Homeward Bound: Del Rey
Donation protected
In 2010, I went to a rescue cat adoption event. Among the kittens and social butterflies was a black cat with a sign on his cage: "Don't let my hissing scare you!"
I'm a sucker. I took him home with me.
Through my years in college, he was my constant companion, climbing on my keyboard or chewing on the tip of my pen while I tried to write, perching on my shoulder like a parrot, waking me up in the middle of the night to play fetch. When I moved for graduate school in 2013, he came with me.
The night he went missing was the first heavy snow we'd gotten that year. I wandered around in the cold, looking for paw prints, calling all the nicknames he'd earned, asking neighbors if they'd seen him.
By the time I graduated, I had grieved, reaching the point of acceptance. Still, when I packed my car for the ten-hour move, I felt a twinge of guilt, like I was abandoning him.
I settled in Asheville. I got a pet-friendly apartment and a job working with mentally ill teens. My phone filled up with photos, and I deleted the blurry or poorly-lit shots of him I'd been saving.
Then I got a call.
Always, always, always microchip your pets. Twenty months after he'd disappeared, a vet scanned the chip on a stray cat someone brought in.
"There is a problem," the vet cautioned when I said I'd make the drive to get him.
They think he was hit by a car. His humerus was fractured. He needed pins put in to ensure it healed right.
The operation went smoothly. He's been cleared for travel. On Friday, 11/4/16, I'm going to be reunited with my cat who might as well be back from the dead.
I'm also going to miss a couple days of work, need a couple tanks of gas, have to buy some cat supplies, and will have follow-up vet bills. That's where you come in.
My work is rewarding, but I'm living paycheck-to-paycheck as is, snatching up overtime whenever possible and fantasizing about the day I'll have "rainy day" money. My credit card doesn't care how giddy I am to have my cat back.
In the next few months, he'll need a second operation to remove the pins. He also has a spinal injury that healed a little funny, which might require a procedure if it gets worse. The timeline and budget for all this is fuzzy, so I'm making a conservative request, but anything that's left over will be donated to Kalamazoo Animal Rescue, the organization I adopted him from—and the ones who put in the microchip that brought us back together.
I'm a sucker. I took him home with me.
Through my years in college, he was my constant companion, climbing on my keyboard or chewing on the tip of my pen while I tried to write, perching on my shoulder like a parrot, waking me up in the middle of the night to play fetch. When I moved for graduate school in 2013, he came with me.
The night he went missing was the first heavy snow we'd gotten that year. I wandered around in the cold, looking for paw prints, calling all the nicknames he'd earned, asking neighbors if they'd seen him.
By the time I graduated, I had grieved, reaching the point of acceptance. Still, when I packed my car for the ten-hour move, I felt a twinge of guilt, like I was abandoning him.
I settled in Asheville. I got a pet-friendly apartment and a job working with mentally ill teens. My phone filled up with photos, and I deleted the blurry or poorly-lit shots of him I'd been saving.
Then I got a call.
Always, always, always microchip your pets. Twenty months after he'd disappeared, a vet scanned the chip on a stray cat someone brought in.
"There is a problem," the vet cautioned when I said I'd make the drive to get him.
They think he was hit by a car. His humerus was fractured. He needed pins put in to ensure it healed right.
The operation went smoothly. He's been cleared for travel. On Friday, 11/4/16, I'm going to be reunited with my cat who might as well be back from the dead.
I'm also going to miss a couple days of work, need a couple tanks of gas, have to buy some cat supplies, and will have follow-up vet bills. That's where you come in.
My work is rewarding, but I'm living paycheck-to-paycheck as is, snatching up overtime whenever possible and fantasizing about the day I'll have "rainy day" money. My credit card doesn't care how giddy I am to have my cat back.
In the next few months, he'll need a second operation to remove the pins. He also has a spinal injury that healed a little funny, which might require a procedure if it gets worse. The timeline and budget for all this is fuzzy, so I'm making a conservative request, but anything that's left over will be donated to Kalamazoo Animal Rescue, the organization I adopted him from—and the ones who put in the microchip that brought us back together.
Organizer
Alice Thomsen
Organizer
Asheville, NC