Flowerbelle

Always so proper!



....but so happy!

Sure. Poor baby was in very bad shape when rescued. A couple brought her to the vet when Gary happened to be there. They found her in a liquor store parking lot. Obviously the vet staff told them they'd have to take financial responsibility for her - so they were going to drop her back off where the found her! Gary chased them down, grabbed the cat, and gave them a piece of his mind.

She was badly sunburned, parasite infested, had been attacked by something and had to have stitches in her leg, had herpes so bad her eyes were glued shut. She had to be tube fed, and the vet didn't think she was going to make it. She was in the hospital for three weeks before we brought her home.

We fought for 7 months to save her eye - and finally we made the decision (at the vet's recommendation) to have it out. But for months, we had to medicate her 11x a day for various things.... she had numerous little surgeries - sewing her eye shut with meds in it... she had some strange parasite in her neck that had to be removed... she almost died (again) from lung worm - never before seen in this county (and which can only be gotten from eating snails. Even the vet was about to cry at that one!).

...and she's deaf. She's not blue-eyed, it's not genetic. She can hear a few frequencies - her deafness is probably from the herpes having done so much damage. She lived mostly in our bed for about the first month - poor thing was just sooooooo sick. Gary used to carry her to the litter box, and we fed her water out of a bottle cap. A "treat" she still loves to this day. She wakes me up with a paw in the eye for her "bottle cap" water "treat" (Being deaf, she "talks" a lot with her paw - though it doesn't stop her from meowing up a storm either ).



This particular picture was taken the day before the surgery to have it out - and this was after treating it for seven months:




Here's after the surgery to have the weird parasite thing removed:





She weighs 7 pounds fully grown - and she has the daintiest little feet! She is very prim and proper when sitting or cleaning - always keeps her tail wrapped around her. But she's a little imp - and we'll always think of her as a little kitten, because she still runs around here like one. Thank goodness she is SO cute - and has the cutest personality - because she does like to be a bad girl too!

...but here's another pic of the regal side of Flowerbelle.

The other side of Flowerbelle.... (one of my favorite pictures! )

...but she still looks so angelic! It's impossible to ever get mad at her!

Happy to be loved and be alive!

Our little deaf girl's "talking paw"- if only we understood her sign language!

Well, she really is a "TCS" cat! We got so much support from everyone here through the whole thing.

In fact... here's the first thread about her! http://www.thecatsite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23845

...and guess what? Chris, if you're reading this - apparently this was happening at the same time as Tuxie's mysterious cystitis problem!

But she's so happy and so healthy now.

I forgot to mention, for those that don't know.... she purred 100% of the time the first few years of her life. Except when sleeping. But she purred eating, she purred playing, and I really have to take a video of her, because she just makes the sweetest chirps and trills. She can also meow - as Nat puts it - at the top of her deaf lungs - but that's rare. She's 6 years old now... but she still purrs... I'd say... about 75% of the time. She likes being picked up in a strange way:



She LOVES this. She loves being lifted up to check out anything high up - she purrs so hard you think she's going to rumble herself apart!

That's so cute and funny!

We finally figured out and are pretty sure that at least part of the reason Flowerbelle loves being high up is because she's deaf - she loves being able to see the whole area.

...and she figured out she could easily jump over to the top of the curtain rods... talk about a heart attack the first time we saw that one. Thankfully she is a little thing.