I am not a cat fan. One, I’m allergic; I can’t breathe well around one, I sneeze every two minutes when I’m in a house that has a cat and all of a sudden my eyes begin to itch constantly.
Second, cats are just full of themselves. An animal that truly believes that it is better than me is not allowed in my house.
This month, we have a cat in the house. I feel like my head is going to explode most days and when I see the cat, the thought of kicking it is pretty close but the reality of me kicking it is actually closer. One morning, Mama (Pastor’s wife) told us the cat is having babies.
Great… kittens.
Now, kittens are cute, I’ll agree with that but I can’t hold them or be close to them so really, I find no enjoyment out of them.
For some reason, I felt the need to go check out the kittens, so I went into the kitchen and into the storage room thing and I see the mama cat and she darted out the door and didn’t come back. Next to where the mama cat stood was a little kitten still covered in its… well, it looked like as if an alien just gave birth to a miniature, undeveloped alien mouse thing; I assumed it was dead.
Then I heard little ‘meows’ in the dark corner. The mama cat hid the rest of the babies after they were born and I couldn’t get to that corner because of all the junk that was there. So, I went to tell the others and sweet Salah and Eva went to go get the kittens. While they go and get the kittens out of the corner, Eva tells me that the mother is a “horrible mother”. She has had kittens before and they died because she never fed them… she gives birth and then ditches them. Yeah, I’ll kick that cat now.
I go to have lunch and Eva calls out to me “Becky! The other baby is alive!”
My last thought was that the alien baby kitten was still alive, but it was. I came, Eva took off its “covering” and there it was, moving around looking like a blind little mouse. My heart was hooked.
So now, it’s time to figure out how to get the mother to feed her babies. I might not like cats, but these babies needed to live in my book.
The team came up with many ideas ranging from using a syringe to get the milk out of the cat’s breast, hooking the cat up to a milk-pumping machine that I guess we would have somehow find in Uganda, putting milk into an eyedropper that we didn’t have or knocking the cat out so it’ll stay put so the babies can get the milk.
We started with “knocking the cat out so it’ll stay put so the babies can get the milk”.
By the time this plan was able to be put into action, it was already on day 2 since the babies had been born and they haven’t been fed once. So, time is of the essence.
I ask Alyssa for a Benadryl, chop it in half, crush it up, coat a piece of chicken with it and hand it to that stupid cat. We go off to ministry for a couple hours and come back and the first thing I hear is
“Becks, the cat has been out for 5 hours…”
Crap. I killed the cat.
I asked if they checked to see if it was alive and no one said they did so I went to go check on it. A very groggy but not dead cat looked at me with one eye open but then closed it when it realized it was just me.
Sadly, the babies were too weak to latch on.
So, now I’m standing there, listening to this news and I’m so mad that these kittens are going to die; kittens that I really don’t “like” at all yet I’m heartbroken over them!
The kittens did pass away and Eva was upset to tell me. I’m alright, we still have our goat. But though I hate cats, they taught me something:
Even if I may “hate”/strongly dislike something, I’ll try my best to make sure that whatever it may be is taken care of…
I hope this doesn’t mean I’ll have a cat in the future.
