These animals are difficult to keep warm during surgery because they lose heat so rapidly. They have little to no body fat to maintain an adequate body temperature during long anesthesia. Hot water is pumped through the blanket continuously during the surgery. We also take great care to minimize any contact of skin with the cold stainless steel surgical table, because the table extracts heat from the patients very quickly. The amount of anesthesia has to be closely regulated so an overdose is not delivered.
Instrumentation needs to be very small, in many cases microsurgical.
The endotracheal tube, which delivers gas anesthesia, can often be no more than 2-3 mm in diameter. Here we present two cases where many of the above problems had to be overcome. These two animals were the smallest to undergo major surgeries at our hospital. Dr. Persky with Loupe Glasses for Microsurgery Nala was presented to our hospital as a five week old kitten that was vomiting immediately after a meal of solid food. She was also half the size of her litter mates.