Today is a very special day for me. Today is the day that
our little orange kitty Oscar went to his new home. Last November, we found
this guy lurking around the back of our house. Jasper and I knelt down and
called; “here kitty, kitty!” To our surprise, he came over to us. We came to
the conclusion that he must be a stray, as we’d never seen him before among the
feral cats of our neighborhood and he wasn’t neutered. We carried him to our
garage where we set out a litter pan, food and water. We named him Oscar, after
“Oscar, cat-about-town” from the book all creatures great and small by James
Herriot. Upon closer inspection, we found that Oscar had an abscess at the base
of his tail and ear mites. Oscar was active, but his injury was weakening him
and would soon become fatal. We would have taken him to the vet, but at the
time we couldn’t afford it. As his condition worsened, he began to lose energy.
Mom called the rescue organization S.P.O.T. and they told us that they could
pay all of the vet bills as long as we would adopt him. We took our little boy
to the vet and he had surgery to remove the abscess, was neutered and had his
ear mites removed. When we took Oscar home, he had to wear an Elizabethan
collar which is basically a plastic cone worn around the neck of an animal to
prevent it from licking the wounded area. We applied a paste to the wound twice
daily called thermazene to help it heal faster. Soon, Oscar was healed and we
were able to remove his cone. After six weeks of isolation he was allowed to
live in the house, but was always rather skittish. We figured that it must have
been the fact that he lived with five other cats, so we began to search for a
one-cat-home for the little guy. After about a year, the perfect place turned
up. It was a large homestead and the family that lived there was willing to
take him as their barn cat. Today they came to pick him up, and our little boy
finally had his happy ending.
