Future Forecast: Sunny but Unpredictable
This post is about a new force in my life.
On a recent Monday, I was having a really busy day. I was bopping from task-to-task on my to-do list, and I ate my dinner while I was on a video call. When my meeting got done, I rendezvoused in the bedroom with my spouse who was in the middle of watching a movie. He said he would stop it for us to start something new together, but I told him to just let it play as there was only like half an hour left which gave me time to reevaluate my life/priorities/to-do list before we transitioned into a new task.
As I was half-watching and trying to recall if the United Citizen Federation soldiers were just genociding the Arachnids through the colonization of the galaxy, I noticed my spouse’s cell phone was face up on the bed and lighting up. It’s on silent, and usually, it isn’t in that spot or face up. I couldn’t tell who was calling, but I remarked to my spouse, “I think your mom is calling you.” Before he answered, we realized it was actually our neighbor calling. After a brief conversation, I hear my partner say, “Ok, we’ll be right out.”
My spouse tells me that our neighbor is out in the alley with a cat that needs our help. I’m in “working on the house” clothes, so I just put on a mask and my shoes before we head out. Once in the alley, we immediately saw our neighbor, and near him is a white and black cat. I verify with our neighbor that this is not the same short-haired black and white cat that comes around all the time and almost definitely has an owner/home. As I’m looking at how this cat’s fur is longer and the spots are different, we confirm it is a new cat. None of us have ever seen this cat before, and we see a lot of cats rolling through our yards.
This new cat doesn’t immediately scamper off but gets a little wary when all of us get close at once. My spouse and I stand back aways while our neighbor gets the cat to come back to the food bowl. We discuss the visible limping and what looks like a wound behind one ear. It is almost immediately decided that I will go back to the house to grab a cat carrier to try to capture this creature. I also grab some gloves (a pair for all 3 of us) just in case. The guys are standing in different positions than where I left them, and everyone is closer to the cat. (I learned later that my spouse had tried to pick up the cat during this time, but the cat was “too squirmy.”)
As I bring the carrier closer, my partner grabs the cat and puts them inside. Immediately, the cat squeezes out, but my spouse snatches them up again. The cat is securely inside the carrier after a process that probably only lasted 30 seconds. It had probably been less than ten minutes since we originally came outside. We asked our neighbor if they wanted this cat, and he said no, he just wanted to ensure the cat got help. We said we were going to head to the emergency vet down the road. A vehicle comes down the alley with our other neighbors in it. After they park in their garage, they get out to talk to all of us. After small talking for a few minutes, and confirming this cat isn’t theirs, my partner and I say we’re gonna head out with the cat.
Luckily, I had separated our cats from each other into different rooms with the doors closed when I grabbed the carrier. We kept the new cat inside the carrier in our kitchen while my spouse takes a quick shower. I didn’t shower, but I did change my clothes for something a little less grimy to wear out in public. I also switched my mask for a new one that hasn’t had a bunch of sweat in it because we were having “record heat” that day on the Full Flower Moon. From my past experiences at this emergency vet clinic, I am preparing to be there for hours. It only takes a few minutes to get there as it is very close to our house.
There are a few vehicles in their parking lot and no one in their waiting room when we arrive. We get the cat taken back right away while we fill out some paperwork declaring that we are taking responsibility (especially financially) for this cat. During our intake questions, the workers at the front desk (who I both remember from previous visits) bring up both our previous cats and my sibling’s previous cat while asking if we have other pets at home. I said something about a rainbow bridge and commented that our cat Achilles actually happened while we were there. The front desk person says, “Oh yes, I see that in the notes!” They said they would update our file, so hopefully there won’t be a repeat of this interaction during our next visit.
