This is a not so usual story about how a sweet KAR foster found his forever home. It is just too special to not share.
On December 31st 2010, KAR got a request from a lady for help with two kittens that were born in her house. She had found a stray white cat in her yard and later found out she was pregnant. KAR receives many calls from the public about pregnant stray moms and we do our best to take the kittens in, for they do not thrive outdoors in the cold, Michigan winters. But we are limited in foster homes. A KAR foster went out to asses the kittens. There were two 8 week old kittens, an all grey short hair and and all white long hair. As cute as any pair of kittens could possibly be. The lady decided to keep the mom but realized she could not afford to keep the kittens as well. When the volunteer picked up the white kitten she noticed his little heart was racing and she could feel it with her hands. This might have been due to being a scared little guy, and did not think too much of it.
I was the lucky volunteer who got to foster these 2 adorable kittens. One of the first things we do in the rescue is bring the kittens into a vet to have them checked out and make sure they are healthy on top of neutering/spaying, vacinations, deworming, microchipping, stool samples and feline leukemia/FIV testing. What we discovered was that racing heart was not just a nervous kitty but a very severe heart murmur. As a relatively new foster I was crushed and tears just started rolling down my face as the vet told me he would probably not live long and might need surgery! I felt like a silly little girl crying infront of the vet, but I was so sad for my new little baby.
I called my KAR mentor and told her the situation with "Sugar" who at this time we had named as his sisters name was Spice in hopes they would get adopted together (Sugar and Spice and everything nice : P ). thankfully being involved in a wonderful organization with lots of support I was allowed to bring Sugar to a cat specialist in the area. The rescue paid for all his doctor visits which included several hundreds of dollars in check ups, and EKG's. Thankfully we also live in a wonderful community of compassionate vets that gave the organization big discounts on these tests.
With many doctor visits which required me to take some time off work to be able to make these appointments the vets could not come to a conclusion as to what was the cause of Sugars heart murmur they had a suspicion and suggested we visit a cardiologist at MSU veterinary clinic who may be able to perform a simple surgery that would fix his heart. So off we went........ with High Hopes!
The long drive to Lansing took us over an hour and Sugar was great, he was a real good traveler. At the clinic the vet decided they needed more EKG's and X rays, the tests took all day we were there till the clinic closed at 7pm on a cold wintery night in January. But that was not the hardest part of the day. The specialist could not conclude definitively where the issues were we will not go into listing all the medical terminology but we had a choice, to risk losing Sugar in surgery for more tests or to open up his little chest cavity for exploratory surgery. One of the risks was Sugar was so small he barely weighed 3lbs and the smallest needle they had for pediatric surgery might not be small enough. The second risk was his heart was already weak and he might not come out of anesthesia.
This was heartbreaking, we had thought that we could bring him here he would go in for a simple surgery and be fixed. The rescue was willing to spend another $1500 on his surgery, but I was not quite sure this was the right decision. Here was this adorable 3 month old, 3lb kitten that didn't even know he was sick. However, there was one thing the vet did know and that was that with his condition he was not going to live past 1 year.
Stay tuned to hear how Sugar overcomes the odds and finds his forever home.
Great story and pictures.
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