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Those unsung heroes and heroines who work for Cats Protection have big hearts. This is a story that knocked my socks off for the pure love of a woman for her cat.
She sent it to me having read about Otto. She is known to her friends as Harry Potter.
"The thing about working for Cats Protection is that people tend to track you down when they have a problem with cats! And so that is how this story began.
I had a phone call from a friend of a friend of a friend ? which is often the way it works. The friend in question had had previous contact with one of our team, known to a few as the Rottweiler, so this time she did not feel up to scaling the perimeter fence and swimming the moat. This time she called her friend and her friend sent her my way.
The lady?s name was Isobel someone who had completely turned her home over to every stray, unwanted or cruelly treated dog on the planet. Now she had also found herself with a stray cat. The cat was about two years old and was heavily pregnant and had been found wandering the roads in a village in the Worcestershire area, so could I help her?
As it was not my ?job? to take in the cats I was not able to queue jump her without a battle, we were already full to capacity with other mums and kittens and the waiting list was getting longer by the day. So I chatted to Isobel and decided that if this cat were to be ?dumped? on my doorstep in say a cardboard box with no give away markings on it, then I would simply have to take the cat in! At least then she would be safe and the kittens could be born without fear of them becoming easy prey for wild animals and without the chance of them growing up wild and adding to our problems this time next year.
Within the hour, a toot of a horn outside told me the deed was done.
I popped to the front door on the pretence of putting out the rubbish bin ready for collection the next day, and there it was - a box on my doorstep! Whatever could it be? I took the box into the lounge where I had already set up food and water and a litter tray. Opening the lid I was greeted by two huge green eyes set deep into a thin black face with a tiny snubby nose. I had a moment to register that this cat was in need of building up before she jumped from the box and got stuck into the food dish.
She was the oddest cat I had seen for some time, and I had seen a few.
Having emptied the dish with superb speed she started to explore. Her balance was hopeless, no graceful tip toeing across the coffee table, she took two seconds to clear it of its contents and put two sets of deep scratch marks down the side of it, before sliding unceremoniously to the ground where she set about washing herself as if to say ?I meant to do that you know?. I called her to me and she staggered over, both back legs knocking together at the point where they bend, her nose in the air, all that was missing was a cigarette dangling from her mouth and she would have given Joanna Lumley a run for her money.
On close examination, her fur felt like bits of old loft lagging, and had the same smell if it came right down to it. She had a couple of v shaped bits missing from both her ears and her tail looked like a fork of lightning. The tail had obviously suffered a few breaks in its time, ones that had not been attended to and it was now set in this strange shape, but it only added to her character.
I booked her into the vets for a check up and set up a nice little box with blankets behind the sofa ready for the impending birth. An hour later she was gently swaying on the vets table whilst he told me that she was in fact about fourteen years old and absolutely not pregnant, and more to the point, not ever likely to be!
Now here was a dilemma, a not pregnant, very old cat with all the rehoming possibilities of a Christmas tree with no needles. A cat brought in under a covert operation that only myself and the people involved knew about. It would have been easy to get away with my sleight of hand had she been a poor starving mother with small needy offspring, but now I had to think again.
The cat went into the lounge as planned and the usual notice went on the door ?Beware?cat in lounge? everyone in the house knows that this means the door must stay closed at all times with the CP cat on one side of it and our cats and dog very firmly on the other side.
When my husband, Phil came home that night the first thing I heard as he entered the house was, ?ok what have we got this time?? As it happens Phil was a saving grace as the cat took to him straight away and threw herself at him without any morals at all. She oozed her charm on him at any given moment and having been shown only small social graces by our other four cats, he lapped it up and oozed right back at her. Having been acquainted with the story of her arrival, and knowing full well that we were going to be stuck with the situation for a while he decided to call her Izzy after the lady that in-advertently created our problem.
Having spent two weeks with us and having worked her feline charms well and truly on Phil it was decided that she had ?settled? well with us and there really wasn?t much point in disrupting her again, and it was he who decided that we should add her to our flock.
As if she knew her initial work was done she immediately turned her affection one hundred percent on me. At any given point of the day when I was home she would be near me. When I was washing up at the sink she was a permanent fixture on the window sill, when I brushed my teeth she would sit on the edge of the bath and when I was in the bath she would keep me company with, sometimes, her tail dipped in the water. My biggest fear was that she would slip in, but despite her fragile sense of balance she could make it from one side of the bath to the other without falter.
At nights she slept next to my pillow. She would sit very still, eyes reduced to slits waiting for me to turn out the light. Once out she would settle down with her face as close to mine as she could get and one paw touching my arm. If I woke in the night she would wake too with that funny little purping sound that cats make when you disturb them from a deep sleep.
When the tea and toast came up in the mornings with Phil she would sit and wait for the dregs of melted butter from the plate when we had finished. She developed a strange passion for Indian food, especially tikka masala and she could carry a whole popadom without breaking it.
She soon became known as Izzy Wizzy, my little witches? cat, she later also became Wizzle Pig, for reasons that now escape me, but both names suited her. So with her huge green eyes and her crooked tail she buried herself a place deep in my heart and I loved her.
