the
website of Melissa Katherine Michael
Daisy the Token Dog
2003
I've rescued four distinct batches of kittens now, since I bought my house in January of 1999.
The most recent was actually two years ago (2003?) when I got up early one morning to discover a batch of kittens sleeping in a flower bed. They appeared to be 6 months old or older and I had 9 or more cats inside, so it just wasn't an option to tame them. Last year I trapped four females and got them spayed. Over the course of those two years, I've managed to gain the trust of the muted calico twins: Sinister and Dexter - named for which ear was clipped.
Sinister lets me pick her up and does fine with me inside as long as I'm holding her. If I stop petting her, she hops down and heads for the door.
Dexter lets me pet her through the door.
Hermione will not let me touch her and she doesn't show up everyday like the twins do.
Tom gets his own page. He may be their brother.
Silver might even be their mother because after she was spayed she developed mastitis, which means she was nursing. So either she's their mother, or there was another batch of kittens that I never found. During the course of treating Silver with antibiotics twice a day, she tamed to me. She's a queen and has issues with sharing food and the potty. She would probably do well in a single cat household. She hops on the bed and makes biscuits right next to my head usually at 5 am. She purrs loudly and bumps her head against my face.
2002
The summer before Silver's gang, two nursing queens ( Princess and Priscilla) showed up at my door, very hungry. They eventually literally led me to their kittens.
Princess' story is tragically short but has a good ending! I think she died in less than a week after I caught her and her kittens and installed them in the guest room. She was in crisis one morning and I rushed her to the ER where she died. I allowed the vet to perform an autopsy. Fluid in the abdomen, most likely caused by Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP). Oh joy! She also tested positive for Feline Leukemia.
Witch
So I tested her 6 kittens, Priscilla, and Priscilla's 5 kittens for FeLk and FIV. All were negative and I was able to give away Princess' 6 kittens. I got the last two females spayed.
Shellie and Shirley
Now, Priscilla was a crafty queen. She bore her kits in the crawlspace of the house down the street. I followed her one day and saw how she checked whether or not the two dogs were in the fence. They weren't so she hopped the fence, then hopped up the foundation and crawled through the space left by the builders, under the bay window.
Ah ha! I knocked on the door and they were quite happy for me to take the kittens away. They knew their two Schnauzers went crazy sometimes, but they thought it must be birds or mice.
I got all 6 of Priscilla's family neutered and adopted her out to a single cat home where she immediately took to helping to care for the newborn human baby.
Starshine
Sunshine
Moonshine
Salazar
and Severus who refused the sardine bait and spent a whole night alone in the crawlspace. I took Priscilla back with me and he came out to her. She went into the carrier and he followed. Priscilla immediately weaned them. They were 4-6 months old. The two males had hairless tails.
2001
My friend saw kittens where she worked. There was an incident with a woman walking her dog and the kittens got caught and impounded for ten days before we could get them. So of course they had kennel cough, or whatever it is you get. Spirit and Sprite are solid black sisters.
12 weeks old?
Sprite couldn't eat because when she leaned down, she couldn't' breathe. So I handfed her for a few days till the antibiotics kicked in and she could breathe normally.
Sprite was adopted out to a nurse who I was trying to give Silver to!
Spirit got out of the house for about 8 hours in November of 2005. When I got home her back end was torn open - perhaps bitten by a dog on the loose. (Grrrrrr!)
Her vet bill was well over $1000 and now her butt and her pee-pee are about a half inch to the right of where they should be.
1999
April of 1999, just months after buying my very own pet-free place to live, I was adopted by two three week old kittens
Samantha,
and Sylvester.
Samantha has always been perfectly healthy. Sylvester looked like a drowned rat for the first two weeks I had them. I took them to work with me so I could hand feed them through syringes every three hours. He had green snot coming out of his eyes and his body temperature was quite low. He recovered and seemed quite healthy too for several years but in 2004? he developed a funny looking spot on the inside of his lip which the vet called a rodent ulcer. Long angry story short, he has EGC a treatable though incurable autoimmune disease.
He doesn't have the worst case of it, but it flares up every few months and then he's on steroids and/or antibiotics for months at a time. During that time, he sees the vet every other week. Year round I grind up a vitamin C and L-Lysine and put it into his canned food with a squirt of omega 3 and 6 oils and a dash of spirulina. I make it up every evening and give him the second half of it in the morning.
Sylvester is my little buddy. He snuggles with me and wants my attention all the time. He's the only cat I've ever had who comes when his name is called. So I'm cool with his medical bills. The sad thing is that getting antibiotics and steroids so often ends up damaging some of the internal organs so his life expectancy is reduced.
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Contact: lorelei at tarotgoddess dotty net