Mali, short for Amalia, is a rescue cat who has had more than her fair share of trauma in her life. She is a very special little cat and had made a lovely addition to the house. I went to the rescue to look at getting a third cat as we had space and love to give, and was adamant I didn’t want a cat with “issues”. I met lots of other cats and then right at the end the lady from the rescue introduced me to her. She came from Romania, and arrived pregnant. She soon after her arrival gave birth to two kittens, but unfortunately only one of them made it. Once she had finished feeding her daughter Megan (who is now happily rehomed with a friend) she went to be spayed and have her tail removed as it was badly damaged and broken. The vets don’t know whether she was kicked or run over, but it was serious enough that it needed to be removed. She was going to be spayed at the same time. During the operation, her tail was removed but they couldn’t find one of her ovaries. The lady at the rescue explained all this to me when I met her, and much as I didn’t want a cat with problems, there was something about her.
The next day I called the vets that she was registered with and asked if they could give any information about the consequences of that missing ovary was. I knew they couldn’t give specific information about the cat to me as I wasn’t the owner, but amazingly the lady from the rescue was there at the time with another cat and the receptionist asked her for consent for the vet to give me information which of course she agreed to. What are the chances?!
I knew she might need to be spayed again the following year if she went into season, but I decided she was worth the risk.
Just two and a half weeks after getting her (and we were at the vets as her eye was weepy, it was nothing to do with her heart) the vet noticed her heart sounds were muffled. After some investigations, she was diagnosed with a diaphragmatic hernia. She ended up under the same specialist hospital where Scruffy had been put to sleep the previous week for major surgery. Part of her liver, spleen and the missing ovary were in her chest cavity. It wasn’t there before, so there must have been a weekness in the wall of the diaphragm which finally gave up, but she came through the surgery and is now being the kitten she probably never got to be! She loves food and playing!
She still suffers from a weepy eye but in the grand scheme of things, she is doing pretty well!
