Apologies that there was no blog last week.  

This week will be the shortest blog ever and unusually goes against everything I have written before as being a sad Friday Story.

Stop now if you wish.

Hopefully this story will have a happy ending but sadly that won’t be today. It involves one of the main protagonists of my story, so it is hard for me to avoid.

Last Sunday at 11.30pm I heard one of our terrible two come through the cat flap as usual. I looked down the hall to check that they hadn’t brought us a late night present and the coast was clear.

The cat moved down the hall towards me and I realised that something wasn’t right.

As he reached me – he started to call to me and looked at me with a very fraught look in his eye. This cat is the one that always sounds like he is straining his voice, and is the friendlier one of the two.

It was then I realised that although he was moving, he was actually pulling himself along on his front two legs whilst his back legs and tail were immobile.

As he tried to go further, he toppled over and he continued to drag himself onwards.

Finally, he reached our front room and he sat, swaying from side to side, trying to keep upright.

I reached for him and picked him up, he purred loudly as he cuddled into my neck, but his legs hung still and his tail drooped like a dead squirrel.

I stood in disbelief. Not only, could I not believe what had happened to him, I couldn’t explain it either. There was no visible injury to his back, just stillness. I noticed he had blood on his mouth and his paw was scraped.

Quickly we phoned the hospital, and took him in.

As we drove to the hospital, a police van zoomed up behind us with its blue lights flashing. For a split second it felt like he was stopping us, but then it flashed by leaving us trailing in its wake.

We reached the hospital and the vet let us in. She soon looked him over and was none the wiser. “I think it is an RTA”, she said. (Road Traffic Accident)

Immediately, she suggested he would have to stay in for observation.

When you care deeply for something, there is nothing you won’t do for it. However, there was nothing we could do except stand and stare. The poor helpless creature just stared back, purring but still.

We went to the counter to register him and were immediately confronted with a request for £800. “Wow, you didn’t mess around”, I thought. Somehow family pets make you such an easy target. You will pay anything for them to sort them out, and although it sounds cynical, vets know it.

We left the cat and went home, stunned by events and not sure what would happen next.

I won’t bore you with the gory details, but the hospital has now used every machine at their disposal. X-ray, CT scan, MRI scan, you name it they have tried it out. The poor thing was given a general anaesthetic more times in a week than most people have in a lifetime.

And they still don’t know for certain what is wrong with him.

He can’t walk and he can’t look after himself. But they have got full value from our insurance policy. How can you justify charging £6,000 in a week with no real certainty of the diagnosis or cure?

In this day and age with all our technology, we still know so little about life. It seems rather criminal to me that someone can have you over a barrel for your health or the health of a loved one. But I suppose that is what it must be like without the NHS if you are severely ill in America and have no insurance.

Sadly, life is never certain, but somehow you would expect with all the toys at their disposal, they might have a good idea by now.

On Monday they sent him home - fantastic.

A slipped disc they surmised.

“Lock him in a cage, don’t let him move much and he might get better in 5 weeks”.

It is so hard to do that when he can’t speak or let you know where it hurts, but he lies and cries when you close the cage door at night, and he looks at you with those eyes as if to say, “Why are you doing this to me?”.

My better half has had to cope with this all week, and it really hurts in a way that you can’t ignore. One gets so close to your family friends, a foolish thing really as they are always going to cause you pain at some point.

He is wearing a special body cover. It keeps a patch on his back that feeds him pain relief. But now he sleeps all day and can barely move off the spot. He knocks over his water and lies in it. He can’t climb onto his toilet so you have to hold him there.

But we live in hope, that he will get better soon. Nature is amazing and finds a way.

Last Sunday, before they doped him up, he was actually trying to walk and slithering around the room at the vets. He was purring and trying to jump onto the table, even though he couldn’t stand on four legs and balance.

Tonight he is lying next to me as I write this blog, on the table, purring away, with his friendly positive face on.  He is clearly not able to move much, but he is letting me know he is ok.

What a special cat he is!

So friendly and placid that they all want to take him home at the vets.

Have a great Weekend!