My first cat, a beautiful tortoiseshell-and-white girl called Sunday, was injured when she was a kitten. We don’t know what happened, whether she was involved in a car accident or kicked by a drunk from the pub down the road, but I remember coming home from school one day, and having Sunday run up the hill to greet me as normal. But something was wrong with her back legs – she couldn’t keep upright and kept flopping over as she ran.
We took her to the vets and discovered that something awful had happened to her hind quarters. She was no longer able to pee unaided, and her tail was paralysed. She should have been put to sleep that evening, but the vet thought she appeared to be unconcerned about it, and she was such a lovely cat that she was given a second chance. She was given painkillers and we were taught how to squeeze her bladder to make her pee mechanically.
After a few days, a miracle happened. She learned to pee by herself again, and she could walk and run without falling over. After a month you wouldn’t know that anything was wrong with her apart from her tail which remained paralysed apart from the muscles at the base of the tail, which meant she could raise it to half mast in greeting. Also, she couldn’t feel a thing that happened to it.
Fast forward 14 years. Sunday’s an old lady now (and she would live a good few years longer yet) but she’s still as lively as she was when she was younger. We’ve moved out to a house in High Brooms, and she’s having great fun patrolling the fish pond and the gardens around us. One evening she came in through the French windows, chirruped a greeting and jumped up onto the back of the sofa for a pet and a nuzzle. As I stroked her I realised her tail was wet. No, not wet… covered in blood. And Sunday is completely unconcerned and purring her head off.
She ended up with the kind of heavy bandage that Jones is currently sporting. Sadly, her tail went septic and half of it had to be amputated, but once again she made a full recovery, and was just as happy with half a useless tail as she was with an entire one.
