This cat video made me feel sick. A tragedy. What can you say about this story? It is your worst nightmare as a cat caregiver. You take your cat to the vet for a standard spaying operation and she is destroyed by it. We don’t know what happened but it must have been the anesthetic. Her owner captions his TikTok video with these words:
“Still can’t believe that we took our kitten to get spayed & she came home blind, deaf, having seizures & dying 3 days later“.
Don’t know why she was dying. General anesthetics can cause blindness. However, Pub Med state: “Current estimates indicate that approximately 0.11% (1 in 895 anesthetics) of healthy cats die of an anesthetic-related death, which is more than twice as frequent as has been recently reported in dogs (0.05% or 1 in 1849)”.
I mean, it’s bloody shocking. And the video is heartbreaking. Is anyone surprised why cat owners don’t take their cats to the vet to have their teeth cleaned?! They have to be put under a general anesthetic. Teeth cleaning of a cat can kill your cat or leave them blind. F***k that.
According to VCA Hospitals a general anesthetic “may cause aspiration pneumonia, a potentially life-threatening condition. Other rare complications of anesthesia include organ system failure such as kidney, liver or heart failure, visual impairment, clotting disorders and seizures”.
RELATED: British SH kitten dies during spaying operation.
Serious injury from anesthesia in cats is much higher than in people. Why? Some quick research did not produce an answer. Is it because vets are less good than hospital doctors in administering a general anesthetic or is it because cats are predisposed to being injured by the stuff? It would not surprise me if the underlying cause is because there is less precision and preparation in applying the anesthetic to cats compared to humans. Perhaps the machinery is worse at vet clinics? Update: Deaths of humans under anaesthesia are at 1-4 in 10,000 cases. This is considerably less than for cats.
RELATED: Why do up to 10x more cats die under or after a general anesthetic than humans?
Something needs to be done to improve the outcome of cats under general anesthetic.
Below are some more articles on anesthetics for cats. It is all bad news.
I have spayed and neutered probably 350 cats in my life time and have never had this happen, the odds should have been there. I cannot help but feel the cat was given to much anesthetic or wasn’t given enough oxygen. Vets do try to use every drop of oxygen and this one may have thought there was enough in the tank to do one more cat. Such a shame. We stopped using one vet that killed one of our chihuahua’s during a teeth cleaning. We also heard he had killed other chi’s not just ours. He bleed to death from a throat tear. Why they think it’s okay to shove a big oxygen tube they use on a big dog on cats and small dogs is stupid. WHY can’t they use a smaller tube for smaller animals?