Once in a while you have a complication with a patient under anesthesia. I have now twice seen instances where a cat, while under anesthesia for a dental, developed a cardiac arrhythmia. (For those who care, they started getting individual VPCs and then developed into runs of them.)
As you may imagine, abnormal heart rhythms are a pretty big concern for us because they sometimes lead to death.
In both cases we aborted the dental and woke the patient up from anesthesia. Fortunately in both cases it was during the scaling (cleaning) part of the procedure and not during any extractions (surgery).
Case #1 at the corporate practice - I talk with the owner. Owner's response includes questions such as the following:
"So we used up the dental on my plan and I can't have it done until next year now?"
"Why couldn't you just finish?"
"How much would it cost to see a cardiologist?" (Ok, this one is a fair question but it illustrates the mindset of the owner - greater concern for money than for their cat - or at least that's the way it appeared!)
I had to bite my tongue from saying to this owner "So you wanted your cat's teeth cleaned even though he could be DEAD with clean teeth?!?!?!"
Case #2 at my current practice - my colleague talks with the owner (it wasn't my case this time.)
Owner's response:
"Thank goodness he's okay!"
"What should we do next to find out why this happened?"
Which owner would you rather work with?
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