I had an email yesterday from Judi, who rescued the Siamese from the Kentucky kill shelter. She reported that Mr. Miles had an announcement…..

Miles told us: “Hi, Everyone. I got a WONDERFUL, new FOREVER home! YIPPEE!!

“A very nice lady named Judy (with a Y) came by tonight and now I am on my way home with her to my FOREVER home. I’m pretty confused right now, because I was starting to think that Judi (with an I) was going to be my new Mom. But Judi explained that I was in a placed called a ‘foster home,’ so she kissed and hugged me good-bye and told me I was going to have a wonderful, new home. Of course, I believed her.

“I want to thank everyone for all your help in spreading the news about me and my family. I really do appreciate your help as we are all alive today instead of the ‘other thing,’ known as PTS (Put To Sleep)–whatever that is. Foster Mom Judi said, ‘That’s not a good thing.’

“I especially want to thank Cory for fighting and blogging for all of us. Cory also gave my brother, Simon (his new name–he was formerly known as ‘Bubba’), a super new home. I want to thank Bridget for giving my baby sister, Stella, now known as ‘Yum Yum,’ a new loving home. You guys are the greatest in my book.

“I am told that I have four new brothers and a sister at my house with Mom Judy. At least, there won’t be as many cats as Foster Mom Judi had. Maybe I will settle in sooner. The two moms in my life told me to tell everyone not to worry about me–that I will be loved and wanted forever.  Thank you all again.

“Purrs,

“Miles (for now–you never know what I might be named later. New Mom Judy said that Miles will always be part of my name, however, even if it is a middle or last name).”

It has been a long time coming, but our toothless, sweet girl, Naomi, finally went to her forever home. And the story of how she got there and how her dad, Scott, found her is just as amazing as the rest of Naomi’s story.

  Naomi with her new dad, Scott.

One of my friends, Jackie, from Siamese Rescue posted about Naomi to several of her friends who then promptly donated money to help with Naomi’s surgeries. One of those people, Susan, who is also involved with Siamese Rescue, not only made a donation, but also wrote about Black and Orange on her company’s monthly bulletin board. For May, the company did a board for “Be Kind to Animals Month.” Susan put up ten acts of kindness and under each one, some information that pertained to that subject. For the “Adopt a Shelter Animal” bullet point, Susan posted four of Black and Orange’s kitties. From seeing that bulletin board and the flyers about our cats, Scott, Naomi’s new dad and a manager in Susan’s department, checked out our web site.

Isn’t it just amazing how things happen? Susan learned about Naomi’s predicament, donated to help with her surgeries, and then was instrumental in finding our girl her new dad.

When I first spoke with Scott, one of the things he most wanted was to adopt a cat who had special needs and who might take a bit longer to find a home. In the process, while we were trying to decide on the perfect cats (Scott initially wanted two), a stray female, barely bigger than a kitten, showed up on his doorstep. Scott felt like fate had led her to him, so he decided he would take care of her medical expenses and keep her.

But he wanted a second cat and so we kept discussing different B and O kitties. I gave him a list of female cats to check out on the web site and he narrowed it down to Naomi and Lydia. After he met Naomi and her fosters, the Swiders, Naomi stole his heart (and thank goodness, because at the very same time, Lydia was winning over her new mom, Linda–so both got great homes).

Kim and Paul Swider have had Naomi since last Fall, so sending her off to her new home was a bit bittersweet. They had nursed her through all her surgeries and watched her blossom as her pain disappeared. Miss Naomi is quite a talker and she was voicing her opinion the whole time as Kim handed her, wrapped in her safety blanket, to her new dad. Scott completely looked the part of proud father and before long, Naomi had snuggled down into his arms and was peeking out at us over his elbow.

I've got my blankie, now let's head home.

This story also has a funny little twist. Earlier this week, a lady called me from South Carolina. She had read Naomi’s story on the Petfinder site under the most heartwarming stories. She had a friend in California who had a dog with a similar problem–he had chewed on an electrical cord and had horrible holes in his mouth. But they could not find a vet to help with the problem and so she wrote me to find out who had helped Naomi. I promptly sent her the info for Dr. Tom Klein and East Hilliard Veterinary Services. The lady was going to contact them to find help for the dog in California.

