As with humans, there is always a risk with anesthesia.  However, your veterinarian can minimize this risk by taking precautions, knowing any breed or familial history with anesthesia, and using high   quality anesthetics.   Preanesthetic bloodwork helps to assess the patient's liver and kidney function prior to surgery.  These organs process the anesthetic chemicals.  If the doctor finds that there is an issue with the kidneys, they may opt to use a protocol that involves drugs that are processed through the liver instead.    Anesthetic patients should be placed on intravenous fluids.  The fluids help to keep the blood pressure up throughout the procedure, and help to "flush out" the anesthetics afterward, often time offering a smoother and quicker recovery.  If a problem were to occur, there is already an easy way to inject emergency IV medications.   Monitoring throughout the anesthetic period as well as postoperatively is critical.  The patient's pulse and respiratory rate, body temperature, pulse oximetry (level of oxygenation in the blood), blood pressure and EKG should all be monitored.    It is invaluable to have a licensed veterinary technician dedicated to monitoring the patient while the surgeon works.  That technician should document the monitoring parameters.  That way, they may see a trend, ie blood pressure dropping, and can adjust depth of anesthesia or rate of IV fluid administration.  Without monitoring of this sort, you cannot adequately determine how stable a patient is.   The most critical part of anesthesia is actually in recovery.  It is critical for a technician or trained assistant to stay with that patient until they are fully recovered.   Even with all this monitoring,  if outdated anesthetic protocols are used, it may increase risk to the patient.  The newer drugs may be more expensive than those used 20 years ago, but when contemplating anesthesia for your pet, you DO NOT WANT TO LOOK FOR BARGAINS!!!   Puppies and senior pets do have slightly higher anesthetic risk, but these risks can be kept negligible with proper monitoring and protocols.    In your situation, I would keep track of any drugs that have been used on your dogs when problems have occurred.  Just when you say that this is the best anesthetic agent for most dogs, one dog will come along that may be overly sensitive to it.  I would be careful of using that drug in other dogs of the same family, given the drugs were used at correct dosage and with proper monitoring.

Barb Meining DVM