Momservation: “Can we keep it?” is the last question a mother ever wants to hear.
☺ ☺ ☺
So how’s your week going?
I get to put down a perfectly sweet, lovable kitty tomorrow. Thanks for asking.
It’s a heartbreaker, but that’s what we get for trying to do the right thing by saving an abandoned kitty struggling to live on the banks of a creek.
When it let my daughter easily scoop her up and carry her to the noisy soccer game going on at Cherry Island, I suspected this kitty wasn’t just a feral cat.
When the emaciated, less than a year old female kitty let me pull a fox tail out of its oozing eye, I knew it was grateful for help.
When Hubby, who adamantly said at the beginning of the game, “Tell her to put that thing back, we’re not bringing home a stray cat!” saw just how pathetic the poor kitty looked and how happy it had been in my daughter’s arms for over an hour, he agreed to let her come home. The stipulation being we’d find her another home.
I called every cat rescue group in Sacramento. No one would take her, being already overloaded. I even called groups in the Bay Area, willing to drive an hour to save her.
In the meantime we nursed her back to health with food and love, trying not to name the extremely affectionate kitty who just wants to be held, so we wouldn’t get too attached.
I emailed and called everyone I could think of, trying to put the hard sell on my cat lover friends. I posted her on Facebook. Nobody could take her. Everyone kept joking I should just keep her, being the cat lover.
But I am allergic, already suffering through eight years of itchy eyes, scratchy throat and eternal stuffed nose with my previous cat I just couldn’t give up.
Plus, Miss Kitty (who we ended up naming after we kept calling her Kitty), doesn’t like our dog, Darby the yellow Lab, – going into fight mode, most likely a side effect of having to defend herself at the creek.
Finally, I convinced a wonderfully compassionate lady at Happy Tails Cat Sanctuary, Jodie, to make an exception so we wouldn’t have to surrender Miss Kitty to the pound where she would most likely be destroyed due to overcrowding.
All I had to do was get her tested for Feline Leukemia and if she was negative, they would try to find a foster home for Miss Kitty.
She tested positive.
I couldn’t find a home for a healthy kitty, how was I going to find one for a diseased kitty?
But I had to try for this beautiful kitty, a purring ball of affection, that lights up every time a person walks into the room to see her, so happy to have a safe sanctuary.
A cat with Feline Leukemia can still live a long and healthy life as long as it is an indoor cat and only cat. The disease is not transferable to other animals or humans.
I posted on Craig’s List for a special needs kitty. I posted flyers at PetSmart, vets and grocery stores hoping for that one right person to save her.
No one has called.
I called the SPCA, hoping there could be a chance for a special needs adoption. But they will euthanize her because of her disease.
We just can’t keep Miss Kitty as much as we love her. We already have a special needs dog ($3,000 in surgeries so far) who’s terrified of the five pound kitty that wants to scratch her face off. Turns out my daughter, whose room Miss Kitty has been staying in, is allergic too.
So we feel we’ve done everything we could do to help save Miss Kitty’s life, trying to find comfort in knowing she will die peacefully rather than suffering a slow death on the creek banks.
Tomorrow is the day we settled on so it doesn’t get harder the more we all become attached.
If this is a good deed, I almost wish we had never found her.