So Naomi’s story has a second happy ending, because our girl’s ordeal may now help another poor animal!

I want to thank everyone who donated, wrote to ask about Naomi, and kept sending her lots of good thoughts. None of this wonderful story could have happened without all the support Naomi had from her hundreds of well wishers. I also want to thank Dr. Tom Klein once more for giving her the chance at a happy ending.

Thank you Scott for giving this girl the home she so truly deserved. Naomi sends slobbery, gummy, toothless kisses to everyone and a gigantic smile!!

Settling in. Miss Naomi peeks out from behind Scott's arm.

Is that a cat’s head in a basket? No it’s Michael (there is a body attached somewhere).

We are sure you all remember Michael. He is the kitty that arrived at Riverside Drive Animal Care Center last November and could not urinate. He ended up having a surgery to remove his penis, because he continued to become blocked (these blockages are very dangerous and can kill a cat). 

After his surgery, Michael went to Noah’s Ark, where he is currently the greeter cat. You can find him most days hanging out in the main lobby or lying on the front desk. He usually tries to find a basket to crawl in and will sometimes even allow you to pet him (if he’s not in an amicable mood, you’ll get a swat to the hand).

You must always check out Michael’s nails. He wears Soft Paws in a myriad of colors. Usually, he has a rainbow on the tips of his toes. 

Michael went from being a kitty with a very poor prognosis to the president of the Noah’s Ark Social Committee (however, being that Michael is  not always the most social cat, he may need to learn how to take the dogs for walks or clean a few cages if he loses his front desk job).

Dr. West and Simon before he left Noah's Ark for his new home.

Simon is the gorgeous lynx point Siamese who I told everyone about a few weeks ago. Simon was the only survivor of a hoarding case in which the elderly woman, who was caring for the cats, entered a nursing home and the cats were all turned out in the snow or left to die, trapped inside the trailer. Luckily, a kind hearted neighbor saw Simon and rescued him just as he was close to death. 

Simon has been through a ton of medical care since then. His feet, when he was first brought in out of the snow, were covered in feces and cat litter from conditions inside the trailer. All of his paws were raw and sore from being caked in this nasty concoction. By the time he came to us, his paws, except one, had healed and that paw had huge scabs on the pads that would pull open and bleed. After weeks of foot soaks and antibiotics, Simon’s feet finally are close to normal, although he will always have scars on the pads from his ordeal. He can, at last, use regular cat litter, as well. For weeks, he had to use Yesterday’s News, the litter made from recycled paper, instead of the finer sand and clay litters to prevent the tiny grains from embedding in his sore pads. 

I also freaked out when I noticed that Simon had a drinking problem. Not that our boy was a lush or anything, but he would actually stop eating to drink water. And he would suck down bowl after bowl until he made himself sick. I worried about diabetes or kidney failure from his near death experience. Instead, Simon had elevated sodium levels due to the fact that he had not had food or water for a very long time and his body began to lose sodium from inside cells. With the sodium outside their normal cellular state, Simon felt as if he had just eaten a can of salty peanuts. Sodium is what makes up salt and so these elevated levels made Simon extremely thirsty. He had to be hospitalized and given fluids repeatedly to bring the sodium levels back to normal.

Dr. West said Simon’s favorite perch in the hospital was on the sink next to the faucet. He knew that was where the water came from.

Finally, however, Simon’s sodium reached nearly normal levels and he could actually leave water in a bowl. At one point when Dr. West first tested him, Simon drank four bowls of water straight down and promptly threw up.

I had been corresponding with a very nice lady about Simon for several weeks. She wanted to adopt him and patiently waited for his foot to heal and for Dr. West to decide if he needed to have all his teeth pulled on top of all his other issues. Then when I told her he might have more complicated problems, she held her breath and waited.

