Tom and I were walking home one evening from the bus stop, when we heard a cat call out to us. Not unusual around here, but as I bent down to give this one a bit of a fuss, I realised how painfully thin and bony she was. Disturbed by this, I scooped her up and brought her to our flat down the road - she had no collar and we later learned no chip, so we don't know about her owner. I wanted to at least give her some food, but in the light we saw how messy she was: all skin and bones, dirty, limp.
So the next two days we kept her warm, gave her plenty of attention, offered her food, wiped her down as best as I could, cleaned her up when she got messy, just made her as comfortable as we could. The day after we found her we took her to a vet. He guessed she was very old, over 16 years, and advised me to just nurse her and see how she went.
Sadly that day she just got weaker and weaker, and the next morning she had lost consciousness and was shutting down. I held her in my lap as her body spasammed until her heart stopped. We took her back to the vet for cremation and returned home to disinfect the flat and wash the sofa cushions. Obviously we were pretty devastated, but it was all inevitable and at least we kept her warm and gave her some love in her final hours.
And thus, Tom, our host/ landlady and her brother all started a mission for us to obtain a kitten...
For those who don't know, we moved to this new flat about 7 weeks ago across town, and it's lovely but a bit of a downsize.
Anyway, some searching later and a few phone calls later, we got in touch with a charity called HEART who had a young cat in Bristol who needed a home. She'd been abandoned at 3 weeks old with her mother, and needed a lot of love.
Well, we've had her since Sunday and she's already developed into a proper kitten from a scared shadow hiding in the shelving unit. And we're named her Oreo (Tom didn't like Guinness):
She's still a bit nervous, but has decided she loves us completely and utterly, to the extent that we now cannot yet go to bed without her feeling lonely; on Night #1 we got woken up at 4am by her crying. She had food, water, the above box, litter tray... what the hell did she want? Company apparently. And also to show me she figured out how to climb into the washing machine.
So now we've had plenty of playing, snuggling, stroking, (and a couple of piddles by the TV, grrr) and I think we're on the way to having a healthy, happy animal who has been given a second chance.
Where is she now? Uh, still in the shelving unit. But I think she's finally fallen asleep after bloody keeping us up all night exploring the bedroom. At least someone is getting some sleep.
