My kitty, Katya, is at the vet’s today, getting her teeth cleaned. Her gums have been inflamed, and the inflammation hasn’t gone away with two courses of antibiotics. I’m hoping this will help.
As cat people (and probably dog people- do they do this for dogs, too?) know, they have to give her a general anesthetic to clean her teeth. I’ve heard all kinds of stories about cats dying or not being right after the anesthesia. I know she’ll probably be OK, but I’m worried Please share your story of your cat getting its teeth cleaned and being all right afterward, to cheer me up a bit.
Also, has anyone else had a cat this young (she’ll be 18 months October 18) that had gum problems? The kitties eat dry food (except for occasional canned food as a treat) and my other kitty, Luna, doesn’t seem to have any dental problems.
I haven’t had to have my cats (we have three cats; ages 3-16 years) teeth cleaned, but our dogs are a different story. One of our dogs has been going in every 6 months or so - his teeth are really bad. The other dog goes maybe once a year. Both dogs are older; one is 12 and the other near 13. I haven’t had any anesthesia problems and I’m sure your kitty will be fine.
I haven’t heard of such a young cat having problems like that; I feel bad for her.
That is quite young for gum problems. We’ve had many cats who needed professional teeth cleaning procedures, but ours were all more than ten years old.
Only once did we have a post-anesthesia problem. One of our kitties was weirded out by the anesthetic; for a while afterward, he acted hostile and paranoid, as if he might have been hallucinating. This subsided, and he was just fine in a few days.
We’ve had lots of cats and none had gum disease. I have a friend whose cat died from the anesthesia. Just so’s you know, it happens more often than you might think.
My kitty went in for a cleaning, and ended up having a lot of teeth pulled because of an infection in the gums. He came through without any problems, but i did feel really bad for him. He’s recovered quickly and started begging for his crunchy food before he was supposed to have it.
There’s a blood test they can do to screen out potential anaesthesia issues. I’m sure Katya will be fine !
Our cats get their teeth cleaned at their yearly checkup a the vets. He never uses any anaesthetic.
We once had some dental work done on one cat for which anaesthetic was required, but she was a couple of yeats old by then. She came through fine.
My cat used to get his teeth cleaned. Haven’t done it to him in 12 yeasrs but considering it lately. He’s always had bad breath (bad cat breath makes bad dog breath smell like roses btw) and we refer to him as out komodo kitty. I truly fear getting bitten by him. Mercifully he’s old enough I’m not sure he could break skin.
AFAIK, that test is considered very reliable. it’s not a guarantee, but i would be really surprised if there was a problem. When you get Katya back, give her a scritch from me.
I’ve had a few who have had teeth cleaning under anesthesia, and extractions. I too am always worried but everything always goes fine.
Coincidentally, I have a cat “Kahtia” who at 18 months started having teeth and gum problems. Sometimes it’s genetic or caused by poor nutrition as a kitten, which Kahtia definitely was the victim of. (Feral kitten; nearly dead when I found her.) So it does happen sometimes to kits that young. The vet thinks most of her teeth will fall out within a few years, or they’ll become so damaged they’ll have to be pulled.
Don’t worry too much. She’ll probably be a lot happier afterwards too.
Our cats have had their teeth cleaned and have come through just fine. At most, they’re a little sleepy the day they come home and then they’re back to normal.
We give our cats some stuff that keeps their gums healthy–can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s a blue liquid that they get once per day. Your vet could probably tell you what it is. It’s easy to use–just one dab on each side of their mouths.
My Glenn has had problems with his teeth and has had three molars pulled on two separate occasions. I don’t think they did the pre-anesthesia blood screening the first time, but they definitely did the second as by then he was over ten years old. He had no problems the first time, and the second time the problems that he did have weren’t related in any way to the anesthesia, I think more because we had moved a few months before and the work was done by a different vet.
First they put a patch on him that contained some sort of pain medication that was extremely toxic if ingested, but which I was assured he would not be able to remove himself (yeah, right). He pulled it off the next day, leading to a search of the house and one of those Elizabethan collars over his head to keep him from licking himself. Poor kitty couldn’t get up and down the stairs in our townhouse though, so I went to Wal-Mart and bought him some infant t-shirts instead. He was really good about wearing them around the house, except when he went up to nap in the loft he would take his shirt off and leave it on the bottom stair. Watching this little black kitty stalk around the house in his undershirt, we took to calling him Brando.
The other problem was that he caught a cold and poor kitty was all sneezy for a week or so. About six months later my fiance and I broke up and I moved home where Glenn is back to his old vet. They said one reason why he has dental problems is that he’s part Siamese and has a long jaw, so bits of food tend to collect around his back teeth. Glenn is now 15 and we’ve had little luck in regulating his diabetes since he was diagnosed last year, but except for erratic glucose levels he’s perfectly healthy in every other way. He’s a great little guy though so he’s worth the trouble. On the bright side, the teeth he has left look pretty good still and we’re hoping to keep him around a while longer. While my other cats are also older and have their own issues, dental work hasn’t been one of them.
