To make a long story even longer…

Since Reilly started his job 4 weeks ago, Darwin, our very large kitten (16 months is still a kitten as far as I’m concerned), has been very lonely. We’d get home and he’d purr and cuddle and not let us get anything done and it was all bad because he was all alone during the day.

On Sunday, Reilly and I went to the SPCA and immediately fell in love with Luna. Actually, the name on her cage was Angel Cakes which was obviously the unfortunate result of a very lonely little old lady, but that’s neither here nor there. Luna is a miniature Darwin in colouring, so black with a white nose, belly, and toes. Her info says 9 months but she’s about the size of a typical 4 month kitten. She has her adult teeth so is at least 6 months old, so our vet and we are going with 6 months for age. Tres cute. We scooped her up and took her home.

On Tuesday as part of our initial check up we had Luna routinely tested for Feline Leukemia. Feline Leukemia is an immune disease that is both incurable and contagious. She tested positive.

Tuesday night Luna and Darwin were immediately separated. The disease is spread through saliva and blood, so they could be out together as long as we prevented them from chewing on eachother or eating eachother’s food, which was not an easy task. Being in a loft, separation is not easy. For the night, we set Luna up in the office with her own litter and food and things to cuddle on. We went to bed listening to her cry.

About an hour later we heard a loud thump near our bed, but ignored it as we assumed it was Darwin. Shortly thereafter we heard the same crying, only this time from much closer. We both jumped up in our confused half asleep states to see Luna at the foot of the bed.

Our office has 8 foot high walls with an open ceiling as part of the loft. Inside are some shelves. Luna had climbed the shelves to get herself on top of the attached closet. Then, rather than jump 8 feet (she’s scared to jump 3 off the windowsill), she walked across the kayak that’s resting on top of the entry closet and the bedroom closet. The thump was Luna, landing in the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed.

While she was resilient, this meant only one remaining place to put her while we slept, and that was in the bathroom. The cries only got worse.

Wednesday morning we took her for the blood tests which would confirm how active the virus was. Either way, the result would mean either a long period of separation so we could either vaccinate Darwin, retest her, and still take a huge risk in him getting sick, or it would result in having to find her a new home. Shelters typically put down cats with the disease, but our vet said they’d be able to help us find her a home with another FeLV cat. We’d already fallen in love with her and had no concerns about potentially having to look after an unwell kitty, but the risk of placing Darwin in danger was hard to factor in. 30% this, 30% that. He’s healthy and older than one year which decreases his risk, we could vaccinate him on top, even of the cats who get the virus many never get sick and just carry it, the list of statistics went on and on. Overall, a crappy position to be in. One more night with a crying kitty that we couldn’t console.

Today we rushed home from work to let Luna out and play, and we got the phonecall from the vet a day earlier than we’d expected. The test had come back negative. Completely negative. No antibodies, no virus, no FeLV. She’s completely healthy. The positive result was wrong, the first time they’ve ever had a false result on the test they did. Best of all, we can let them play!

So now, after all of that, I’d like to introduce you to the newest member of our little family. This is Luna, and she’s super affectionate. In fact, she purrs so much that when they needed to listen to her heart at the vet they tried everything including turning the tap on her head to stop her from purring so they could listen, and she continued to purr. Too cute.

Luna

Luna and Darwin

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2004 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.