While in our facility, if your pet suffers respiratory arrest (stops breathing) or cardiac arrest (the heart stops), we need to know your wishes concerning treatment. If either respiratory arrest or cardiac arrest occurs, your pet will die unless immediate resuscitation attempts are started.

• DNR means “Do Not Resuscitate.” This means that if a pet stops breathing or his/her heart stops, no effort will be made to attempt to revive the pet, and the pet will die.
• CPR means “Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation” and is the treatment (resuscitation) of a pet who has stopped breathing or whose heart has stopped beating. Resuscitation of a pet who has stopped breathing but still has a heartbeat is more likely to succeed than resuscitation of a pet with no heartbeat.

There are two options where this is concerned:

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​- Basic live-saving measures which include manual CPR and the administration of drugs
– Advanced Life-Saving measures which means we will exhaust all life-saving options within our power.

Animals that have been successfully resuscitated are extremely critical and unstable. The likelihood of re-arrest is high and usually occurs within 4 hours of the initial arrest. If resuscitation is successful, there is only about a 20% chance that a pet will stay alive for the first 4 hours after resuscitation. The percentage of long-term survival is even lower and may be as low as 1%, depending upon what caused the arrest. Brain damage is common due to a temporary lack of oxygen to the brain, which can result in blindness and/or impaired mental function, leaving a pet with physical and/or mental disabilities. This impairment may last for days, weeks, or years. Even in human medicine, statistics show that less than 10% of patients who are successfully resuscitated will leave the hospital without some degree of brain damage (contrary to what the television shows lead us to believe).

Management of a pet after successful initial resuscitation requires vigilant monitoring for 24 to 48 hours. This care is costly, and the outcome is uncertain because a pet will still have the underlying serious problem that led to the arrest; that disease or injury must also be treated as we attempt to stabilize the pet.