Lucky Lorenza

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For some strange coincidence of destiny I learned about the existence of this abandoned cat the same day I had to say good-buy forever to my beloved feline companion Charlie.

 

A neighbour alerted me in the morning about a cat roaming the gardens of our blocks… In the afternoon I saw her, looking out from under a brush: eyes of gold in a black, furry face… a Persian! … and wearing a collar!

 

Days passed and she seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth… days turned into weeks… until she appeared stretched out in a corner from which she barely moved. Someone had put out water and dry cat food. It was impossible to get nearer that 3 meters without her climbing up and hiding herself in the brushes.

 

I went every night to bring her canned cat food, but tenaciously she disappeared into the shadows and only ventured near the food when I had retired…

 

Within a very short period of time it was obvious that she moved each day with more difficulty… A house cat with large hair, living by now 2 month in the streets and in August… surely her fur had formed knots and ravels which limited her mobility and compromised her health. She had to be rescued… but how?

 

With a group of friends I rounded her up, to get her into a pet carrier as only way out… and almost we succeeded. But in the last moment she slipped through the hands that hold her and vanished into an underground car park. It was Friday afternoon and the weekend passed with regular expeditions to the car park in regular intervals, both day and night. The only sign that she could possible be there where some droppings on the ramp from the first to the second level. We bought a flashlight and I looked beneath hundreds of cars… nothing… slowly our hopes of finding her faded… when exiting the parking area on Sunday I heard a faint 'meow' in my head. Surely it was only my imagination, but a friend who was with me, after joking about it, heard it too… another 'meow', very faintly and then… silence. I made another round, and after an hour another, and another. Without any results.

 

Dismal and discouraged I went up the ramp, already long after midnight - and led by intuition alone - I turned to see something disappearing into a drain tube of only 10 cm diameter. This was no rat! I had found her! I phoned a friend, who got into her car and covered the 14 kilometers that separated us. I got an pet carrier and food, but the cat wouldn't or couldn't get out, and we needed another long hour until finally we got her to the animal hospital. Still on our way there we noticed that something was wrong. The cat smelled (to put it mildly) like putrid.

 

At first sight of her, the  attending vet recommended us to put her to sleep, but the kitty looked at us with eyes full of life...

 

What the vet found out later outstripped all our imagination: The whole cat was a mess of hair, glued with pus and other secretions, the collar has moved and practically segregated her left arm, with a large, infected wound of raw flesh in the whole axillary perimeter. She barely weighted 2 kg, was emaciated and dehydrated and had a cracked fang. That night she stayed hospitalized, was given medication, her wound was cured and her hair shaved off.

 

huge dog carrier, in my kitchen for quarantine. She was the living image of misery. A sack of bones and skin at the point of collapse. And adding  to this scarcely was able to eat or sleep with the enormous pet cone put on. The next day I went to buy her an inflatable collar, and when I switched it for the pet cone, her little face of sorrow lit up. Finally she could rest and eat.

 

click the images to enlarge

 

The cures turned into a tug of war, because, despite of being  weak, she found them annoying and tried to bite me. She ate like a horse and gradually developed confidence. I didn't wanted to engage with her emotionally in excess because I lived with 2 cats in a small flat and only thought to foster her until finding a new home for her.  A month passed an all seemed to go well… until one morning a found her in a  funny  stance, with her face pressed to the floor, like 'praying to the Mecca'.

 

 

First I laughed, but when she didn't change position all day I took her to the veterinarian. She was ill. They found an profound abscess - undetected until then - probably produced by the collar buckle. Followed 3 weeks of daily visits to the vet to inject her antibiotics, because she didn't tolerate pills.

 

 

After that, and learning in the meantime that she was lost only a few blocks away, but her 'family' decided to go to their summer residence without searching for her, I decided to try my luck and present her to my cats.

She got an microchip, was operated from an incipent pyometra,  they extracted her rotten tooth and discovered, in an ultrasound scan, that she has kidney cysts, which require a quarterly vet control.

 

 

Lorenza, how she was named because the night of her rescue was the night of the Perseids or  Tears of St. Lawrence, today forms part of our lives and surprises me each day with her way of being so different, teaching me to discard preconceived ideas about felines. She has her own ideas about being patted and brushed, about how to use the litter box and how to interact with the other cats.

 

 

It was hard at first (I never had lived with a Persian), until a friend of mine came up with the solution in form of a ingenious phrase: 'Don't look upon her as a cat, simply see her as Lorenza'. And it worked.

 

On January 17th 2016 we lost the fight against the treacherous polycystic kidney disease (PKD), result of irresponsible breeding. After a fulminant worsening the only thing was to save her from more suffering and help her trascend in peace and surrounded by love.

RIP 'Fussele' - wait for us on the other side of the rainbow bridge.

 

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