My now 8 month old black kitten is now hiding under and OSU Professor’s bed in her home in Eugene. Thankfully, Jessica understands that kitties get PTSD and that they hide and can hide for long periods of time. Chaunce has been adopted out twice before but both times, the people could not just LET HER BE! They had to “find” out where the kitty was hiding, pull kitty out of hiding and oh, well, let’s just sit her on our lap while we are at it. Sigh.  I think Jessica gets it- I guess time will tell. Chauncey slid right under her bed so I left my old nightshirt there for her to snuggle with while she gets used to her new “mom.’ Jessica was so nice, and so excited to have Chauncey in her life, even though right now, that life might be under the bed for awhile.

No word from the doctor yet about when Mike goes in. Will keep you apprised as I can.

Just got off the phone with one of the local shelters and they will take (without charging) 5 of the kittens in the bedroom from me! I am relieved and sad at this news because my kittens aren’t used to being in cages. They will spay and neuter the kittens boys are $20.00 and girls are $40.00 (this is the same place that the clinic I talked to previously uses for their spays/neuters but the prices went up for the New Years.) So now I am going to select 5 kittens to take over to them and pray they get great homes and won’t be in cages for very long.  I will have to pay for the spays/neuters but hopefully by the end of the month the money will be raised to do this. They will also call me if they are adopted out so I can bring in more.

Still don’t really have my legs under me. George has been a blessing helping out around here. Alaska came back yesterday to my surprise. Apparently, they didn’t listen to me about keeping her away from their over-active boxer puppy and it was to much for her. She started to poop and pee on down covers in the basement and the woman was not happy. Rather than work with me to solve the issue, she just caved and told me to come and get Alaska.

I don’t currently have the time to put into Alaska to get her re-adjusted to the kitties here, so I called the woman who adopted Jordan. She agreed to take Alaska and foster her which was a big relief. Jordan is apparently only a night kitty. She comes out right at dusk and hugs Barb’s side, sleeps with her, head bumps her loves on her- come morning, she vanishes into the kitchen cupboard where she has been staying since I dropped her off. Bless, Barb even though she couldn’t deal with Darby, she hasn’t given up on Jordan and she told me yesterday, she won’t! So now Alaska has a shot at a loving home provided she can accept the two dogs over there in good time.

I put an ad on CL asking for small cat carriers to be donated. The kittens need to be spayed and I don’t have enough carriers here to do the job. I attached photos of the kittens to back-up my claim of not having enough carriers and wouldn’t you know it? Everyone is calling and emailing me wanting the kittens! I’m glad, but they aren’t ready to go.

We’ve got 14 boys and 8 girls to neuter before they can hit the door. The one clinic will do these for $626.00 whereas my regular vet quoted me $1,500.00. But currently the kitty is tapped due to Penny’s treatment and Sully’s mouth procedure. I do still owe my vet a chunk of change as well. So I just need to start raising the money- while dealing with Mike and his upcoming hospital visit.  But I will NOT allow anyone to take a kitten from here that has not been spayed. I know from past experiences that people don’t follow through on those types of promises.

I had this one call yesterday that made me go Hmm here is the gist of it-

“Hello”

“Hello do you sell cats?”

“No, I rescue cats.”

“Oh I want to buy your calicos!”

“My calicos are not for sale, they will be up for adoption soon. I do not sell cats, I am not a breeder, I am a rescuer.”

“You might not have heard me. I WANT to buy your calicos!”

“I heard you. My calicos are not for sale. If you want to adopt them, then just give me an email address, I will send you an application form, you fill it out and send it back, and I will be in touch.”

Click……line went dead.

I know that some people buy cats and steal them as well for research. Sometimes the researchers only want certain types of cats,   So my red flags were up. These calicos are adorable and I have no qualms about them finding loving homes. But this woman was so insistent, it was unnerving to me. She has not called back.

London and Paris say “Thank you Mom for protecting us!”

At the start of 2015 there will be a major change here in our home. Mike went to the doctor’s yesterday for his routine vascular visit and he pulled in all the key doctors he could for this visit. He wanted to know if his leg was really worth saving?

