a freshly sterilised set of instruments to prevent infections.

After surgery
After surgery we’ll give every animal time to awaken fully in our hospital. In the case of major surgeries, an animal might require a couple of nights of hospitalisation. In other cases, he or she might go home the same afternoon. In almost every case we will ask you to monitor your animal and the incision line carefully during the first weeks after surgery and to contact us if there is any doubt about anything. Things to look for when monitoring your pet are signs as lethargy, inappetence and vomiting. When looking at the stitches, keep an eye out for swelling, redness and discharge from the wound. We’ll also ask you to keep your animal quiet and to prevent him or her from getting wet until we remove the stitches, free of charge, 10 – 14 days after surgery.

Examples of Surgeries
De-sexing
You can find more information about de-sexing.

Aural Haematoma Repair
An aural haematoma is a swelling of the ear itself due to the ear filling up with blood. The surgical repair consists of making an incision in the ear, draining the blood from the ear, flushing and cleaning the interior of the ear and then stitching the ear to a plate to prevent recurrence of the problem. We’ll also examine your dog’s ear canals as in some cases the cause of an aural haematoma is excessive shaking of the head due to an ear infection. After surgery 4 or 5 re-checks (free of charge, the first 2-3 days after surgery, then one re-check weekly) will be necessary to monitor the progress and to enable us to act rapidly if there are complications (in contrast to the post-surgical check-ups, possible additional medication is not free of charge).