Animal Anecdote

Lessons From Veterinary Gaslighting

What happened when a vet used my love for my cat against me

Kiki Wellington
Creatures
Published in
9 min readNov 16, 2020

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Photo by César Couto on Unsplash

Although I was concerned when my cat had to be hospitalized because of problems caused by her inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), I was confident she would be okay. After all, a few years earlier, she had an operation at that same clinic, and she got the best of care for a week from a veterinarian she loved.

Unfortunately, that care was not what she received this time around. Maybe it should have been a red flag when her dedicated vet wasn’t available to see patients anymore because his role at the clinic had changed. But why would it? People get promotions all the time and besides, the clinic had an excellent reputation in the community, so surely the other veterinarians would be just as good as the one I’d built a relationship with, right?

I could not have been more wrong.

In fact, the incident was so traumatic that, although it happened years ago, I cannot even hear the clinic’s name without somehow getting upset. The experience was bad for me and bad for my cat, but it did teach me some hard truths about veterinarians that I never expected to learn.

Veterinarians May Not Be as Compassionate as You Would…

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