Took cat aged 1 to vets for neutering and he comes back with an eye injury

[middleeasternpromise]

Apparently these things can happen, although not in their huge detailed terms and conditions - and now I need to pay a further £80 for eye drops. Is it unreasonable to expect some sharing of costs here?

This!
In my 16+ years of vet nursing, I can count on less than 1 hand , the amount of eye injuries from anaesthesia that I have encountered!

All practices i have worked in, have always used eye lubricant for GAs (and sedations). The clinic where I currently work have a strict 20mins lube application time (and this is regularly audited and corrected if needs be).

I would also email the practice manager and lead vet. They might need to adjust their protocols if this is a regular occurrence for their patients 😮

Thank you I will request all of this. Hopefully it will lead to some improvements for other animals

Yes agree, if it was caused by lack of eye lubricant they need to change how they are doing things and that is down to poor care.
Re cost of eye drops this is not the vets fault but the cascade system where they have to legally prescribe specifically animal meds rather than the human equivelant so not their fault on cost of meds but do check on what caused an eye injury - if due to nurse forgetting lubricant etc or if happened due to the timings of premed/analgesics etc meant cat woke up in a panic, also not great, but equally cats can have unexpected reactions/recoveries (but also should be being monitored on recovery obviously).

@MaloneMeadow I would've thought it would be the anaesthetist that's meant to tell me about it, not for me to ask. I've never heard this before at all from any surgeries me or cats had. It should be explained more prominently I think.

This. Also I’d be wanting to know more about recovery. Did he wake up badly? I.e stumble around? Did he have a cone on that he was trying to get off? Were his eyes lubed during the op? It is unfortunately a risk of anaesthetics

It’s certainly been on the consent form for all of my surgeries and most likely if you dig deep enough you will find it in the documentation. If they personally talked over every single possible risk they’d be there all day. Even had blindness listed as a risk for spinal surgery once!

@MaloneMeadow thank you, you are right they can't list everything. It felt like for me they didn't really have a choice but to operate as it was a massive hip fracture, so I was just in shock and on morphine and the whole thing was a blur it's not like I could've refused it! It just seems like the last thing you'd think of that it could affect the eyes. Well now I know which is good. I'm almost certain vet didn't mention anything either but I must have signed a form for the cats so it was prob in small print.

His form was supplied and it looks like he received lubricant - I have raised it with the practice management and they said they would like to resolve it. I am not sure I feel comfortable using them further regardless of what they say now but I do want to ensure they handle future similar situations with a more sensitivity.