The bottom line is, the leg is toast. It hasn’t been serving him well for over three years now. I stayed home (wasn’t well enough to travel) but I was grateful for the excuse because I wanted HIM to make the decision and not have someone blame me later for forcing him to decide. They ran a bunch of tests on him and some were severe. His leg is red-hot right now and so swollen. He is resting with it elevated and I just gave him some pain pills.

If the results of these tests come out favorable, then come next Tuesday, Mike will be in the hospital awaiting amputation. They will do a three day prep before the surgery where they will try and get the leg as healthy as possible before the procedure, because face it, with his weight, age diabetes and medical history he is a poor surgical risk. They said to his advantage his mental outlook is bright. He is not depressed about this decision that he had such a long time to make. I think he is a bit excited about becoming a bit “bionic.” Personally, I would have cut my leg off myself a long time ago had it been me in his shoes! But he had to come to the realization that this leg was sucking the very life out of him. I am planning a bon voyage party for the dang thing!

He is “only” supposed to be in the hospital for 6 days, but I know better. He just doesn;t heal- but we shall take this a day at a time. Last night, I wrote a difficult email to his four kids all grown-up and into their own lives. But I wanted to let them know what is coming down the pike for their father.

Please do not contribute snake oil solutions for this problem. We shared this at church and have been flooded with people telling us silver collidial water will cure diabetes, or the peanut butter diet will work. They did pray over us- but as I told them afterward, if God wanted to heal him, He had plenty of time to do so in the three plus years we have been praying for that very thing. For some reason this is happening and it is not up to us to question why it is happening. We just need to take it day-to-day and hope for a brighter tomorrow-

Happy Mew Year Everyone- stay healthy and remember to always hug those you love-

One of the older cats from the CL guy has from the get-go heavy drooling coming out of his mouth. When he growled at me, I saw his tongue was really strange-looking. Half of it white, half of it blood red. Then I had to go to the hospital and couldn’t get him in. He went in to the vet’s this morning.

Sully has apparently bitten a electrical cord in the past and it never was treated and so it was greatly infected. He has a huge burn on the side of his mouth inside his gum line and the infection was taking over his whole mouth! We gave him a pain shot, a shot of covenia and I have oral pain gel to give him twice a day.

He is now inside- the burn is months old and when I asked the vet why it didn’t resolve on its own, I was told that the mouth is such a moist hotbed of germs, he never stood a chance of recovering from the actual burn without vet help. Poor kitty. He is the living room, not real happy about being there but the vet said he is lucky to even be alive with the extent of the burn.  Guess I can’t go out of the year without some sort of cat trauma to deal with! 🙂

HI Guys,

It is unbelievably good to be back home and sitting upright again. I  have been in the hospital and they still don’t know what is wrong (the last test results won’t clear for four days) but let me just say it’s nice to be home. I fairly got animal mugged this morning when I walked through the door! The doctors told me had I messed around any longer, my heart could have stopped because of dehydration. It was a good thing I asked Mike to take me to Portland (that was a switch!) They did rule out a bunch of things- but it is some sort of gastrointestional bug that I picked up somewhere and quite frankly, I can’t wait for it to hitchhike the hell back to where it came from! They could only control the pain with morphine so I am not really sure of that last few days events. So I am taking a rest for a bit. I much rather would have gone to the tropics and sipped long island ice teas-but instead I was flat on my back worshipping the porcelain god. I’m not insured so this was an expense not needed- but it couldn’t be helped. I knew I was in trouble when I heard the kittens crying for food and I couldn’t even find my feet! Thankfully in my absence volunteers stepped up- Thank you George and Haley! And kittens and cats were fed- Darcie was adopted out! and the litterpans were taken care of in a timely fashion.. Thankfully, these two people know the standards to which I keep the care of my cats and forgave me for the mess I left behind. I have been fighting this bug for three weeks now. I just kept thinking it was the flu and it would “pass.” It didn’t.

I did find a clinic who will work with me on reasonable prices for getting the last group of rescued kittens fixed. They will charge me $17.00 for the boys and $35.00 for the girls! The one problem is, this year we have 17 girls and 7 boys. I only had 5 boys before and less girls, but the man who wanted to shoot his cats (and I took them) upset that balance. So it would be $595.00 for the girls and $119.00 for the boys. This will also include dewormings and vaccinations!  They seemed impressed with my work and are eager to help out.  If you feel led to help out financially, please do. I checked this clinic out thoroughly and it come up aces!

