Stinky
He showed up on the front step to the townhouse out of the blue. The cutest kitten EVER (I may be a touch biased, admittedly), a poor little forlorn flame-point himmy-ish kitten. He’d try to sneak in the door when people were coming home. We figured he must have a home; NO ONE would be able to ditch this adorable face, right?
After a couple days, we gave up and let him in, because we are the picture of self-restraint toward possibly abandoned critters. Hell, we would have brought him in the first day but didn’t want to effectively steal him.
He soon took over the entire house and everyone in it. OK, the other cats merely tolerated him. Jen noticed that his back-end was rather dirty and so set about bathing him.
That was when she discovered a problem: he appeared to have a very bad wound. “Under his tail,” if you get my meaning.
She finished cleaning him as best she could and set up a vet appointment for him. (All the while, Stinky remained as friendly as if he’d been laying uninjured on a favourite person’s lap.) The vet did not give Jen much good news. Stinky had a torn sphincter, which is not nearly as funny as it sounds. Still, they did surgery on his poor lil bum, and Jen tended to his healing rectum. She is a much bigger person than me; I was grossed out just hearing about it. It involved Vaseline, rubber gloves, poop pulling…and let’s leave it at that. Jen deserves some sort of award. A large award.
For all of this, Stinky was an incredibly happy and friendly kitten. He claimed Josh as his person, and Jen and I suspect it was because much like Stinky, Josh’s socks had a tendency to smell really foul, so they were like his comrades in arms. Yes, cats who can start a loaf, but not fully push it out or pinch it off tend to be a tad ripe.
Stinky and Josh
Jen pretty much devoted herself to trying to make Stinky better. Poor lil guy tried to hide when in pain from a half dislodged turd, but he wasn’t difficult to find, you just had to follow your nose. Jen would clean him up and he’d be back to his happy lil self again.
He loved to snuggle under the blankets with people, Josh was always his first choice, so a lot of the time he’d be in my room, unfortunately the lack of proper sphincter control led to erm, presents being left. I sleep FAR too heavily. How do I know this? Well, have you ever rolled over as you were waking up onto a cold somewhat firm but still moist cat turd? I have… I was not happy let me tell you. Still, he was worth the risk…
You know, the more I write about him, the less I want to finish. It’s as though, by not finishing the story, I can pretend nothing bad happened, I can just focus on the good memories and pretend that’s all there were. In the end though, he couldn’t be saved. His rear-end started healing shut; Jen had it operated on again, but it started to do the same thing. It was decided that it was not fair to put him through that over and over with all signs pointing to him not healing properly. He was in pain that was worsening with each attempt to help him, yet he still stayed sweet, but the balance between his suffering and his enjoying life had tipped the wrong way with no real likelihood of improving. It wasn’t fair to make him endure it because we couldn’t let him go. And it was damned near impossible to give him up, even Josh, who has no real care either way for cats, still wishes he could have Stinky back. He was special, the few months we had him for still affect us in ways far exceeding the impact he had the time to make.
