Our passion is helping abandoned kittens find loving homes.
Hollister, CA
95023
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It was Fall 2018 when I saw a skinny mangy kitten trying to get into a trash can. My heart sunk as I saw the poor thing struggle, so I stopped to offer the kitten some wet food. They scattered under a deck as I approached, but once they caught a whiff of a delicious meal the kitten slowly creeped back into view. Wide eyes, and scattered movement drew it in while I was still trying to get the lid off the can. I hovered a hand over the meal and let the poor thing eat. She was all bone, just little tufts of hair here and there, and open lesions from nose to tail. I didn’t even think about it as I grabbed her scruff and drew the hairless feral kitten to my chest.
She bit into my hand and scratched at my wrist as I went to my car. Kids passing paused to offer help, and happily threw away the empty cat food can and opened my car door for me. Blood dripped down from my bite, but I didn’t notice because I was fixated on the cat’s wounds. At first she looked like someone had hurt her, with boiled water.
Luckily for the kitten it was merely ringworm. Sadly I didn’t find this out until I had already been exposed long enough to catch the fungus myself. We isolated her to get acclimated to our home, but that didn’t stop our other cats playing with her under the door and getting some ringworm too before we had fully figured out what was wrong. At first we panicked, it sounded so bad, “ringworm”, as if some actual bug was crawling around under our skin! Nope, it was just a simple fungus just like jock-itch or athlete's foot. Akiko is what we named her, it’s got roots in Japanese to ‘orphaned but lucky’. She recovered within a month, between myself and the cats it happened to stick around for about 2 months before we finally got rid of it. We also replaced our main couch because it was old and we wanted to remove the only cloth in the house we couldn’t wash, but otherwise it was as simple as fighting germs.
I did ended up with a pretty bad case of ringworm on me that included my face, and I missed some work. I had the worst boss ever tell me, “Did you learn your lesson? Stop helping cats!” in frustration I missed work, even though it was the first time I had taken any days off in the three years I worked there.