What kind of antibiotics did they give Katya? The Strange Vet gave Glenn liquid clindamycin, and each dropper full took three tries to get into him and left me flayed from head to toe, and the stuff still mostly ended up sprayed all over the bathroom walls. Once I sneaked it into tuna juice, but he didn’t fall for it the second time. Glenn says to give the ol’ girl a kiss on her fuzzy little head and a yummy treat when she feels up to it, that always makes him feel better.
My tabby, Phoebe, has had her teeth cleaned several times. The last time was 3 years ago. She was 17 then. She came through it with no problems, she had an abcess they had to clean out and they had to pull one of her teeth. She is now 20 years old, plus a few months. I probably won’t ever have to have her teeth cleaned again, as she only has 3 left.
She sends good, living-to-a-ripe-old-age- kitty vibes to your kitty.
My gray tabby had to have cleanings/extractions done several times over his life, he just had bad teeth. He was always sick for a few hours after general anesthesia but right as rain the next day. Now I’ve got an orange tabby and at his last checkup the vet discovered he’s got a neck lesion on a tooth. So he’s probably got an extraction in his future and he’s only five years old. Seems like I’ve always got at least one cat with dental problems.
Our kitty just has genetically bad teeth - they’ve always been nasty, and she has to have cleanings about once a year. The most recent one resulted in them pulling a few teeth. She’s always fine immediately afterwards.
Make sure they do a checkup beforehand with bloodwork to make sure that everything’s functioning normally.
I talked to the vet. She came through fine, though they did have to pull two of her teeth (the top teeth right behind the fangs on both sides). I will be picking her up in a couple of hours.
Interesting! I don’t know anything about Katya’s history before she came to the no-kill shelter where I got her. She came in 8/24/04, when our vet thinks she was about 4 months old. The shelter thought she was about a month younger, but our vet said she was older as soon as she looked at her teeth.
I hope the rest of her teeth will be OK.
Is your Kahtia’s full name Ekaterina? That’s Katya’s full name, but I only call her that when she’s really in trouble. Katya’s a Russian Blue mix (or at least looks an awful lot like a Russian Blue), so I figured I should give her a Russian name.
Thanks to everyone for the good wishes, and I will pet Katya for you when she’s home and in a reasonable mood (I suspect she’s just going to want to hide when I first get her home).
Any of you who’ve had cats that have had teeth pulled: did you feed them a special diet afterwards? I’m just going by what happened when I had my wisdom teeth removed- I remember I had to eat soft foods for a few days after that.
I should add to this: of course I’m going to ask the vet, and do what she says. I just want to get an idea what experiences others have had with this situation.
Glenn’s always gone right back to his normal dry food diet, but then again he doesn’t really like canned. His front teeth are fine, but he picks his food up with his tongue, and that doesn’t work as well for canned. He just licks it until he gets annoyed, then he sulks. Riverbed recently lost one of her fangs, but she doesn’t seem to have any trouble eating her kibble either. If she was still feral and had to catch little critters for dinner it’d probably be more of a problem. Then again, I really don’t think anything would stop her from eating! She’s a little piglet. Allessandro, knock on wood, has no dental problems so far, he just needs special food because of a tendency to get UTI’s.
The vet’s probably the best judge as to how tender Katya’s mouth feels, and if she’s used to canned food as a treat, she might like some anyway just to welcome her home after her ordeal.
I liked your story about how she got her name, BTW. I did sort of the same thing with my horse. He’s Arabian, from Russian-Polish stock, and I named him Sebastian after the son of a Polish woman I used to work with because I loved how she pronounced it.
When Pixel had his teeth pulled, the vet said canned food only for 10 days, then it would be OK to feed him kibble again (which up until that point had been his only food)
He went back to the kibble as soon as it was out with no problems. Actually he started to beg for it a couple of days early, and I caved on day 9. I gradually decreased his canned food. I had been feeding him 4 small meals a day. (I hate the smell of canned cat food.) which was fine, until i stopped the last one. Then he got all pathetic on me. Now, he gets a half of a little can of “stinky mushies” for breakfast.
Kahtia’s full first name is just Kahtia, but she has a last name too - Kahtia Petrovna. (Petrovna is not my last name; it’s just hers.) She’s Russian-Lebanese. Don’t ask me how I know; I just do. I have another cat (a boy) who is Cuban.
Please share your story of your cat getting its teeth cleaned and being all right afterward, to cheer me up a bit.