And, thankfully, I had good news for Karen. Today, she was finally able to take Simon home. This sweet boy truly deserves a life of leisure and happiness after all the trauma he has witnessed in his short life. We offer up a toast to Simon’s turn of good luck. And we know that Simon will drink to that.

Simon and his new mom, Karen, off to celebrate Simon's turn of good luck.

Albert chillin' in his new home!

We just want to thank Brian, one of our very favorite PetSmart employees, and his mom, for giving our little feline leukemia positive kitty, Albert, a chance at a good life. Since they do not have any other cats (their others all lived to be close to 20 years old–you have to do something right to get a cat to live that long), only three spoiled guinea pigs, they had the perfect home for our positive baby. However, we are still hoping that after he is re-tested, Albert will be negative.

In any case, fuzzball Albert is now out of the cage and making himself at home with Brian. It is a perfect situation since Brian’s mom recently retired and can spend lots of time with our little guy. We’ve already been asked what they would have to do if they decide to make Albert a permanent resident.

So, thank you, thank you from us and Albert to his new family. Now let’s just hope the pig girls appreciate their new furry brother, too!

The look of understanding--we know who is in charge of this household now!

Miss Emily poses for foster mom, Judy.

For the past several months, we’ve been working with a very nice lady, Judy, who lives next to a nature reserve/park-like area where tons of cats get dropped off quite frequently. Judy had taken in four litters of kittens since the summer from pregnant, dumped mother cats that found their way to her yard seeking food. Emily came from one of those litters.

As Judy wrote and told me, “A stray, timid Siamese mother brought her kittens, three sisters, to our deck this fall to wean them with the food we leave there. They were pretty sickly and their eyes were crusted over — I almost stepped on two of them as I was mowing the lawn. And Gracie, the little gray one, was stuck in the mud amidst some chickenwire that was holding a bush together. She didn’t move when we approached, and with her coloring blending with the mud, we almost didn’t see her. She was the smallest and sickliest, so I took her to my local vet for testing and meds right away. These three sisters were on three rounds of antibiotics before they were really well.”

Emily was one of the kittens that Judy almost ran over with the lawnmower. Her siblings Gracie and Camille are still looking for their forever homes, even as Emily is being spoiled rotten by her new mom in Virginia. Yes, that’s right, Emily is now enjoying the good life with her Balinese older brother Kamarre near Richmond, Virginia.

So how did we get Emily to her home in Virginia? It all came about because I wanted to find Emily the best home ever with someone familiar with Siamese. Since I volunteer with Siamese Rescue, I knew about a site called Siamlist (www.siamlist.org), where people and rescue groups can post listings for Siamese kitties. I submitted Emily’s info to the site and within just a couple of days had heard from Siamese lovers in Missouri, Minnesota, Indiana, and Virginia. Now the big question was who was the best applicant and how exactly was I going to get Emily to them?

Lynne, Emily’s new mom, was just wonderful in all the emails we exchanged. And her vet had known Lynne for years and could not say enough good things about her. So a trip to Virginia looked in the works. Lynne was more than willing to meet up with us halfway, and I know if needed, she probably would have driven the whole way, but she was eight hours from Columbus–not a pleasant trip for anyone to try in one day with a kitten in tow.

I asked a few people I knew about transporting and then began investigating the shortest trip and routes. To divide the trip in half, so that each person would only drive four hours one way, I mapquested a location in Beckley, West Virginia, straight off major highways for Lynne and Emily’s transporter. I also had to look at the weather for the coming week to make sure that no one on either end of the trip would run into nasty snow or ice.

Once I began talking to Judy about the trip, she decided that she wanted to take Emily so she could meet Lynne and see her little foster off to a good life.

