Meet Cookie – our sweet new, surprise addition to our family!
Earlier this week my husband and I went for our regular walk through the neighborhood. Every day when I get off work we try to walk a few miles before settling in to the evening routine. We have a standard route that we walk and have come to learn things about our neighborhood. Our neighbor is always out to say hello when we start our walk, we know where the barking dogs are, who will be out on their porch to say hello, etc…
In our neighborhood, we have a house that seems to be a cat magnet. We always look forward to walking past this house so we can count the cats both inside (at least those that appear in the window) and outside the house. From what we’ve always been able to tell, the outside cats are all feral. The woman who lives there puts food out for them all around the same time in the evening, so by the time we walk by there are tons (we’re talking at least a dozen when it close to their dinner time) just sitting outside waiting on the stoop. We can’t ever get close to them and one of her neighbors told us she’s the only one that can get close to them, but she even can’t pet them really.
So Tuesday night, we’re walking by this house and it’s getting close to kitty dinner time so we’re counting the cats and notice one really tiny one. Well, she noticed us too. And instead of running away from us she walks towards us! As she got closer, we could see she wasn’t in the best healthy – lots of snot and a bad eye. It didn’t matter though, we still reached down to pet her and she let us. We stood there for a couple of minutes petting her then decided it was time to continue on our walk. It wasn’t that easy though – we now had a third member of our party for the evening! This sweet, sick little kitten wouldn’t stop following us. At least three time I picked her up and placed her far up in the yard of this house and ran away thinking she wouldn’t be able to keep up if she decided to follow again (I HAD to look like a crazy person!). I was wrong, she was fast, and we now have a new cat. 😀
The neighbor saw this all happening and confirmed what we thought that these cats were feral and this one was born not too long ago to one of those feral cats. Looking at her sweet, sick little face, I couldn’t leave her behind, so we took her with us. Before we had even made it back to our house, we had made a vet appointment for that evening to get her checked out and to get her some medicine. Obviously before we took her to the vet she had to get a name. We spent some time with her and learned just how sweet she was, so we landed on Cookie. The hubs calls her Sugar Cookie and I call her Cookie Monster – poor thing is already set up for an identity crisis! 😛
At the vet’s office, we learned Cookie had fleas, worms, a bad upper respiratory infection, and irreversible eye damage due to an untreated eye infection. She weighs a whopping 2.6 lbs and the vet thinks she’s probably about 8 weeks old. Despite all this, we were already in love and would do whatever we had to keep her healthy. Luckily for all of us, these were all treatable or manageable and the scarier things like feline leukemia and Feline Immunodeficiency Virus weren’t something we had to worry about because her tests were negative for those! 🙂
It’s been only 3 days since we found her, but she’s doing so well so far. We have her quarantined right now since we don’t want to expose our other two cats to her respiratory infection and because we want to give her time to adjust before introducing her to our other girls. Her fleas are gone and the worms appear to be gone as well. Her upper respiratory infection is much better and she’s not sneezing and snotting everywhere now and her eye is looking much better (but probably as good as it ever will according to the vet). Cookie’s been on antibiotics, probiotics, eye gel, worm pills, and advantage for fleas and even through all of the pills and drops, she hasn’t stopped purring.
I truly think she was meant to be a part of our family and we love her so much already, it’s ridiculous! She seems like she’s comfortable here and feels at home and loves to snuggle with us. She also loves to play with her ribbon, which she also loves to play fetch with! I can’t believe it! This sweet little girl is so smart that at only 8 weeks old she knows how to fetch – and she’s a cat! 🙂
I haven’t managed to get many pictures of her because she won’t hold still long enough for them to turn out to be anything but a blur. But, I did manage to get a small little video of her fetching her ribbon. Take a look!
