Rescuing Sassy: The Full Story

ObeseChess

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So, I've alluded to the whole story of how I ended up with my cat, but I've never told it in full here - I did live-tweet the whole thing but I would never subject you nice strangers to the filth I normally put on my twitter feed, so here it is.

At the end of 2016, after a series of financial emergencies, I had to move back in with my mom in a suburban home she had just moved into. At the time, I was dating a woman who had lived on a farm and grown up with cats, but I had never been much of a fan of them. Her cat started to grow on me, and then I helped her rescue a feral (we did the whole trap, fix, release thing but she was so cute we couldn't release her). A few weeks after I moved in, we started to see a small, fluffy black cat in the neighborhood, usually at night, and mostly around the full moon. We started affectionately referring to the "moonlight baby."

After a while, we started getting more comfortable with the cat and she eventually started coming up and greeting us when we called. We deduced that she lived across the street as an indoor/outdoor cat, and that she came in and out of the garage, which was opened a crack, as she pleased. This was corroborated by her owners.

As time went on, Sassy, as I learned her name was, started spending more time at my house - she would take refuge on my porch from the rain, she would sleep in my mom's flower beds at night, we would see her cruising around in our back yard. The rest of this is kind of a blur, as far as things happened, but over the next couple of years we got very conflicting messages from her owners about everything - her age, why she was indoor/outdoor, if she was fixed, everything. They appeared to know nothing about their cat. I began to notice mats in her fur and, concluding that her owners weren't doing anything about it (she allegedly hated being brushed or handled at all - this was not my experience! It's her favorite!) I purchased a brush and a de-matting comb. I would get home from work and there she would be, chirping on the front porch, and I would sit with her and brush her and pet her until my legs fell asleep. We just liked to hang out.

What we ended up learning from neighbors and piece together from what we heard from her owners and observed by ourselves - and again, I'm fuzzy on the chronology here - is that her owners had adopted a puppy that she didn't get along with, and their solution was to make her an outdoor cat.

The next big jump was in the summer of 2019, when we had a heat wave. I came home from work and Sassy was shivering and vomiting on the porch, clearly having a heat stroke. We alerted her owners, who shrugged it off and closed the door in our faces. As she was legally not my cat, my hands were tied, but some vets gave me some "hypothetical" advice. I brought her inside and cooled her off and let her stay in for a bit - my mother is very allergic to cats, or that would have been the end of it, we would have just kept her. In the cooler evening, we let her back outside, and I started putting fresh, cool water out for her every morning, as well as ice packs under a pet bed to keep her cool.

In late summer 2019, we had a neighborhood block party and Sassy was the star of the show, with multiple people referring to her as my cat - I noticed that she was abnormally hungry, even assuming animals loved to beg for scraps. I learned that numerous neighbors had been feeding her as needed and that they often found her rummaging around in their trash cans. So, I did what anyone would do upon learning this and started buying cat food to leave out for her. I had to de-worm her a few times and made sure to keep up on flea medicine for her, too.

In winter of 2019, we noticed that the garage door was no longer being left open for Sassy at her house. After admonishing her owners numerous times for leaving her in the cold, I purchased a heated feral cat shelter on Chewy and put it on my front porch, as well as a warmed water dish. Sassy spent most of her time in the heated shelter, with me snuggling her as much as I could in my free time. Again, my mother is VERY allergic to cats, or we would have just brought her in, though she would occasionally just sneak in and we'd let her stay for a bit.

In February of 2020 I went on vacation for a week, and when I got home Sassy seemed very sick. Consequences be damned, I took her to the vet. The diagnosis? Separation anxiety. Sassy, despite being at least 10 years old, was in absolutely perfect health minus being a tiny bit overweight, but she did NOT like that "her guy," as my mom called me, had been gone for a week. She had been such a nightmare to bring to the vet that they had to sedate her, so we brought her home half-asleep and drooling in a makeshift cat carrier. My mom and I said we would just let her back outside when the medication wore off, but, well. We never did. She slept in my bed that night and that was that, she stayed with us. My mom started to see an allergist and we bought some air purifiers and made it work. Throughout the pandemic, she was my mom's work from home buddy as well as a watchful guardian of our garden. They became fast friends.

Earlier this year, newly single and convinced that I would not be able to buy a house on my own, my medical bills paid, I moved into a cat-friendly apartment. Sassy stayed with my mom for a week while I built a catio, and moved her in. At her most recent checkup, they had some concerns about her blood pressure and thyroid but they couldn't rule out that it was just from stress (she HATES the car and HATES the vet) so I have to take her back in for a re-evaluation soon. Other than that, she's leaner, her coat is shinier, and she's living out her old age in luxury with me. She misses the garden and my mom, but she's adjusting to having the balcony to herself and she gets lots of visiting time with friends and family. She still gets a little wild around the full moon every month.

Anyway, that's the story of how I ended up with my first cat at the age of 31. I'll add photos when I'm not slacking off on a work computer. :)

Thanks for all the advice you've all provided to me so far, I hope to share many more stories and photos of her for many years to come.
 
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fionasmom

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What a beautiful story! Thank you for sharing it. You mom is really a very kind woman to have worked through the allergies for Sassy's sake....very often that is not the rule in these stories. Pictures would be great!
 
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ObeseChess

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She is! My mom and I sort of had the same view - like, what else were we going to do? Abandon her? We couldn't do that. Here's a before and after that I put in another thread. More photos later, though.

October 2018:
oldsass.jpg



June 2021:
newsassy.jpg
 
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