baby kitty and a friend in her new home. baby kitty is the smooshy white marshmallow kitty. you know you want to squeeze her :-)
baby kitty is the last of my original fur babies...the babies i had before i met josh. my little fur family included ippy-good-dog, frank, the cat, tabone, and babyface tabone. these little bundles of fur were my ever-present companions for many years before i met josh. fortunately, he's an animal lover and took me and all my fur babies as a package. we later added copper-bad-but-now-good dog and sookie-cookie-the-good-bad-dog to our brood along the way.
ippy passed away almost two years ago. franky passed away last august. just days after franky passed away, some dear friends lost their baby, and our hearts were concentrated on them, their grief, and our grief. i have not processed franky's death except to understand that he had a long, good life with us, and it was time for him to go.
several months ago, baby kitty started becoming ill. or, rather, more ill. she's always been a puker. she's puked since the day i got her. she walks around in a veritable cloud of her own fur, AND she's a compulsive bather, so i always assumed the puking was just hair balls. then it changed. then she started losing weight. then we got the news we had the opportunity to come to hong kong. we knew we had to do something, but we didn't know what that would be. we started with a trip to the vet. the diagnosis was that baby kitty either had a food allergy or lymphoma. i rolled my eyes at this, and when they sent me home with a bag of duck and sweet pea cat food, i rolled my eyes some more. after 5 days on the new food, baby kitty was a new kitty...no puking, lots of energy, and even some playfulness. i called the vet ecstatic to let her know that she was right and baby kitty was doing SOOO much better. that lasted 2 weeks, and then the puking started again. worse. she lost more weight. we talked and talked and talked. baby kitty will be 13 in may. we made the decision to have her put down, but i didn't feel good about it.
i waited until the last possible minute to take baby kitty in to the vet...literally, 5 p.m. the day before we departed texas. when i walked in, i told the tech on duty that though i was there for a euthanasia, i wanted to know if there was anyone on the staff who would adopt baby kitty...that i would pay for her therapies (a further appt. mostly confirmed lymphoma and the proposed treatment was steroid therapy). no one on staff was able to take her, but lo and behold, there was a woman there with a cat who was being seen for diabetes, and she just happens to run a cat shelter. she adopted baby kitty on the spot.
i get emails about how baby kitty is doing, and she's doing well. she has responded very well to the steroid therapy (she has stopped puking), and she has adopted a young man named johnathan. she's also made friends with two other old-lady cats in the shelter. the woman who runs the shelter has a goal to keep baby kitty healthy enough to come back to us when we return to texas. i am just glad that she is in good, loving hands. i miss her desperately, and would love to scratch and hold and love on her again, but it's enough to know she is well cared for and loved.
