Sadly our little girl Ginger lost the fight yesterday. She wondered into our front yard about 4.5 years ago & started sleeping in the garden, she would run to the car when I came home from work every day & greet me but wouldn’t let me get to close. After a while & as winter approached she started bring mice & lizards with the occasional bird to the front door for us making lots of noise “look what I’ve done, aren’t I a good girl!” We enquired around the street if anyone owned the little ginger kitten but no one put their hands up. There was a family further down the street that said that they had lost their ginger cat but it wasn’t a kitten. One day the teenage boys from down the street came & took her from the yard saying she was in fact their cat that had gone missing, she was back within the hour!
How I like to remember her
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When the first winter came she moved onto our front verandah with some encouragement from my wife & as our other two girls are inside cats I managed to catch Ginger one afternoon & took her to the vet for a checkup & needles as we didn’t want anything passed through the front door to our other girls. The vet informed us that she wasn’t a young cat as we thought but was more likely 8 to 10 years old & was showing signs of long term abuse.
One particularly wet & cold night she came in the front door & spent the night curled up just inside the door, that was the real start of the relationship, she was ours or we were hers is probably more accurate.
Things changed quickly from that night & she slept inside for the rest of her life. She became so accepting of change, she didn’t know how to play with other cats & would try to get a high vantage point whenever our other two girls started to play chasings around the house just to have the tactical advantage if she had to defend herself. She didn’t know what a litter tray was, but would hook her claws into the fly screen door & give it a shake to be let out, this developed into a collar with a bell which meant she could just scratch her collar to ring her bell & one of the staff would come & let her out, it also gave the local birds a fighting chance.
Things settled down for a while until she limped into the back yard early one morning as I was getting ready to leave for work (she would go out to the toilet first thing then spend the day in the yard waiting for me to come home). She had a large wound across her belly from who knows what which after treatment developed into feline leprosy! That was a long fight, it took about 9 months before we were confident that we had it beat. Her outside time was now confined to our cat run on our back deck which didn’t seem to bother her, the recovery had knocked her about & she gave up on the idea of being an outside cat & decided that litter trays weren’t such a bad idea after all.
In September when the weight loss started
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Unfortunately over the last couple of months things started to go downhill, we had a urinary tract infection which lead to inappropriate toileting then she started drinking lots of water & would go off her food for days at a time, then she started having trouble keeping her food down, her kidneys were failing & there wasn’t a lot we could do. She was quite over the weekend but not well, she spent the days in the cat run with Greta our GSD asleep beside her with only the wire between them & the nights asleep on my lap.
So Sunday night we made her as comfortable as we could knowing what the morning would bring & for a while she slept between us but then she just wanted to sleep in the laundry on the floor. I was expecting/hoping that I would find her gone when I got up on Monday morning but she greeted me as usual from her pillow. She tried to follow me around for breakfast as was her usual routine but was very week & had trouble staying on her feet, we knew it was time sadly.
She passed quietly in my arms with the Jenny the vet who had cared for her for so long helping her on her new journey.
Good bye old girl, thanks for the love, it was a pleasure being your staff/Dad
We’ll see you soon.
The photo was taken on Sunday, happy to be out in her run.
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Sorry for the long post but I just needed to put these words down for me to work through the hurt
Phil
