Clinton Parkway

Intravenous Fluids

Intravenous Fluids in Pets

For older pets undergoing anesthesia, we recommend intravenous fluids during the procedure. An IV catheter delivering fluids to your pet helps maintain blood pressure and assists the body in processing anesthetic medicines, thus, resulting in a quicker recovery time. The IV catheter allows rapid administration of drugs should an emergency situation develop.

This pump is a sophisticated machine that allows us to give precise amounts of fluids over many hours. Programmable digital IV pumps provide very precise measurement of administration rates for fluids given during anesthetic procedures. This is especially important for small pets.

The first step in catheter placement is proper preparation of the leg. After the hair is clipped it is cleansed with the same disinfectant that is used to prepare pets for surgery. If the leg is not prepped properly an infection can be introduced into the venous system.

This is the cephalic vein coursing from the foot on the right to the elbow on the left (the arrows mark the vein and direction of blood flow). It is bulging (this one is bulging much more than usual, which is why we picked it for this picture) because one of our assistants is gently occluding the flow of blood by holding the vein at the elbow.

A special Teflon coated catheter is precisely inserted into the vein and threaded all the way in. We use different sized catheters depending on the size of the vein, this one is an 18 gauge. As you can imagine, this takes significant skill (not all veins are this large).

After we are sure of proper placement we carefully wrap the catheter to the leg with several layers of tape.