The DU Lounge

joeybee12

(56,177 posts) Fri Mar 21, 2014, 02:23 PM Mar 2014

An Update on the Kitten I Rescued from My Neighbor's Hoard

We met over a basket of filthy linens (neatly folded, what the fluff?). Our eyes did not lock from across a crowded room. We did not experience love at first sight. To be truly honest, what I felt was a weary sort of dread, and I don't believe he felt anything at all. He simply lay there, in the home of my friend the hoarder I was trying to help. His tired, sunken eyes were partially open, his breathing barely detectable. For several moments I just stood there, paralyzed. He was the mirror image of my girl, Mina, a cat I lost to FIP nearly 10 years ago to the day. The sight of this kitten so still and strange, with Mina's precise position and expression, staggered me, another in a long series of posthumous punches to the belly.

When I lifted his tiny body, he didn't register any change, just hung limply across my forearm. Tiny bones jutted up from his gray coat, which was silky soft but too cool. I performed the skin turgor test at the scruff of his neck, and the flesh didn't spring back. After 30 seconds of waiting I smoothed it back down, just to stop seeing it. He did not register my fingers probing in his mouth, examining his gums, which were nearly pale enough to be called white. I stuffed his little body unceremoniously into my purse, then rushed him to my vehicle when the homeowner took a bathroom break from this, our most recent foray into the deep-cleaning and exhaustive organization of the hoard.

The next hour crept by in an outrageously slow fashion. It was the slowest hour to have ever passed in the history of cat kind; it was utterly maddening. I didn't dare make some feeble attempt to mumble excuses and dash away from my paranoid acquaintance; to risk upsetting our cautiously friendly relationship would compromise my access to so many animals. It was a risk I couldn't take.