So my stomach is still queasy- I hope everyone had a wonderful, blessed and Merry Christmas and maybe by the time New Year’s rolls in- I will have some answers to who this nasty passenger is inside my body that took my electroylites so dangerously low-

God Bless-

Mary Anne

Looks are deceiving for this golden boy. Although he looks so friendly and loving, sadly, the opposite is true. He has a high aggression factor not only to other cats but to people as well. After he almost killed Penny last night when he got out of his cage, Mike and I talked about it and it was decided he would be better off away from whatever terrors chased him. I put him down about an hour ago. Not a good way to spend the day before Christmas, but I know in my mind it was the right thing to do. He shredded Penny’s leg almost to the bone and the only thing she was doing at the time, was lying on the rug below his cage. She just got in the way. She will spend Christmas at the ER Vet for observation- and Flannigan’s pain has also ended. He  now is flying free toward the heavens and God’s grace.

This is the kitty who attacked a tenant at the trailer park when she was coming out of her trailer in the morning with a fried egg sandwich in hand. He bit and scratched her to such an extent that she had to go to the ER. I thought maybe hunger drove him to act with such aggression and wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it’s been clear for at least a week now that he was  a ticking time bomb just ready to go off-

The two tomcats have settled down and now that they know their food arrives at the same time(s) every day, they are quite sweet. They have shed their feral suit of armor and they just want to be petted and loved on. They along with the two kittens are eating so many cans of food daily that my supply went down quickly. Tonight, I was opening up my last three cans of wet food and the doorbell rang. It was one of my volunteers and friend and she had a bag of canned kitty food for us! I was so relieved because the two kittens don’t really like the dry stuff much and one of the tomcats has major mouth issues so he can only eat wet food. The timing couldn’t have been more purrfect for the arrival of the 15 cans of food.

Flanigan the orange and white boy from the trailer park is proving to be quite a challenge. He won’t eat cat food- either wet or dry. The only thing this kitty eats is deli chicken which leads me to believe he must have been getting his dinner from the deli across the street from the trailer park. I have tried all sorts of different brands of food types of cat food- he wants nothing to do with any of it. It HAS to be chicken and if it isn’t he very LOUDLY tells me what he thinks about the situation.  I have him in the living room because my neighbor was really exasperated by him hollering all night. So I took him out of the deck enclosure and brought him inside, what a mistake. He is LOUD! LOL  Chicken will shut him up!

They are talking about snow by Christmas so we put the heater into the stall enclosure so the kitties: Lexi and Bradley will stay warm. The two toms have heated cat beds so they are set for the oncoming chilly nights.

God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world-

Here they are:

Everybody can breathe now. We have four of the five cats and they are safe! One tomcat did not want to be captured, so I left him with the man because they seem to have bonded. I left him with PLENTY of cat food (and human food too). I told him that when I go after the holidays to do the spays, I will get this big black boy neutered and bring him back. In the meantime, I told him, I would keep him supplied with enough dry food for the cat that he doesn’t have to worry about it. So we now have a beautiful muted tortie girl and a mackerel tabby boy (about three months old) and two long-haired black tomcats in our sanctuary. They were SO Bloody Hungry! I am only feeding them small amounts right now because I don’t want them sick.

Now to back-track- the deputy called me and told me to meet him at the location. I took George with me, he is here today helping out. I told him if I even saw a gun on location, I was going to get the hell out of dodge. and he agreed.

The man turned out to be quite nice- just really down on his luck. A big brute of a guy and you can tell his elevator doesn’t quite go clear to the top. He helped us gather up the cats and when I left the deputy sheriff had stayed behind and was talking to Jeff about all of this.

I am grateful this worked out for the cats. I am not grateful to have 4 more mouths to feed and vet and neuter- but it is what it is. I couldn’t leave them there to turn into ducks in a shooting gallery!

All cats are doing well. They have plowed through food and unless I am mistaken, the muted tortie girl (she is so gorgeous) is pregnant! I don’t think she is quite four months old- I’ll know for sure on Monday when I call to get them in to be seen.