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Robin is an emergency veterinarian in a secondary care hospital and lives in Glasgow. Together with him, we delve deeper into his profession as a veterinarian and what cats need for the best quality of life. Special conditions, diseases, and accidents? We discuss it all with you.
I am Robin, 28 years old and living in Glasgow, Scotland. I am an emergency veterinarian in a secondary care hospital.
At the moment I work for Vets Now Glasgow, a secondary care hospital that simultaneously receives patients from surrounding clinics for emergency and out-of-hours care. For this reason, I mainly work at night.
I started here in July 2022 as an "intern", which is a graduated veterinarian who wants to gain more knowledge and experience in an environment with specialists in certain areas of veterinary medicine, and after my internship I stayed on as an emergency doctor.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, my work schedule and living environment are not suitable for having a pet. Personally, I feel that I cannot provide the necessary care and love that a pet needs at this moment, which I find very unfortunate. This always motivates me a lot to visit my parents and their pets, two wonderful Bernese Mountain Dogs.
I would like to have a cat at home in the future when I can provide enough for him/her.
Veterinary medicine was actually never my first choice, contrary to what most veterinarians say.
That doesn't mean I don't have a connection with animals, quite the opposite. At my parents' house, we always had pets, and from a young age, I learned to take care of them and built a special connection with them.
But for work, I wanted to have a profession where I could make people happy and help them in difficult situations. Through a friend, I then ended up in veterinary medicine in Antwerp, and after a few years, I noticed that there is so much to achieve within veterinary medicine, both for the animal itself and for the connection between the owner and the animal. This gave me so much energy and motivation to finish my studies that I got through the tough years and now have found a really great job in Glasgow.
It is very important that animals, not just cats, can perform their normal behaviors.
For chickens, for example, it is very important that they can take dust baths. If animals are no longer able to perform this behavior, they will show other behaviors as a replacement, which is called a stereotypy, and sometimes these are not good for the animal.
Sharpening and filing their nails is normal behavior for cats. When a cat goes outside, they will use trees for this. Nowadays, cats stay indoors much more often, or live in an apartment without the possibility to go outside. A scratching post is a good substitute for cats to perform their normal behavior.
Every cat is different and has different things they like. I also think it is very important to tailor certain things to your cat. As long as the basic needs such as food, water, and shelter are met and the cat can express its natural behavior, they should have a good life.
Unfortunately, we often see cats, especially males, with urine and urination problems. Sometimes it can happen that cats get a bladder infection and this causes an obstruction of the urinary tract. At that moment, it is no longer possible for the cat to urinate, which can lead to serious problems, and even cardiac arrest.
We often hear a story from the owner that the cat behaves strangely, often goes to the litter box but produces nothing there, or that it seems like the cat is constipated. In some situations, we even see that the cat vomits and is painful in its abdomen. We want to see these patients as soon as possible to relieve the blockage.
There are various causes for these bladder infections. Most people immediately think of a bacterial infection, but this is the case in only about 2% of these cases.
Other causes are crystals or bladder stones, but in most cases we see that there is no medical cause for this inflammation. Several studies have shown that there is a connection between stress in cats and these bladder infections, and I often hear stories of other animals in the house, moves or renovations, or other stressful situations with these cats.
I therefore advise owners to reduce all forms of stress as much as possible after the treatment, to prevent relapses as much as possible.
