Confessions of a Converted Cat Lady: Flannery

I had never thought of myself as a cat person. We'd had five dogs and no cats as pets in almost forty years of marriage. I had tested allergic to them and had some fairly severe allergic reactions when I'd spent much time in homes where cats resided.

 I've never had anything against them though and never understood why some people seem to hate them. What's to hate? I've always thought they were fascinating creatures and from time to time had thought about being allergy tested again to see if it might be reasonable to try having one as a pet. I guess you could say it was on my bucket list.

But cats were the farthest thing from my mind when I was driving home from work early one December evening last year. I called Rick on my way home to tell him that I'd like to go out for Mexican food. He said that was fine and that he'd meet me at the house but that he just wanted to warn me that there was

"a badly neglected cat in the garage."

"WHAT?!"

He said that he'd explain when he got home, but just wanted to give me a heads up.

I arrived home to the usual noisy exuberant greeting from our two dogs and slipped into the garage where a wretched looking gray creature with yellow eyes, a pushed in face, and a mass of horribly matted fur came meowing out at me from among the clutter in the garage. I looked, wondered what in the world we would do with  it, and went back into the house. When Rick came home, I remember saying two things,

 "That is NOT a pretty cat" and "What makes you think that cat is so neglected?"

He looked at me seriously and asked,

"Did you touch it?" 

 "No," I said, "I'm allergic, remember? I'll get hives."

"Just touch it," he said, "under the fur."

So I went back out into the garage and touched the cat. As soon as I did, the cat started purring and I knew what Rick meant. Under that mass of hair I felt nothing but sharp bones under paper-thin skin.  Rick told me how the cat had approached him in the front yard and seemed hungry. He took some chicken from the fridge out to feed the cat, which ate out of  his hands so voraciously that it bit his finger and broke the skin. He explained that he felt he should confine the cat just since it had bit him and we should be sure it didn't have rabies. I knew right away that this was just an excuse by my tenderhearted husband who couldn't bear to turn his back on a suffering creature.

It was cold and messy in the garage, so before we went out to eat, Rick carried the cat past our excitedly barking dogs, and shut it in our large master bathroom. On our way home from the restaurant we stopped to buy a small supply of cat food, a small litter box and cat litter.

Soon after we brought her in.

The next day we called a couple of shelters, realized the cat would just be put down or turned away, and  took it to our own vet, who cut away enough matting to tell us that the cat was a female and that she was well over ten years old. She said  that she might be in kidney failure, but that if we wanted to try feeding and sheltering her we should know in a couple of weeks if she had a chance. The cat was a pure bred Blue Persian who had probably lived out on the street for at least a year to be so badly matted. Our vet said that she would have to sedate the little cat to remove all the matting and that she was too fragile for that. She weighed three pounds and most of that was matted hair.

'People are always dumping Persians," our vet said. "They buy them because they have the money and then when they get sick or just turn out to be too high maintenance, they dump them."

We took the little creature home and I named her Flannery. It took some doing to keep her away from the dogs, but for the next few days we fed her and fell in love with her. I decided that her eyes were topaz, not yellow, and that she was a pretty cat after all. I cut away at the matting without getting anywhere near the tiny skeleton underneath with my scissors.

 Finally I remembered that a friend from church was a cat groomer. She came to the house twice and spent hours carefully removing matting and finally bathing Flannery. During these grooming sessions I held Flannery much of the time and never had any allergic reaction. My friend said that she thought Flannery was going make it.

Tiny, spunky, and sweeter than you can tell by this picture

And we dared to hope so. She had some fight in her. When we finally tried to do a controlled introduction to the dogs, she stood up to their rushing and barking at her. She soon walked confidently between and past them. No matter how we tried to tempt her with drinking water from a dish, she preferred perching on the toilet seat and leaning down to lap water out of the toilet bowl. And how she loved to eat!

I realize this view is pretty shocking, but it's the only picture we have of her with Zoe.

She wasn't  intimidated by Penny either.

But she loved nothing more than to climb up into our laps and fall asleep purring. In fact she continued to react to a mere touch by purring, just as she had when I first touched her in the garage. It seemed that she came to us every bit as starved for love as for food.

We had longstanding plans to go to Dallas for a couple days to see two of our granddaughters dance in The Nutcracker and have an early Christmas celebration with our daughter's family. Our son stayed at the house to care for the pets. He had come to love Flannery too and we knew he would take good care of her.

When he returned from work as we were driving home Sunday night, he called to say that something was wrong with Flannery. From his description we knew it wasn't good. When we arrived home she was sleeping on a soft rug on the bathroom floor where she had often slept in the ten days since we brought her in. But she didn't wake up when we came in and her little body felt cooler than it should have.

We took her to an all night emergency vet clinic where a sympathetic and compassionate vet listened to our story and reassured us that we had done all we could to fill Flannery's last days with the love and care she lacked for so long. She said that Flannery must have been dying when we took her in and that she probably  rallied under our loving care and may have felt stressed when we left her, but that she would have died anyway.

We both shed many tears over that little cat. It was hard to believe we could have grown so attached to her in just ten days. I told my family and friends that she left a little kitty shaped hole in my heart. And I remembered  the emergency vet  saying,

 "You did the right thing by taking her in. Maybe Flannery paved the way into your lives for some other little cat who needs a home."

And so she had.

Our sweet daughter, Erika, made this little keepsake.