Ten times out of 10, I'm going to say a professional. The quality and safety you'll get can only be achieved when you go to a professional groomer. When you bring them in, it's also a great opportunity for someone to look your dog over and make sure they're as healthy as they can be. You're going to get the best possible results.

With extractions, we actually remove a tooth. From our own dental health experiences, we all know that our teeth can hurt when they're damaged or extracted. So we want to make sure that your pet's pain is very well managed. Little Fritz here will have a dental procedure with us this afternoon. He's already had some narcotic medication, so he's feeling very good. If we do extractions, we'll do local nerve blocks on him, which is almost like Novocaine for you and I, so that when he wakes up, he'll be nice and numb. We're also going to use some anti-inflammatories, which we'll send home with Fritz if he needs any extractions. Pain management is very important here at Blue Oasis, and we take it very seriously.

A cat dental appointment can take anywhere from one hour to up to three hours. It depends on what we find. We sometimes have no idea what we're going to get into when we go into the mouth for cleaning. That's why we want to do a full assessment and do x-rays, and when we uncover problems, we want to have time to deal with those problems. So a dental cleaning just takes as long as it takes.

Intubation is where we put a little tube down a pet's throat, specifically their airway so that we can protect their lungs. We want to deliver anesthesia straight into their lungs and ensure that all the fluids we use for cleaning are not going into their lungs. So intubation is necessary for this.

Yes, radiographs are incredibly important. We want to see what's under the gum line, and I cannot see under there without an x-ray. Full mouth dental x-rays are part of every cat's dental cleaning appointment.

General anesthesia is very scary for us, but we do it very routinely. We know that monitoring is part of the safety of general anesthesia. The doctor that's overseeing your cat while it's here for dental care will be overseeing anesthesia along with a trained pet nurse and a wonderful electronic monitor. So there are about three different ways we're monitoring your pet under anesthesia.

When we do teeth cleaning, we use a lot of water and a dental x-ray unit, so we need your pet to be very still during its cleaning so that we can do a thorough assessment. So that means general anesthesia is needed.

Yes, you can. You can let us know if your cat is apprehensive and scared when it comes into the pet hospital. We can prescribe your pet some calming medications so that when they come in for their dental appointment, they're already premedicated, which helps us, them, and you feel more comfortable when they come in for a general anesthesia appointment.