Hey! Y’all wanna see something cool?
MargaretMeet Seamus
To give him his full name he is Seamus Sloth Winston De Bergerac. Heather and I couldn’t decide on which was more appropriate so we kinda just stuck them all in there. “Seamus” because Heather and I are both raging fans of Archer and when he was first dropped off with us Heather was scolding a loud dog patient about how he needed to hush because he’d “wake up the wee baby” and Seamus just followed from there. And my understanding is that “Sloth” is one of the monster-ish sort of characters from The Goonies but I’ve never seen The Goonies so I wouldn’t know. Andrew, however, agrees that Sloth is appropriate. “Winston” and “De Bergerac” should be pretty self explanatory.
We got a call on the morning of 3/20 from someone we’d never seen before asking about whether we’d euthanize a 3 week old kitten. The kitten, she said, had a cleft palate and while he seemed to be keeping up with his litter mates, they were getting to an age where they were going to wean soon and she was afraid that this little one wouldn’t be able to eat normally. She couldn’t afford the surgery he was going to need to repair his face and she didn’t want him to get sick from aspirating food or waste away and die because he wasn’t getting proper nutrition.
Since I have an interest in surgery (to say the least) and Heather has a soft spot for bottle raising hard luck kittens, we told the woman on the phone to bring the kitten in and surrender him to us. We’d evaluate him and if I thought he was potentially repairable I’d do what I could to repair his face and Heather would take care of the kitten raising. If I didn’t think he could be reconstructed I’d euthanize him.
So she brought him in. 3 weeks old, 13 whole ounces in body weight, and in remarkably good flesh and good health for a kitten with a facial defect.
As it turns out, kitten doesn’t have a cleft palate! Whoopee!
Kitten has a cleft nose, of course, and possibly a partially cleft face – thus the third set of whiskers – but the palate is intact. So Heather is on Mommy Kitty duty, Seamus is gaining weight appropriately, and I’m burning up the internet posting photos and dragooning specialists on VIN to help me plan out how and when to reconstruct this face. I’m very excited.
And I already have one dental specialist interested in coming to observe and/or help with the procedure whenever it happens.
God I love what I do!
Besides, how could you not go completely gaga over this little spottybelly?