Mickey could well have been another sad statistic.  Having lived on the streets for years as an undesexed cat he had contracted the FIV virus from fighting for breeding rights with other males.
An affectionate and super friendly boy he was left to carry on as he always had.  We don't understand why and Mickey did not know any different.

By the time he came to our attention his health issues were dragging him down.  Taken home by a rescuer we work with, Mickey needed two or three stages to his rehabilitation.
Desexing and vaccination, nutritious food, antibiotics for his mouth, steroids to control skin inflammation headed the list..

Next came a dental and foster care.  His skin issues were still causing problems so it was back and forth to the vet for more medications.  Initially he had had lice as well as fleas.  Can you imagine what a difference life as an owned cat is like for him?

Mickey was microchipped and adopted in to a real home of his own.  He is here to tell the tale two weeks later!

Left, Mickey when he first came in to care. and before he had his considerable makeover.

Drooling was caused by bad teeth, inflammation and infection in his mouth.

He lost large patches of fur due to skin issues caused by fleas and lice.

​Mickey is all set for a peaceful life.  He has his own bed, his own dish, his own pot of grass!!!

On that fateful day, Ben was dying.  I like to think that those spiritual forces that surround us gathered to watch.  They reviewed his life and saw the misery, the lack of love, the sadness.  It was not his time so they sent a lady on an errand to the house where  strays were left food and she saw him, lying there, already climbing on to that mythical Rainbow Bridge.
He struggled and scratched her but she got him in to a carrier and took him straight to the vet and sent me a text.

It was not feasible to save him I was told by the attending vet in a phone call.  He was too far gone.  His teeth were rotten, his mouth full of ulcers and lesions, he was FIV+ and he fought any attempt to examine  him with what little strength he had left.  'How do you expect him to fight this ? she asked.

All due respect to that vet, her experience and the things she sees daily in these difficult times but we had to try. 
He was put on a drip, given pain relief, medications, bloods taken.
Later that night his vitals plummeted but the spirit people standing by must have whispered in his ear, keep fighting, things will change.
And he did.  By morning he was stabilising.

He spent days in hospital.  All his teeth were removed, he was syringe fed by them, given pain relief, antibiotics.  His was desexed and vaccinated, his ratty tangled painful fur shaved off while having surgery. 

Our vet called me.  She wanted him to come home because he was depressed. We had no room, nobody to foster him.  We had to leave him there for a few more days until we found someone.
And then we did.

Our  foster carer was also a rescuer.  She worked with rescue, fostering mainly mum cats and kittens and orphan kittens for others.  Ben settled in to eat high quality food.  He ate and he ate to begin with, He put weight on his scrawny frame.
There developed a love affair between Ben and his carer but it was not over yet. Ben had breathing difficulties and came back to surgery for more antibiotics and observation.
He needed Entropian surgery for his eyes and came back a third time for that.
Each time it meant a long drive for our volunteer who first found him and later ourselves.
.The love  strengthened, at each separation between Ben and his carer.
Until.....Ben is being adopted by his foster carer.

Enormous thanks to Bronwen Stade, Lex Lexy his carer, the staff at Farifield Road Vet Hospital and the people who donated towards his recovery.  To enable us to rescue more cats like Ben please  see our donation page.

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Suffice it to say that some, if not several of the cats, were named after human counterparts.  My best friend;s mother was called Mona.  At one time when relating stories of her mother's often difficult behavior, she told me that one of the relatives described her mother as being aptly named.

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Mona the cat had ample reason to complain about her lot though.  Found in the shrubbery of the garden, looking emaciated and sick, I had no idea as to what I was going to do. Money was always short and getting more so in the number of cats that were turning up for food.


Feeding her seemed the only option and it soon appeared to be the solution.  She would be waiting on the porch in the morning only to greet me with warning hisses.  I would say 'And good morning to you too' only to receive an even louder hiss in response.


Mona was a tortoiseshell  My first impression was that of a  very elderly  cat but as diet improved her health she dropped several years in a short span of time.
That December  I had bought a cat bed, a soft fluffy  cloud of cushion.  On Christmas Eve I left it on the porch for her..  In the morning of Christmas Day, Mona was lying on it with an expression  of unbelievable  pleasure. What better kind of Christmas present could I have?


Soon though, Mona exhibited  an even fuller belly.  Mona was pregnant.
I reported to John that the male cats don't seem to care what the females look like.  Even if they are ugly like her. 


Mona was not ugly, of course.  As her pregnancy wore on she blossomed but as she did I became increasingly anxious that she be caught before the kittens were born.  Shortly afterwards she seemed to disappear. 


Our young neighbor reported  with dramatic emphasis :
'Someone is feeding Mona and I don't know who!'


It would seem that Mona had found a caring person to look after her.
After a time of absence Mona reappeared one day at feed time.  She stood around watching the other cats eating. then left by the fence into next doors  escape route. She came one more time, seemed satisfied about things and never came back.  She was not pregnant.  She was actually quite beautiful with a glossy dark tortoiseshell coat and clear lovely eyes.


Mona had moved up in the world.  We never saw her again.

Unfortunately I was never able to get a photo of Mona.  The two cats above were part of her family though, Charlie at back died two years ago of kidney failure and his mate Dennis (below) continued to live with us for the past four years.  Sadly we said goodbye just three weeks ago.
https://www.catmintcottagestreetcatrescue.com.au/donate.html

We took on the long road to get his health issues addressed and managed, staying hopeful that one day a special family would make him a part of theirs but remained realistic that it was a big ask.

Last year Faith had  the rest of her teeth out and chest xrays to monitor the extent of the Cancer. Apparently her lungs did not look much worse and my comment to the vet nurse that we had not expected her to live this long extracted this response:

'Neither did we when we saw the xrays of her lungs.

