A Bit of Downtime

It's a bit of a long story, so I'll copy and paste from my personal blog:

Cat Found

My cousin and his friend walking around some school at night when they found a little kitten mewing for them to pick him up. Normally a kitten his age should look like this:but he looks like this:

He's tiny enough to fit in the palm of my hand, he's so skinny I can feel the joints, ridges, and curves of all his skeletal bones and his kidneys can be easily felt through his back. He was so dirty that when I washed him, I had to use three buckets of water to get the brown out of his fur, and he was beginning to get a distended colon from the fecal buildup.

After getting him washed-up and picking off all the fleas, he looked a bit like this cat, but much skinnier:

We've been feeding him for the past two days and he's taking food well, but he has some sort of respiratory illness. He coughs, sneezes, and has a running nose most of the time. If he can get past that, then I'm sure he's gonna be fine. If he'll live, I'll update with some pictures of him when he looks more like a kitten rather than a Ren and Stimpy character =/

Alas, the irony..

I have never been allergic to ANYTHING in my life, and for one reason or another with this cat.. I have hives ALL OVER MY BODY!!! I can deal though..

As for the cat.. he's not gaining much weight and he might be getting sicker.. I really hope he lives, he's too sweet to die..

Rest in Peace, Oreo

Oreo the kitten was put to sleep yesterday. I don't think I've ever cried so hard and so long in my life, and I never knew I could get so attached to someone so quickly. I had fed, held, and slept next to the kitten for the full four days I took care of him, and it had gotten to the point where he would follow me around everywhere I went and would cry for me when I was gone. The first two days he would eat food constantly, but each day after he'd eat less and less until yesterday when I couldn't even feed him with a bottle without him choking.

He slept the whole night curled between my chin, neck, and shoulder, and woke me and Mauro up in the morning crying. Oreo kept mewing and crying. His little body had already wasted away to nothing but bones; his muscles weren't even strong enough to hold his head up.

Me and Mauro grabbed the cat and jumped in the car to find a medical supply store to buy a feeding tube, our last chance to save him. We drove to five different pharmacies, and the best thing we could find was eye droppers. As a last resort, we stopped by an animal shelter to ask if we could buy a feeding tube from them. By this time Oreo was still mewing and crying, but he wasn't even conscious enough to realize who I was or where he was at. I guess we had reached the point of no return. The shelter [nor any of the vet offices we visited] would allow us to buy a feeding tube, and the kitten was suffering immensely.


The lady at the desk was very nice about everything, but said we couldn't keep the body because a found cat is technically city property [meaning the city doesn't want to lose the $5 they'll be paid by pet food companies to use the body in pet food]. We could have filed a claim saying the cat was ours, but we'd have negligence charges on us for the poor state of the cat.

The lady told us Oreo would be put to sleep within two hours, we said our goodbyes, and left.

I felt so guilty for letting the poor thing die. He had trusted me with his life, begged me to make him better, and I had sent him to death. Nothing hurts more than to have something look you in the eyes and cry for your help when you can't do a damned thing.

Mauro drove me to the beach and took me to eat after. Neither of us could bring ourselves to eat much and we mostly just sat there. Then, a bit more than an hour after we had left the shelter, we were just sitting in the restaurant and I could distinctly smell Oreo [I could only smell him when he slept with me; it was a bit of a spoiled milk smell, but it was very unique and specific] for a few seconds, then it was gone. Mauro suddenly wanted to leave. I asked him if he smelled something a minute earlier, and he said it was the cat.

I don't know quite what had happened, but I have had many occurences in which it had seemed I had been contacted by a dead pet. I might be inclined to think I was just imagining things, but Mauro had sensed it too, so I don't know.. One way or another, I felt much happier afterwards..

I'm really gonna miss the little guy..

Turns out the hives were an airborne form of Cat Scratch Fever; it's nothing serious, but it itches like crazy! Anyways, that was my vacation story =/