I wrote this over fifteen years ago..
Sometimes a cat will lead them. When we first moved to my wife Alison's hometown, the place where she grew up and lived until her last years of college, there didn't appear to be any certainty to our change. Had we done the right thing? Would life be any better? Should we have stayed in the hustle and bustle of metro Atlanta instead of coming to the slow moving southeast Georgia town of Blackshear? The jobs we had left Atlanta for were not turning out to be quite as promising as we had hoped, and we were living in a storage room at the back of her father's print shop; us, our dog, cat and three birds.
Then one night three months after we had moved down, a tiny pathway to the right answer began to form, led by little cat's feet. It was Sunday evening around nine, and we were driving down Main Street, coming back from a visit with Alison's mother. I saw in my headlights a horrible sight. A cat in the middle of the road, lying in a pool of blood, lifting its head slightly, its eyes caught in the glare of my lights. I could see in those eyes a desperate confusion, totally lost as to what had happened to it. I braked the car just inches from it.
My first instinct was purely selfish. I wanted to go home. This was not our problem. But I knew I couldn't live with myself if I did nothing. Alison and I had to at least get it out of the road.
We got out and looked closer. The cat was no longer moving, but panting fiercely. "What do we do? If we pick it up, we might hurt it worse!," Alison said.
"I don't know," I moaned. "We can't just leave it in the road!"
Just then, a couple in their fifties, who often took evening walks, came by. They commented on how mangled the cat was, and how it might just be best to put it out of its misery. There was a fallen road sign nearby, and the middle-aged man picked it up. "Here," he said. "Let me club it with this."
Neither Alison or I could stomach that, so we came up with a different plan. We used the road sign like a shovel, leveraging the cat onto the sign, and then off the road. The couple then walked on, leaving us with the twisted cat.
I moved our pick-up to the parking lot of a nearby store, and tried to figure out what else to do, if anything. It was Sunday night in a small town. What else was there to do? Who wanted this awful responsibility?
I thought a call to the vet was worth a shot. "Tom! It's Sunday night!," Alison exclaimed. "He's not going to be at his clinic. Even if I got him at home, he's not going to want to come out for a stray cat."
"I know, but we have to at least try. I'll put it in the back of the truck and you go call. If we can't get ahold of the vet, maybe your Dad will know what to do."
Her Dad's shop was only a block away, and she left to make the call. I put the cat in the back of the truck, trying to carefully slide it off the road sign. As it lay in the back of the truck, I began to realize the enormity of our arrogance. It was bleeding from every orifice of its body, including its eyes. Fresh fecal matter came from its rectum, and I thought - this is what happens at the end, isn't it? The only thing showing that it was still alive was its faint but intense panting, sounding like a pregnant woman doing Lamaze.
Ten minutes later, Alison came back with surprising news. "I can't believe it! Doctor Kimbrell is there! He was doing an emergency operation on the dog of an ER technician, and is willing to see the cat!"
Excited by our good fortune, we drove to Dr. Kimbrell's office. Our excitement quickly faded at the prognosis. He felt the cat had little chance of survival, and maybe, especially since it was a stray, it should be euthanized. "Isn't there any other choice?" I asked.
"Well," he answered, "the jaw is broken and will have to be wired shut. I'm not sure it will retain its vision, and there may be severe damage to internal organs. It will take the jaw operation, medication, and boarding, and with all that, it will most likely not survive." And that brought up cost. We were in poor financial shape, with inadequate jobs, and no home of our own. Still, I felt like we had no choice. God had presented us with this small animal, and whether I wanted it or not, I could not abandon it. "We'll pay for it. Whatever it takes." Alison shivered, not because she wanted to abandon it, but because she knew what additional financial pressure it would bring.
The vet agreed to board the cat, and do his best to make it comfortable, and then look at any operation in the morning. After we left, the ER technician, whose dog had had surgery, and observing the cat's condition told the vet, "If you ask me, I wouldn't give that cat one chance out of a hundred." Dr. Kimbrell reluctantly agreed, believing the cat would most likely be dead by Monday Morning.
This concludes Part 1. Keep watching this blog for Part 2!
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