Last Sunday, just a few weeks shy of her third year with us, Faith, 'that palliative care cat' slipped quietly away.

During the early afternoon I went outside to sit in the sun to think.   The day was warm and there was ambience and magic in the air, just the way it was  that very first day that a girl called Faith crossed our path.

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Your donations will allow us to help others like Faith.

https://www.catmintcottagestreetcatrescue.com.au/donate.html​

Photo is of the first cats desexed and housed.  Stormy is back rhs.

 
The sultry day moved on into evening.  Darkness fell.  
Another element crept in to the blackness, unnoticed.  A storm had been building in the west and the first ominous rumble of thunder was sudden, loud and close.

  The kittens!
'They have shelter.' 'they will be alright.'

Tempting fate.

Before we could respond further the storm hit with a ferocious bang.
Lightening lit up the darkness, thunder crashed and the rain came down with a roar, swept by the wind, into hammering relentless sheets of weaponry, great forces  against the windows, doors and roof..

From outside squeals erupted from the kittens, high pitched screams easily heard over the sound of the lashing rain.
We tried to open the front door to get out to them but were driven back by the fury of the deluge sweeping into us, the door wrenched from our hands.
 Outside the squealing continued,   

  Blindly facing the fury, we met it head on with our second desperate attempt, fighting  all the way to get outside.

 In the darkness, Socks huddled in the 'shelter'. Alone. Yoda, pure white,visible and small enough to fit through the wire was caught halfway on his way out of the enclosure.  Even in those desperate moments, being pummeled with heavy rain, Socks wore what seemed to me to be an inscrutable expression of blame.  'You did this'  'Now look.'

The larger kittens were at the other end which puzzled me.  They were fully exposed to the elements and looked half drowned, confused. .  I pulled Yoda from the wire and then started collecting the others into a carrier.  I counted only six.
I went back to Socks, opened another carrier in front of her and was amazed that she jumped in to it.  Remember she was an untouchable cat.

We looked everywhere for the seventh kitten until we had to give up. 
Once inside we took the kittens to the bathroom and bathed them quickly in warm water, dried them and put them in front of the heater in the carrier.

Back outside we went in a fruitless attempt to find the little grey one.  We came back inside, disbelieving that we could have lost her.

I vividly recall sitting on the lounge and saying 'That poor little thing., that poor little thing.'

John stood up  and said 'come on!'   He grabbed the car keys and outside he turned the car headlights on to light up the driveway and encouraged we began to search once more. but there was nothing.   Why did we never have a torch when we needed one?  I looked into the shadows, near the enclosure, I put my hand under it somehow quelling my fear of spiders or other bitey things but could feel nothing.

I ran around the fence into next doors driveway to see if she had been washed under the fence.  I came back around and noticed the solar garden light..  I pulled it out of the ground and ran up the driveway to the enclosure holding it like a giant torch and started to look around the ground when soon I noticed something moving. I saw a tiny form crawling out from underneath the pallet toward the light, soundless, silent, moving toward the light, the size of a mouse.

She's here! I found her!  she's alive!!

Thinking back to that time, it is easy to realize that certain decisions I made were wrong. Having the benefit of hindsight gives great clarity to the errors of what was, after all, a learning experience,

Having Socks and her now six kittens in a rabbit hutch was not kind but the best we could do. We were at work all day and when home, the older kittens were released for play. We could not release Socks, she still needed desexing and we would have had difficulty in trapping her again. Even so she did not appear greatly affected.

The catrun had at last been delivered and stood waiting for us to erect it.

In its original location this catrun was  inspiring. The house was at Stanmore and there was an exit in the back of the house for the cats, who then had a walk tunnel around the corner attached to the wall, then upwards to the roof where the catnip cage was erected and overlooking the rooftops of neighbors and the trees of other backyards,

The erection of the run at our house was not that simple. Nothing seemed to fit. Every part of the extension was at odds with what we wanted it for. There was no roof on the main enclosure, therefor there was no  shelter from the weather.

I managed to convince John that we should go and collect an old cupboard I had seen abandoned on the footpath at Newbridge Raod, Liverpool. I had been watching this cupboard for weeks as I walked to  work from the station.  So we drove to Liverpool to collect it.  The day was very hot and humid. We were cranky and sweating profusely.  The car was old and had no air conditioning making us weary at each problem that presented itself.

When we arrived the cupboard didn't fit in the car and a certain man got crankier.  I was not going to give up.  I really wanted that cupboard!! I was going to make it fit and I was going to convince John that it could. So what if I rode home in the passenger seat with two inches of space from my nose to the dashboard?  it was my nose!

Worse was to come. When we arrived back home the cupboard wouldn't fit through the door of the catnip cage. Our son called in and watched the debacle not to mention the arguing!  I looked at the wire roof and suggested it might be removable.
Thankfully it was, so the cupboard was lowered in via the top.

Feeling much happier, we arranged bedding, litter trays and water.  Socks and her six kittens were brought  out to their new spacious quarters and we felt a little smug at the progress.

The kittens were impressed, those of them who were running and jumping.  Socks looked less convinced but at that stage had not realized that the shelves above her would enable her to separate herself from them.

After hours of struggling with so many complications we were fairly worn out.  A Midsummer heatwave sapped our energy but we had  overcome many obstacles.

Persistence was the key!!   By late afternoon we were back inside and I stood in the now spacious lounge room where I proceeded  to tempt fate and said those awful words.  With a wave  of my arm, like an actor in a Shakespearean play I said out loud....

​"I don't care what happens now, I am just so pleased to have them out of the lounge room at last."

Fate cupped her ear to listen more closely. 

What could I have been thinking?
Within hours they were back in there.

(to be continued)
Below, we later had another cat enclosure built (left) and used the extensions as a bridge across.