I just returned from a 'working vacation' and am a bit behind on my blogging...
On Tuesday, August 17th, Feral Fixers volunteers brought 13 more cats to the PAWS-Chicago Spay/Neuter clinic to be TNR'd.
9 of them were ferals while the other 4 were 'friendly ferals'... One of the friendly ferals was a beautiful chocolate smoke kitten who has a home already, and another was an almost completely white 6 month old who had obviously been abandoned as he is very affectionate! Snowball also had a hernia that PAWS repaired for us.
Super volunteer Judy took the cats in and super-volunteer Mary picked them up. Thanks Judy! Thanks Mary!
On Sunday, August 22nd, super-volunteer Jennifer brought 5 more cats to the PAWS clinic (Thanks Jennifer!) while I picked them up and brought them back to Tammy's. One had a severe wound on its face which we asked the PAWS people to take a look at. When I returned to pick the cats up, I was told that it was one of the worst wounds they had ever seen on a cat. Much of its cheek had been eaten away by maggots - the maggots were still in the wound and there was a lot of necrotic (dead) tissue. The PAWS people cleaned out the mess and the maggots, snipped out the necrotic flesh, stitched the wound closed with dissolvable sutures and gave the cat a shot of Convenia (a long-acting antibiotic). The cat must have been in absolute torment - and the PAWS vets were real heros here (as they are so often for us and for the cats). THANK YOU PAWS!
And today, August 24th, we took in 10 more ferals to be TNR'd. We also took in Flicka, a friendly kitten that had been spayed in our Sunday batch, but had developed a lump about the size of a golf ball around it's incision area. We were fortunate to get it to a vet who took an X-Ray for us and then we brought that kitten and the X-Ray back to PAWS to see what was going on. The surgical vet spotted a suture floating around in the fluid sack that had developed over it's incision - this was almost certainly 'self-inflicted'. When I brought the kitten in, one of the PAWS Vet techs came in to take a look at it and exclaimed that "I remember this one". It seems that this kitten did not gradually wake up from the anesthesia but did so all at once and with a spastic type leap. It is probable that the cat loosened it's suture at this point and then worked itself free of the muscle tissue. The PAWS vets did minor surgery on this kitten, drained the fluid sack and implanted a new suture. She now looks like she's doing just fine.
So all told, 28 more cats. This gives us a total of 83 cats TNR'd for this month (including our 2,000th cat!), 550 for this year and 2,029 overall.