Here is Judy’s account of what turned out to be a very uneventful (thank goodness the weather followed what the reports said!) trip: “Although I have a lot of  experience transporting cats by car for trips that were a couple of hours long, I’ve never taken a cat on a long day trip like this–considering that Emily had about four more hours to go with Lynne, and after we’d already had Emily in our car since 6:30 am. I did a little research online and got a few tips to try to get tuned in to what the issues might be for Emily. Emily had done so well when I drove her to Plain City on the day of the clinic, so I was kind of surprised that as we began the trip she was very restless in her carrier. We stopped and for awhile I had her on my lap (I wasn’t driving), but she was still very restless. So then I thought perhaps she needed to use the litter box. So we stopped again at the next rest area and tried that, but she didn’t use the box. She went back in her carrier on the back seat (with our dog, who goes with us on longer day trips) and she slept for a long time then, crying occasionally. About thirty minutes before meeting up with Lynne, we stopped and tried the litter box and water again. But she wanted none of that.

“When we met up with Lynne, who seemed, like me, very focused on the fact that Emily was going to have an overall very stressful day, we were both geared to getting things done so that Lynne could get back on the road to get Emily home (we got there around 11:40, but Lynne had arrived before us and was re-fueled and ready to get on the road).”

Emily with new mom, Lynne, in the car in West Virginia.

  Charlotte peeks out from her new hideaway in her new home.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, we took in several cats that, with other shelters or rescues, might not have fared as well as they have with us. In fact, Charlotte, Blue, and Michael came very close to being euthanized. Thankfully, we did not let that fate befall any of them. And now they’ve all got their own happy ending.

First off is Charlotte, the gorgeous, fluffy (and very pregnant) Himalayan kitty who tested positive for feline leukemia back in October. The vet wanted us to retest her in three months, thinking that her pregnancy and other factors might be giving us a false positive result. Rather than automatically dooming her and all of her kittens to death because of the test result, we asked her foster mom, Kathy, if she would care for her until we could retest. Poor Charlotte had already had a bad start in life. She’d had two litters of kittens in six months, because her former owner was selling her kittens for drug money. With a positive test, many shelters would have euthanized her and her unborn kittens, not caring that this poor girl had never got her chance at a joyful life.

At the end of October, Charlotte had her kittens. And while we had had tons of people looking at her photos on Petfinder, no one inquired about her after reading that she had tested positive–no one that is except one very patient and persistent lady who wrote often wondering if Charlotte had been tested again.

Finally, just this past week, Charlotte was tested again and she was NEGATIVE–as were all her kittens. The persistent lady became Charlotte’s mom and now Charlotte’s biggest worry in life is keeping her favorite toy away from her new feline sisters and brother. 

A happy ending for Charlotte.

Blue with her new family.

Our second happy ending goes to Blue. Blue is the Siamese that came to us from Capital Area Humane Society. Blue had been brought to the shelter in August as part of a hoarding case with 30 other cats. She stayed at the shelter while the case was prosecuted and was finally able to look for a way out in October when Capital contacted me. Because I work as a volunteer with Siamese Rescue, too, I had hoped to get Blue in there. But circumstances worked against that and to keep her from being euthanized, I took her into Black and Orange.

Blue had a deformed right eye, due as my vet told me, to her eye not developing correctly when she was a baby. Because of that, Blue could not see out of that eye. However, she had vision in her left eye and did not realize she was handicapped. She ran and jumped and played like any cat with sight in both eyes. Because of her “handicap,” however, she was deemed “imperfect” and would have been killed to make room for more “adoptable” cats. Luckily, we proved how adoptable she is. 

Miss Blue turned out to be the friendliest and most loving cat we have ever met. Her early horrible life did not scar her and she found joy at every new experience. When a family from Michigan inquired about her, we worried about her going so far away. When the same family turned out to be wonderful, having nursed their other Siamese through the trials of a stroke (they bathed her and made her a special “wheelchair” so she could get around and massaged her legs so they would not atrophy), we told our girl it was time for a road trip. The family drove over four hours to pick Blue up and take her home with them. With tears in their eyes, they saw none of her flaws, only her loving nature.

Miss Blue in her cage at Capital wondering if anyone would save her.

Our final happy ending is for Michael.

Michael lounging in his new foster home.

