The cat came back...

The cat came back
The very next day
The cat came back
We thought [s]he was a goner
But the cat came back
[S]he just couldn't stay away...


More than a month after my kitty went missing, our building manager called me in the middle of the workday to report that he thought he'd seen her going underneath the building next door. There was a hole in the chicken wire of a ventilation opening, and she'd scrambled through. When I got home, my sweetie and I took turns peering under the house with the flashlight, sprinkling dry food around a number of entrances and enlisting the help of neighbors to try and locate and extract the cat. The building is big, and when we tried to coax the cat out from one side, she'd skitter across, too far away to reach. An hour later it was dark, and our half-baked plans of crawling under the foundation were on hold. I was giving it one last try, calling "Here kitty kitty" and tapping the can of wet food I'd opened, before packing up for the night -- when the wayward feline started yowling back at me. She was hungry! And scared. But determined, it seemed... so a few seemingly-endless moments later, I had an armful of underweight, grimy, probably flea-ridden feline.

I brought her inside and into our apartment, where I promptly quarantined both of us in the bathroom, with the other cat meowing outside the door, confused. She seems to be all in one chunk -- nothing broken or missing, no wounds. Yes, she has fleas. And she needs a bath. And she's lost several pounds -- her ribs and pelvis are palpable. She also has a little bit of a bubbly wheeze when she purrs (and she hasn't really stopped purring), so I'm concerned about that. Would hate for her to have been stuck out in the rain last week developing pneumonia. Tomorrow we'll take her into the vet and get her thoroughly checked out -- and get flea and worm meds, for sure! And then I'll wash the bathmat in VERY hot water. :/

But my kitty is back!!