This has been a difficult week because of an upsetting experience at the beginning, and i was not sure whether i was going to do this post...however perhaps for me it will be therapeutic for me to share it with you.
Three weeks ago Marc saw, posted by someone we knew, a feral ginger kitten that needed a home. When he showed me the picture (yes nearly all kittens have an ahhh factor) but this one had an ohh and an ahhh factor coupled with emotional shoestrings. Marc's mum had a ginger kitten and the fact that my mother had always wanted one, and then the strongest pull he was just impossibly cute. Marc rang up the face book contact and said yes please, it was a friend of hers that she then put us in contact with. Next came the big catch, i do not know how long he would have survived in the wild. He was a wily little kitten full of energy and having left mum he was already trying to look after himself, although Liz was still feeding him. Liz already has quite a menagerie of her own so therefore she wanted to find a home for him, meanwhile he was in and out of her barn taking bits of food but not letting anyone get to close. We were like expecting grandparents, every time the phone rang i would leap a mile or ask Marc to answer it. Liz rang early on a Thursday morning to tell us she had got him and could we come to pick him up. I was so excited, i thought the call was going to be bad news as we had had the most terrible weather for the last three days, and it would have been easy for a small kitten to have perished.
She explained where she was and we jumped into the car, when we arrived at the house it was to find Liz and her mum flooded out. We stayed for a cup of tea and promised to come back and help shift the water having released our little ginger captive in the utility room back at home.
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| marc preparing the ladder for rescue |
Liz took us next door to the barn where the kitten was captured in a cage. Marc climbed up into the barn and lowered the kitten and cage to the floor with the aid of a rope and Liz and i guiding the cage. It was then that we discovered the poor little mite had lost the tip of his tail when the trap door fell on him. Although there were a few drops of blood on closer examination it was just a little skin and fur not the bone thank god. I was eager to get him home and release him, so with the promise to help with Liz's flooded house we jumped back in and drove home. I filled his containers with kitten biscuits, food and water and we let him out, he promptly shot behind the washing machine. We thought at this point he had had enough traumas in his little ginger life and should be left alone to find his food. I had put a cardboard box with a fleece inside very suiting for our furry vagrant.
Then we hurried back to Liz, who had another helper, her mother's part time carer Tina had arrived. It took three hours to get rid of the water from the lounge, and dining room. During that time there was much discussion of kitten names, he was found in a woodpile so woody was the favourite one. On the way home Marc said that woody from toy story was quite a hero and that it would not be such a bad name. I was stuck on Gingembre (meaning simply ginger in french) something we had both come up with the week before when we first saw his pic.
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| hardly a squeak out of him all the way home |
When we got home, he was nowhere to be seen, back behind the washing machine again but every scrap of food has gone. I filled his bowl and looked behind the washing machine, were a couple of small grey green eyes looked balefully back at me. There was still a bit of blood on the floor, but as earlier he had tried to climb the glass doors to get away from me, i figured it was going to scare him more to try and catch and clean him up. So just cleaned the odd blood spots off the floor and left him. He emptied another three bowls of food and eventually by the afternoon was sussing out the box. I also noticed he was licking his tail and bless his little white socks had used the litter tray?? how did he know to do that. By the evening he was curled up and licking his tummy. When cats stop washing themselves unless very old it is a sign that something is wrong with the cat. On the following morning he shot behind the washing machine again, so we just repeated the process of the previous day and each time we went in we would sit in the room without moving and talk to him.
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| I'm very cute am i not |
By Saturday, three days later he would not shoot behind the washing machine to hide and we would hear a little purring noise emanating from his box. We are still not sure whether we have a little boy or a little girl, he/she has quite a lot of white which could indicate a female. Genetically most ginger cats are boys.
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| the first day i proved how clever i was..... |
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| and how hungry i was!!!! |
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| ...and how sleepy |
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it is Sunday today I'm still purring, but i am not eating today
on Sunday, Gingembre stopped eating, we thought maybe he has got post trauma. He was still purring and not running away, but we though whether he was eating or not on Monday we would get him to the vets. I rehearsed a script for the vet and translated it through Google translate.
Monday came and had not touched his food or water for a day and a bit. So when we went to our french class at the end of it Marc asked Chris and Barbara if they had a cat carrier, he thought they looked like cat people. They said yes and said come over in an hour and we could borrow it, they had also gone to the trouble to find the opening time at the vets in Castelnau at the bottom of our hill, which was very kind of them. We discussed how we should get him in the cage bearing in mind that he had never been handled before. I went in to put him in the carrier, he was maybe weak then or he trusted me either way he made no attempt to struggle and i held him to my chest for a few minutes before depositing him in the pet carrier. He had also got a major scratch to his ear, fleas perhaps. We took him to the vets and as before he did not seem to mind the car, all our previous cats would have let you know that they did not like car journeys.
Thankfully we got there just as the vet opened greeted by a rather unbending french receptionist without any English telling us we could not turn up without a rendevous (appointment) When there is a very obvious language barrier it is hard to get your point across, i just kept holding him up and saying tres malade (very ill) Just as we were on the verge of giving up, the vet hearing all came out and beckoned us in. I got out my kitten script, it happened that the vet had quite a bit of english. He was very gentle with Gingembre, told us that he was a little boy, looked at his teeth and his injured tail, he seemed quite confident and said that if the tail was infected they might have to shorten it slightly. I just wanted him to be racing around again...manx cats have short tails, anyway he was only talking about the tip. He asked if he could keep him in overnight and of course we said yes.
I felt that he was in very capable hands and we left promising to call in next day. The morning went quite slowly, the feedback had been fairly positive so only with slight apprehension did we approach another receptionist the next afternoon. She looked up our notes and proceeded to tell us in french that they had tried to ring us and then came the fatal words 'il est mort'
meaning he is dead. She guestured that we should sit in the waiting room and wait for the vet and told us she was very sorry as she could see how visibly upset i had become. I know it was only five days
and maybe to some people completely irrational, but for the next twenty four hours i was totally inconsolable. I could not even face the vet who had been so kind and so confident and in the end ran out of the waiting room distraught. Marc having chatted to the vet came to find me, partly because i had the company cheque book (ours). They would only let us pay a consultation fee which looking back on it was a generous guesture, would they do that in England? He had suffered a massive heart attack on the operating table the vet said, it was nothing to do with his tail. in fact he head been quite bewildered and had asked Marc whether he could do an autopsy. I think i cried all afternoon and half of the next day. He actually died on the same day as Marc's mother last year, a ginger kitten was not to be.
JUIN 4/6 2013 Gingembre RIP
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