Donate now in support of our diabetic cat Datura, other cats living with sudden illness, and their human friends.
Early in the summer of 2007, David and I moved in with our best friend Gen. After furnishing and decorating the relatively large 1,800 square foot space, we felt something was missing. With so many cats abandoned, alone, and living in shelters, we wanted to share our space with a feline friend.
Later that summer David and I visited the SPCA in Gatineau, Quebec, while Gen was working at the nearby Museum of Civilization (Now the Museum of Canadian History.)
A young, deaf volunteer brought David and I through the three "cat rooms" at the shelter. We were searching for a one year old, female cat, and the first cat that caught our eye was a very stoic looking, skinny, white-furred blue-eyed cat. We quickly learned from the volunteer that this cat too was deaf, a male with his 4th birthday coming up that August.
When we held him he nuzzled into us and gently purred. We quickly toured the other two rooms but the decision had been made. After a quick consultation with Gen over her lunch break, we returned to the SPCA and adopted "Coco." Figuring he was deaf and would be open to a new name, he was christened "Datura" (after the white flower and Tori Amos song of the same name.)
He immediately adapted to our home, quickly locating all the windows to look out, crevices to hide and sleep in, and beds to make his own.
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Three weeks into his new living arrangement, Datura began to sneeze constantly, drool, become increasingly anti-social and avoided food and water.
We baked fresh fish for him, made "kitty-custard" out of specially formulated milk for cats, and purchased an expensive water cooling and filtration fountain. He continued to refuse to eat.
We made repeated calls to the SPCA who refused to disclose any health information of the other pets that may have shared a disease with him. We brought him to the vet, spending thousands on tests. Everything came back negative.
With dehydration and starvation quickly wasting his small body away, we made a difficult decision to have a feeding tube placed through his nose into his stomach. At this point, some friends, co-workers and family members asked why we didn't "simply" put him down. I asked them what type of person would put down a 3 year old cat who was healthy weeks prior, without even knowing what ailed the poor cat.
Datura eventually had to spend a weekend at the vet's office for monitoring, and after returning home he coughed up his feeding tube. Back at the vet, we were told the next step would be inserting a tube through a hole drilled in his throat. Even at that there was no guarantee he would stay with us much longer because we didn't know what ailed him.
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That day I made an angry, desperate phone call to the Executive Director of the SPCA where we had adopted him. After much insistence, the director finally divulged an outbreak of Panleukopenia. In short, Datura had a terrible viral respiratory infection. Unable to smell food or water, he was starving himself to death.
Once confirmed with our vet, she told us our only hope was to keep him breathing in steam and do our best to make food smell as strong as possible so he could smell it.
We dedicated a room in our apartment as the "kitty hospital" and boiled a kettle in it non-stop for 48 hours, filling the room with steam (and likely ruining the walls). Still not interested in food or water, one day he started to lick my fingertips while I was petting him.
We quickly heated up wet food in the microwave (to make it smell extra strong) and I placed small dollops of hot, wet stinky cat food on each of my fingertips. Those licks of food off my fingertips were the first thing he had willingly eaten in weeks. We were elated.
After a few days of feeding him from our fingertips, he eventually graduated to eating from a spoon (yes, we literally spoon-fed the cat) and soon he was eating from a dish like a normal, healthy cat.
Over the coming months he quickly regained his lost weight and returned to being the energetic, loving and healthy cat we had first met.
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Eight happy years later, Datura has moved twice with us, now settled in our centretown condo in Ottawa. He loves the Hudson Bay box some of my sweaters came in so much that we've begrudgingly allowed it to remain in our living and even added blankets for his comfort. In the summer he's happiest on our balcony with us, dozing-off in the afternoon sun.
His weight loss was dramatic for others who saw him rarely, but so insidious for David and I we insisted he was in good health.
When we took him to our vet, she immediately noticed he had lost so much fat that his muscle tissue was now vanishing. A blood test, urine analysis, and 48 hours later, she confirmed our cat was severely diabetic with blood sugar levels 3x the normal.
While he remains happy and energetic, he needs immediate medical attention in the form of insulin injections and blood glucose monitoring.
No one ever expects their cat to become ill suddenly, and few people have the right resources in place to cover bills, vet visits and other expenses should illness invade their home.
We've created Dat's Dat as a means for our friends, far and wide, known and unknown, to help Datura become a survivor once again. We also want to help other cats and their humans who are faced with the unexpected.
Thanks for shopping and thanks for reading,
Christian and David