A few weeks ago, I visited the shelter to check on three fosters I'd returned for adoption. I didn't have a carrier in my car. I had no plans to take any cats home with me. But....on my way to help socialize some new feral FeLV+ kittens with a friend, I stopped for a visit in the geriatric room. I was about to leave when a very skinny cat, drooling heavily and caked from her face through her chest, all her legs and her tail in reddish brown residue came out of her box and meowed her way towards me. They told me she had stomatitits and the stains were from her constant drooling. They were force feeding her sometimes. She didn't appeal to me at all. I didn't have any room because I still had two sick fosters at home with all my own cats. But I couldn't walk away from her. They had never fostered out a geriatric cat but I persuaded them to let me take her. Here she is after a week after coming home with me when her weight had gone all the way up to 3 pounds 11 ounces! They were giving her 35-70cc of AD mixed with Friskies each day. I boosted it to 50cc of AD three times a day (and have boosted it even further since then.)
I think this photo, though not very good, shows how thin she was:
And this one shows how, when I tried to soak away all the mess caked into her fur, it simply came away in places:
It breaks your heart, doesn't it?
I took her to my vet at the end of the first week when her cold got worse and found out that she didn't have stomatitis after all. The reason she is incapable of eating on her own is not that she is in pain and doesn't want to, but that her tongue cannot move forward. It's almost completely fixed in place due to old scarring from sores and current sores, and possibly some growths. She is far too weak still to sedate and examine. When she is ready, I'm going to battle for my vet to do the job because three shelter vets misdiagnosed her.
She is so easy to force feed, simply sitting in front of me as I sit on the floor and opening her mouth for the syringe like a baby bird. After all the starvation she suffered, she craves her feedings.
I call her Rose.
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