Jezebelle

All growing up, we had a cat named Calico, who "ran away" when she was about 16 years old. About 3 years later, my sister decided she wanted another cat and went to the local shelter to rescue one. Our previous cat, as her name suggests, was a beautiful calico cat and my sister decided on another tortoiseshell, Jezebelle, who was a six-month-old rescue kitten from an abusive home (estimated date of birth was May, 1997).

When she brought Jezebelle home and told me the name she and her friend had come up with, I asked her if she knew what it meant because the Jezebel in the Bible was a prostitute who was torn apart by wild dogs, so I didn't think that was the best name for a cat. It ended up being too late and no mater how hard I tried over the years, the name stuck till her dying day, even though the majority of the time, I called her "Little Kat" or just plain "Kat."

The story of how I ended up with her starts with Patrick. When my sister got Jezebelle, Patrick was about a year and a half old at the time, so Patrick stayed in my room and Jezebelle stayed in my sister's room for the first couple of days....or so we thought. About three days after getting Jezebelle, I came home from school one day and found her sleeping with Patrick in my room. Patrick woke up when I came in, looked over, saw this foreign cat sleeping next to him, and he wasn't thrilled. Surprisingly, no fight broke out, but he did get up and walk away from her. Over the next few days, every time Patrick would fall asleep, Jezebelle would take the opportunity to sneak up on him and curl up next to him. She was relentless and after a couple of weeks of this, both my sister and I gave up and realized there was no separating Jezebelle from Patrick. She was now Patrick's cat.

My Little Kat was re-joined with her beloved Patrick at Rainbow Bridge on December 6, 2010.

Phoenix

After my sister first got her, she took Jezebelle to the vet to get fixed. The vet discovered an abscess on her back from a previous injury sustained with her old owners. Since she had to be on antibiotics, we had to hold off on getting her fixed. Almost immediately after that first visit to the vet, she got out of the house by pushing a screen out of a window and jumping down. She was gone overnight and we thought it was the trauma of being adopted, going to the vet's, getting shots, and being on antibiotics all within a two-day span. The next morning, she was right back in the house, as if she'd never left. After her antibiotics were complete, my sister took her back in to get fixed. That is when the vet asked her if she wanted to keep the kittens. Kittens?? Jezebelle was pregnant at 6 months old! (No, Patrick was fixed so they weren't his.)

Jezebelle was already a tiny cat to begin with. When my sister rescued her, the shelter said that she had stunted growth due to being abused. Not sure how true that was, but she never got bigger than five pounds and remained around the size of a 6-month-old kitten for her entire life. So, when it came time to give birth to her litter, three of the four kittens never survived the birth. The fourth kitten, Phoenix, only survived because he was the runt of the litter. I hate to say it, but she wasn't a very attentive mother. She was constantly bringing me Phoenix and dropping him in my lap so she could run off somewhere else and do her own thing. If I wasn't around, she would ditch Phoenix with Patrick. In fact, I think Patrick spent more time with her baby kitten than she did.

When Phoenix was about two weeks old, it seemed he stopped "thriving" so we took him to the vet. The vet said there wasn't much he could do because the kitten was so little and sometimes this just happens. It's been so long now, I'm not even sure what the ultimate diagnosis was, but a couple of days later, Phoenix passed on from "fading kitten syndrome" and was buried with his siblings, Eros, Psyche, and Anteros.