He is absolutely beautiful! I am so glad to hear that he's just fine. I have a special place in my heart for kitties. Mine had a terrible start in life. She was wild and born in the woods. The lady who owned the house in front of those woods saw them and posted an ad that if anybody could come and get them they could have them. Something told me to go and I was able to catch two of them, my Lily and her brother. I couldn't catch the third. Her brother went to my ex's parents, who put him outside to live and he got hit by a car (which I was VERY upset about
) and my Lily got extremely sick and almost died. She had so many worms in her tiny little body that it blocked her intestines. We finally got her cleared up after days in the emergency hospital. Then she was spayed at 12 weeks and they left a piece of gauze sponge in her abdomen during the spay. She was extremely unique because she only had one ovary and half of a uterus. The vets had never seen this before and I guess they were so amazed that they forgot to take out the piece of sponge. So at 6 months of age she started to get sick and vomit daily but they could never find anything wrong with her. She was staying with my ex (he was my boyfriend at the time) one weekend and he accidently let her outside. She was attacked by another cat within a few minutes and it bit off a huge chunk of her foot and one of her toes. She was taken to the emergency vet and they sewed her up. I took her back to school with me and her foot just kept getting worse. I took her into the vet 5-6 times and they had to do 2 more surgeries, they could not figure out why her foot wouldn't heal. It was majorly infected but no matter what they did they couldn't fix it. They checked her for an array of diseases, everything was negative, but her white blood count was crazy high. Finally one night she got so sick she wouldn't do anything but lay in the floor on her side and throw up. I rushed her in again and they kept her for 3 days. They couldn't get her to eat, let alone keep anything down, and they couldn't figure out what was wrong. The next step was exploratory surgery before she died, and within 2 minutes of opening her up he found the sponge immediately. He said it was imbedded into the inside of her abdomen, almost like a splinter in a human, highly infected and poisoning her whole body. He said it was probably extrememly painful for her, and she was 9 months old at this time. She had been spayed at 12 weeks, so for 6 months she was enduring this pain. That's why her foot woudl never heal up, because her body was busy fighting that infection within her and didn't have anymore left to fight the foot infection. She would have died if they hadn't found it. The vet who left the sponge in (NOT the same one who did the exploratory sugery and was taking care of her at that point) paid her last vet bill, but didn't offer to pay any up to that point. I thought about sueing but I was just glad my baby was finally ok. I know they didn't do it on purpose but it was so upsetting. Now Lily is 4 years old and doing wonderful, but it was a scary first year for her!