When she eventually made it outside she became a ferocious hunter and soon ended up sporting a nice bright red collar with an array of bells hanging from it, not that this did anything to help the mouse population in Leigh Sinton. We decided either the mice were all deaf to begin with or had been sent deaf by the ringing of Izzys bells, because she managed to bring home a great supply on a regular basis much to the delight of Harry our grey cat who has never quite had the nerve to actually kill anything for himself. The house was a constant warren of ?vole tubes? (kitchen roll tubes blocked at one end) and one or other of the cats was always on point duty at one end of them.
There was once a moment in the middle of the night when I became aware of Wizzle purping into my ear and intermittently clicking her teeth together, this I discovered seconds later was cat talk for ?I?ve dropped my live vole down between your headboard and mattress and would very much like you to get out of bed and pull the mattress out so that I can get it back?.
Izzy adored the sun to the extent that her fur took on a distinct ginger hue during the summer months. From dawn to dusk she would follow the sun round the garden flattening herself a sun bed among the flowers and shrubs. Her favourite place was any of the car roofs, my stepson Seans was ?the best a cat could get? as it was black and really held the heat. It seemed an even more delightful place to lie if it had just been cleaned!
The winter however, was a totally different matter. I became aware that at nights she would flatten herself as close to the pillow as possible to shield herself from the draught of the always open bedroom window. This was Phil?s chance to use Izzy as leverage for his constant argument of ?why have the heating on and the window open?? Phil will get the shivers watching the weather forecast!
Deciding that this was a problem I made a tactical decision???I bought a high backed totally enclosed fur lined cat bed for Izzy that was just big enough to sit next to my pillow. I got to keep my window open, Izzy got to sleep in comfort, with her paw still able to reach my arm, and Phil got to sleep lower in the bed with the covers higher up than before!
During the day she would sleep by the radiator on top of the coffee table venturing out only for the toilet. Despite still eating like a horse she remained skeletal, her coat was always a mess and it was clear that my little witches? cat was in need of a visit to the vet. The vet confirmed that Wizzle had an over active thyroid gland, which was why she was so thin and why, unbeknown to me she had such a racing heart beat. This was also the reason for her inability to cope with the cold and accounted for the terrible state of her fur. The long term prognosis was an operation, something I was not keen to see happen. The risks of anaesthetic for an old cat are always greater and I felt physically she needed to be stronger. She went onto tablets. Three a day for six months to try to improve her chances of surviving an op.
The tablet taking became a battle of wills from day one. Wizzy was not going to take them, not with butter, not with tuna, not with fresh sprats from the fishmonger, not with double cream or even her beloved pate.
Having tried the somewhat brutal ?finger down the throat? approach a couple of times it became clear that Wizzy was far to clever for me. She would sit stock still for over half an hour at a time lulling me into a false sense of security that the tablet had finally made it to its destination. Having left the room with confidence I would return later to find the soggy remains of the little pink pill oozing onto the lino.
At one point I even tried crushing the tablet into pate and smearing onto her front legs, I was told this was a tried and trusted method amongst some of my friends based on the theory that cats don?t like to be dirty and would therefore be compelled to lick off the pate and at the same time consume the medication.
Not so! Wizzy spent many a day sat at the end of the drive with two brown and pink stripes caked to her front legs, surrounded by numerous flies.In the end I took the hard decision, but in my opinion the kindest for Wizzy. I simply stopped trying to give her the pills. I decided that she had come this far in life in charge of her own destiny and that she should continue to do so from now on. For this very reason I knew that the amount of time that I would have with her would from this day on be uncertain.
Nothing seemed to change; Wizzy was happy, she continued her life with us as she had always done. She insisted on greeting every member of the public that ever came to our home to view the CP cats in my care. She would wait for them to make it into the garden before staggering over to give them the once over. I always had to go through the routine of telling them that she was ill as she was really the worst possible example of a cat belonging to someone who was supposed to be dedicated to the health and happiness of all cats! Each day I would look at her and wonder how much longer she was for this world.
One evening in May of 2004 Phil came to collect me from my Monday skittles game. We had just won our first ever competition which meant that we would all receive a cup on presentation night and we were elated. Having dropped off my friend on the way home Phil said he had some bad news to tell me. My first instinct was one of the boys, or one of our parents, an accident may be or even a death. It was a death .I sat in the car with the world rushing by listening to the sound of my own heart banging in my ears and feeling the air grow thick as I tried to breath in.
Having dropped me off earlier that evening at the skittles hall Phil had been turning into our close when he noticed a small black mound lying underneath the speed camera on the opposite side of the road. Stopping the car and crossing to look, his worst fears were confirmed. The little black mound was Wizzy. She had been killed instantly. Apart from her left eye having been blown from its socket she had no other visible injuries. Phil had just scooped her up and put her in a box to await my return.
Walking out of the back door onto the patio where Wizzy now lay in a box on her favourite bench I was greeted by the saddest thing I have ever seen. All four of our remaining cats were sitting beside the box. None of them was moving. They were not sniffing or trying to get in, but just sitting still, paying their respects maybe.
I opened the box and picked Wizzle up. She was wrapped in a blanket. I held her to me. At that very moment it started to rain, big heavy drops, cold and hard. The rain mingled with my first tears and I felt a feeling in my chest like the sharp twang of an elastic band on the skin. It felt as if my very heart had cracked.
I don?t remember how long I stood there and I don?t remember putting her back in the box, but I do remember knowing that a little piece of me would never be the same again."
? Jayne Garfield
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