Michael also came to us at about the same time as Miss Blue at the beginning of November. In fact, we saved both their lives in the same week. A family brought Michael (who was named Mittens at that time due to his white paws) to Riverside Drive Animal Care Center because they thought he was not acting right. They thought he had eaten some “chewing tobacco.” Michael had never had any vet care of any kind. He is one year old and had never been vaccinated or neutered.

Well, it turned out that Michael was having trouble peeing. He had crystals in his urine that caused him to become blocked. The family did not have the money to pay to have his system flushed out, so they told Dr. Wisecup to euthanize him. But Michael was so nice that no one in the office wanted to end his life–especially since he was only a year old and had never had much chance to enjoy his short time. Black and Orange got a call from Riverside asking if we would pay to help Michael so he would not have to be euthanized. Dr. Wisecup donated all of her time to do the necessary procedures. We said yes.

While at Riverside, Michael was also neutered, vaccinated, and tested negative for feline leukemia/FIV. Shortly after leaving Riverside for foster care, Michael did become blocked again and a special surgery was performed at MedVet to remove his penis so this would never happen again. Michael is recovered now and is doing really well. He does fine with dogs and is super with people. He also made friends with another kitty at Noah’s Ark where he was staying after leaving Riverside and MedVet.

Michael is now in foster care with one of the fabulous people from Noah’s Ark. He has new cat buddies in his foster home, as well as a dog friend. Everyone loves Michael and we are so glad we saved his life.

Michael hanging with his cat buddies in his new foster home.

In case you couldn’t tell…WE LOVE HAPPY ENDINGS!

Kaly arrives from the North Pole via the US Postal    System.

Kaly and her new best friend, Addie.

This story starts back in early November and ends on the day before Christmas Eve. A lady wrote me about her cat infatuated daughter, who I was told, spent a great deal of time “meowing” instead of talking in imitation of her favorite animal. She wanted to adopt a cat for her daughter and their family, but the only catch was, she did not want to take the kitty home until Christmas, over a month and a half away. Could we do that?

Of course!

And on top of that, we were going to make this a very special Christmas for one lucky cat and her adoring human girl.

The loving mom wanted a kitty who would not mind being picked up and carried by an overly exuberant four-year-old. She had noticed in the posting for Kaly on Petfinder that Kaly liked to be held like a baby in your arms. She thought, based upon what she had read, that Kaly might be perfect for their family. And after meeting Kaly and having her sit in her lap the whole visit, she was smitten with our girl.

So we came up with the idea that Kaly would be Santa’s cat, living at the North Pole, but looking for a new home just in time for Christmas. Right after Thanksgiving, I went on JibJab and instead of “elfing myself,” I made an elf with Kaly’s cat face. That graphic of Kaly in a green elf suit went in a card to Addie from Kaly, explaining that Santa had told her Addie loved cats and she was “Kaly the Christmas Cat.”

The next week, upon learning that Addie’s brother was a bit disheartened that his sister received a letter from the North Pole, but he did not, I made a card of Kaly in a Santa hat (this time really dressing her in the cap) and sent it. Believe me, I remember how it was as a kid–whatever my sister got, I’d better get the same or better. So I understood where Addie’s brother was coming from.

The final touch on our holiday adventure was to have Kaly’s photo taken with Santa at the PetSmart “Photos with Santa Paws” event that we participate in every year. This would be proof for Addie that Kaly really had been with Santa.

Kaly with Santa.

Finally, the day before Christmas Eve, Addie’s mom came to get Kaly the Christmas Cat. She had been in our care for over two months and it was hard to let her go. Yes, we do get attached. Kaly is and was such a good, good girl.

But off she went with a story about her arrival. Because Kaly was a bit afraid to ride in Santa’s sleigh–too much flying and fast moving reindeer–Santa decided to send her by the U. S. Postal service. Addie’s mom was picking her up from the post office direct from shipment via the North Pole mail route.

The whole adventure of Kaly the Christmas Cat was one we will never forget. And the best part of this is that a little girl got a new best friend and Kaly got a wonderful home.

The best way to spend Christmas--with a friend.