Rebbie
I was eleven years old the first time I stepped into an animal shelter. The smell of disinfectant was immediate, but it wasn’t too shocking considering everything about the shelter screamed “clean”; white, unscratched walls and then unnaturally bright glow of the fluorescent lights made the shelter seem more like a hospital than a haven for the lost and unwanted.
My brother Michael and I had spent the summer in South Carolina with our father and his girlfriend at the time. Low and behold, his girlfriend’s cat had kittens during the summer and we were promised one since they had trouble finding homes for them. But fate is a cruel mistress and the two of them broke it off just a week before we were supposed to head back up to Michigan. With their falling out, the promise of one of her kittens was thrown out the window.
So here we are, my brother and I bouncing up and down as we were led to the room with the cats. I’m sure my father wasn’t as pleased…show more content… However, we began to notice something was different a couple weeks before his ninth birthday. He was growing skinnier every day, and despite always having food inside his bowl, he refused to eat. At first we thought he was just being picky since he was growing older, but after a short while he began to hide away from his. When he did come out he was frail and exhausted. With the skin on his ears and paws turning yellow, it only took a quick google search to find out it was liver failure. Still, we loved him and we couldn’t just watch him like this anymore, so we prepared for the worst, but hoped for the best as we took him to the vet. We assumed it was either parasites or an infection, maybe even cancer, but the vet’s tests came up dry. We were sent back home with antibiotics and their