The first report from the initial exam was that this cat is an intact male, ~2-5 years old, who is very sweet, with ear mites and shallow breathing, so they put him into the oxygen tent for a little bit. He was purring too loudly to hear his heart, and he did not have a microchip. They did a quick ultrasound and didn’t see any fluid buildup inside, but they also didn’t notice a limp. A rectal temperature said he had a slight fever of 103.7, but when they redid it in the ear it was down lower. They said it might’ve just been heat and stress. Also, they did not find any large wounds near his head or anywhere else, but his torso was COVERED in small “superficial” wounds. I also pulled a cat claw out of his back while we were there. His paws had what seemed to be hot pavement or tar stuck to the fur, and his pads were both pink and black with no way to tell if that is his natural markings or stained dark in spots. He also has a big scratch underneath one eye that will almost definitely leave a scar.
We went back to a room where we were reunited with the cat. I got off the chair and down onto the floor to be near the new guy. He almost immediately jumped up and sat in my chair leaving me alone on the hard ground. 😂 He did come back to the ground and ended up rolling over for some belly rubs even! (Found more wounds there too.) He also did some exploring in the window of the room, and he vacillated between napping and being vocal up at the window looking outside.
All the tests they did came back clear, but they did send us home with both flea/tick preventative and dewormer medications. We went through a similar protocol around nine months ago when we rescued Eddy from our yard, so we already knew the basement would be a good spot for this cat until we could get the all-clear from our vet that we could introduce him to the other cats. In our paperwork, it says to wait at least 1-2 weeks to ensure this new cat doesn’t have any respiratory infections.
Since we were at the emergency vet for a couple hours, it was already past my spouse’s bedtime when we got settled in at home. I volunteered to sleep in the basement the first night with the new guy in order to let my partner rest up for work the next morning. I thought one of us should stay with him for both his sake and ours.
Once in the basement, the cat gave the room a once-over, and he marked his territory right on the leg of this wooden bench that I use as a table for my cacti. It used to live outside on the deck, and I’m sure it smells like lots of other animals. It isn’t ideal that he peed there, but I actually took it as a good sign that he wanted to claim this space as his. (My basement still currently smells, but I have a deep cleaning day on the books where we will put the table back outside. It is very heavy!) The other thing he did almost immediately was saturate a catnip rainbow that was down there with some other cat toys.
I put up a post on PawBoost saying we found this cat, and I scrolled through hundreds and hundreds of Lost cats in the metropolitan area on PawBoost, Petfbi, Petco, and NextDoor just in case. I didn’t see any cats that even looked remotely similar to his markings. Along with the fact that he didn’t have a microchip and wasn’t neutered, I took the lack of possible people to reunite him with as a good indicator that this cat would be joining our household as a new member of our family. Even that same night I was already brainstorming names with my sibling.
Because it was the Full Flower Moon that day, I started thinking of names related to the moon or flowers. We couldn’t use Luna (or the like) as that is our neighbors’ cat’s name. (The very neighbor who called us.) My spouse suggested something to do with the heat of the day. Eddy arrived on a stormy day last August which influenced his name choice, so it did seem fitting that we would incorporate the weather of the event into this new one’s name as well.
We ruled out Icarus, Dante, Ra, Jinn, Purrslane, but we were still debating on S’mores when I casually suggested Sunny. As soon as I said it though, we both liked it. Not only does it reflect the conditions in which he was found, but it also highlights his disposition. I thought Eddy was the sweetest, most trusting cat I ever met, and Sunny is even more chill! He has not swiped with his claws or tried to bite us, not even once.
Sunny is constantly rolling onto his back to expose his belly. My spouse theorized that he probably tried to submit like that during a fight with another cat, and that’s how he ended up with so many scratches on his torso. He made up an entire backstory of how Sunny got run off from wherever he had been living and that’s why he ended up in our alley that day. It sounded pretty plausible since we had never seen him around before.
The next morning, we called our vet to see how quickly we could get into an appointment. Last time it took ten days before they could meet Eddy, so I expected a bit of a wait. To our surprise, they said they had an opening that afternoon. It was another abrupt shift in the plans of the day, and we got ready to take him there very quickly.
