After sitting outside for several hours last night, trying to get the kittens to come out from under the porch so I could catch them, I finally went to bed around 3 a.m.
At around 9 a.m., I was woke up to the sound of my orange cat Kenny gasping and wheezing. (He sleeps right next to me, with his head on my pillow, so it's pretty loud.) Kenny has asthma, and for the past week or so, it's been bad. But this is the worst I've ever seen it -- he's not just coughing this time, he's really struggling to breathe, and his tongue is hanging out.
I gave him his prednisone pills and waited to see if they're going to help. Meanwhile, I called his vet and they said to bring him in right away. So I packed poor wheezing Kenny into the cat carrier and off we went.
Some of my cats go to the vet that's only 2 minutes away from my house, but Kenny still goes to the vet he originally went to, which is more like 15 or 20 minutes away. By the time we got to the vet's office, Kenny was breathing better, so he probably would have been fine if I had just waited a bit longer for the pills to work. But I had never seen him struggle so hard to breathe.
The vet did give Kenny some new medicine, so I guess it's good that we went. The new medicine is a bronchodilator, which is supposed to open the airway when Kenny has a bad asthma attack. It's still a pill, though; I was hoping for something that didn't have to dissolve before it starts to work.
Later, as I was standing on the porch talking to Linda, another neighbor, about the kittens (she had seen them from across the street when they were out in the yard playing), a neighbor from up the street and her two boys stopped by. She was carrying a young brown tabby cat, about 6 months old, that they had found.
I'm pretty sure this was the cat I had seen in the alley the previous week when I was coming home from work. When I saw it, a big black-and-white cat was on top of it, in the middle of the alley. I stopped and tried to chase the big one away, but the small one had run away, too. At the time, I wasn't sure if the cats were mating or fighting.
Now that I knew the cat was a female, I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that question.
When I told her I hadn't lost a cat, she said everyone she had asked said the cat wasn't theirs. She said she couldn't keep the cat, and was going to release it back into the alley where it was found.
The cat is very friendly, so I'm pretty sure she belongs to someone and that someone's looking for her.
I"Oh,don't do that. Give her to me, I'll keep her until we find the owners or find her another home." Who said that? Oh yeah, it was me. (Sometimes I hate myself!)
I knew if she was released back into the alley, she'd have kittens out there, and eventually some or all of them would find their way to my house, anyway.
I called Animal Rescue to schedule an appointment to have her spayed. She goes next Tuesday evening. Cost: $44 for spaying and vaccinations.
So, I spent part of the evening setting up a room for THIS cat.
Then I went out to try to catch kittens -- still no luck. Boy, are they fast!
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