Newsletter – September 26, 2025
In the picture above, Tabitha waits patiently outside the trap.
“I can wait here all day,” she seems to say. “How about you?”
“Just go in, Tabby, so the vet can help you.”
It was a game of chess that could only continue if she made the next move.
As I wrote last week in “Fear of the Unknown,” Tabby had what looked like a piece of raw meat hanging out from under her tail. If we ignored it and it got infected she’d probably die, as would the three-week old kittens she had nested somewhere in the woods.
On the phone, I asked the vet how often three-week old kittens needed to feed. The answer: “They need to nurse every few hours.”
We had replaced the food holder in the cage with something much smaller. Something that would require her to step on the metal plate and trigger the door to shut.
“Nice fresh canned food, Tabitha,” we murmured from indoors.
After forty-five minutes of waiting, she entered the cage. She stepped on the plate and the door slammed shut. It was GO time!
My wife and I had prepared for this moment. An old towel to cover the cage and another one under it. We didn’t know if Tabby would scared-pee or, as the expression goes, get pissed off. No problem with that, thankfully.
We got her to the Emergency Vet Care at Purdue University where she refused to cooperate. She’d never been touched by a human being! They had to put her under just to examine at her.
I’ve heard of a prolapsed uterus after childbirth, but I’d never heard of a prolapsed colon. Apparently it’s not uncommon with outdoor cats who have worms. Inside the cat’s guts things can get so backed-up that a cat will strain enough to push out part of the colon. That was the “raw meat” we saw under Tabby’s tail.
While Tabitha was asleep, they restored the colon and used sutures to hold it in place. Non-dissolving sutures that encircled the “tube” of the colon. She would need to eat food with stool softener to have successful poops. They told us to bring her back in two weeks to have the sutures removed.
I’ve found that being a pet owner, a home owner, a car owner, and a parent, comes with a lot of choices and responsibilities. Not to mention a thorough education in how things work.
If we took Tabby back home and let her go, would she ever trust us again? Would she return to eat the medicated food? If we kept her in captivity we could make sure she did. But if we didn’t let her go, the newborn kittens would starve to death.
We decided to trust her to trust us.
Before releasing her, we fed her medicated food inside the cage and then we opened it up to let her go.
Next Week: Part Three
TTFN
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My middle grade novel, The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles is available through The BookBaby Bookshop at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-most-amazing-museum-of-los-angeles
Eric Margerum 