During that vet visit, they estimated his age to be 2.5 years old. They did not see any ear mites, and he did still have a slight temperature. They gave us antibiotics for a week to care for both the fever and all the wounds everywhere. Sunny got his rabies and distemper vaccines, and we set up an appointment for him to be neutered in a couple weeks. I checked the calendar to see what day his birthday would be with their estimate of two and a half years, and it turns out that it lands on my partner and my anniversary date! Sometimes it is hard not to believe in fate when the kismet of the situation lines up like that.
Sunny has successfully completed his rounds of dewormer and antibiotics now. We noticed that he is still limping or walking a bit off, and the plan is to get x-rays during his neuter appointment. He is still extremely happy, purring, and not really acting like he’s in pain. While he isn’t that active, he has been jumping up and down from hanging out in the cat tree. But, a lot of the time, he does pull away if you touch his back right haunch, so we think that may be the issue. It was starting to feel a little too “Best Case Scenario,” so I will reserve further judgment until we can determine the cause of it. We also got his fecal testing back, and he has coccidia which is a different intestinal parasite than the giardia that Eddy had.
The day after we rescued Sunny there was a Tornado Watch and then Warning where the sirens went off alerting us of a nearby tornado sighting. Because we usually take our cats into the room of the basement that Sunny was in, and we didn’t want them to commingle yet, our cats got a little adventure where we put them in their harnesses on leashes to let them explore the “creepy side” of our basement after we carried them through the room with Sunny. We were only down there for a little while, and on the way back upstairs I held Eddy while he and Sunny looked at each other. (Percy missed out because my partner took him upstairs so quickly.) They were completely across the room from each other with Eddy in my arms and Sunny in the cat tree. Neither Sunny nor Eddy seemed aggressive towards each other (no posturing or vocalizing); they seemed curious instead.
My spouse and I have fallen back into a schedule where we try to have someone down with Sunny every few hours, and my partner has taken to sleeping down there at night. Percy, Eddy, and I keep late hours upstairs, and they have been tolerating each other in closer proximity more often. When I come back to my bedroom, after being in the basement with Sunny for a movie’s length of time, I have been finding Percy and Eddy sleeping near each other on my side of the bed. Sometimes the upstairs cats hang out on the landing near the basement door, and they definitely know there is another cat in their home. Percy sometimes huffs his displeasure near the gap in the bottom of the door, but Eddy doesn’t seem to be bothered. They both are trying to constantly smell our clothes when we smell like Sunny, but we are still changing outfits between the two spaces as the vets recommended.
I’ve spent hours gently teasing out burrs from deep inside Sunny’s fluffy tail and almost all of the weird tar/pavement chunks have also been worked out manually from between his paws. (Absolutely NO scissors said the vet tech who I’m sure constantly sees the damage done from people with good intentions.) His paw pads are still dark and dry in a lot of spots, so we will have to wait and see if that dissipates ever. A LOT of scabs have fallen off of him in the past ten days including a very long one off the top of his head. He seems to be healing, and his fur is looking and feeling better every day that progresses.
Just like when the Cat Distribution System gave us Eddy when I said I would not have chosen a young, orange cat, I also would never have chosen a medium/long-haired, white cat. (I’m way too goth/alt/punk in my wardrobe to willfully choose white fur! #BlackHoodieClub) Maybe the universe keeps handing me what I think I don’t want to prove me wrong and keep me humble? It was also just a couple of days before we met Sunny when I offhandedly mentioned to my partner that Eddy will probably need a friend once Percy is gone, so be careful what you speak into existence! 😅 All I know is that I already love Sunny, and I look forward to getting through this transitional time when he is a full-fledged member of our home.
~The Overstimulated
TL;DR:
As I was sitting down to re-prioritize all the tasks on my overflowing plate, the universe told me that I shouldn’t bother with any of it. Instead, I needed a new cat to focus on to help me slow down and remind me what is really important in this life.
The Cat Distribution System Strikes Again: Part 1
CW: discussion of cat death and cat health problems
The Cat Distribution System Strikes Again: Part 2
CW: discussion of cat death and cat health problems