A Miracle by any other name .....

I'm a middle aged grandmother with decades of experience baking, so I'm not always a fan of getting on the scale.  To be perfectly honest, as long as my jeans don't seem to be getting tight, I tend to leave the scale in the back of the closet!

And NO, I am not talking about the pair of stretch denim jeans that I accidentally bought at Frenchies one time!  It took exactly one wearing to realize that the darned things KEPT stretching every time I bent over ... and being 56 not 16 I didn't particularly care for THAT look!

For the past couple of days, the Internet has been all afire about the Tragically Unhappy Tail for the Huskies out in BC.   Is that a bad thing?  Of course not!  I just wish that the general public could get THAT upset about the hundreds of thousands of cats who are killed in shelters around this country ... and the hundreds of thousands more who are shot/ drowned/ or meet a myriad of Equally Unhappy Tails.

Even when the Cape Breton SPCA was killing so many cats they needed to use a gas chamber to keep up, there wasn't this kind of public moral outrage.  The only person in NS to be prosecuted for killing cats in my memory got a whopping five dollar fine! 

Yes sir indeedy, the difference between cats and dogs is definitely more than purely anatomical ...sigh.

And that is why I am always overjoyed when I hear of folks who pull out all the stops for the kitties.

In December, the Clarenville SPCA had a bomb dropped in their lap.  On the 23rd, a cat that had been neutered two days before became violently ill.

One of their volunteers took the little darling up to the clinic and thankfully she stayed with him to find out what was going on. His belly was bloated and he was vomiting yellow fluid. Immediately the clinic went into Panic overload and started talking FIP and that if he had it, the shelter would have to kill all their cats.

They almost died at that thought but after research they realized that the clinic had FIP and Pan Leuk mixed up. FIP is trasferred by feces and saliva and as this cat was always in a condo, he wouldn't have been able to pass it to others.
The decision was made to keep him comfy for the weekend. At the same time, the shelter was under total quarantine for cats until they got the results back.
Later that afternoon the vet clinic called the shelter to let them know that they had given him dexamethasone and he was responding well. The next morning he was eating, happy and just a purring.
A Miracle it seemed but they still didn't know what was happening. They took him off the dex on Sat and he regressed. Put him on and he did well. After a bit, the clinic realized that it was viral pneumonia.
He went back at the shelter in isolation and Blood samples were taken two weeks apart to determine if it was FIP or pan leuk.  The down side was that there could be no adoptions until this was sorted out but that was more than outweighed by the upside ... which of course is that nobody panicked and killed all the cats at the shelter needlessly.  ( The subject of how often that is done .. and in some instances by folks purporting to be No Kill ... is a sticky wicket for another day )
The short version of this story is that Rolo, whose name really should be Miracle, has recovered and his adorable self is available for adoption from the Clarenville SPCA.
What time is it?   In a world where so many are still second class kittizens even after they are rescued ... where roomfuls of cats can be given Unneccessary Unhappy Tails ...  it is time to understand that the Real Miracle here is seeing kind hearts who pull out the stops for their kitties.
The smallest feline is a masterpiece.    Leonardo Da Vinci