Happy 3rd "Gotcha Day" to Hannah!

Three years ago, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, my husband and I set off to "look" at kitties. I'd been bugging him for a couple of years to get a playmate for Callie, but we lived in a teeny-tiny 1 bedroom apartment (660 sq. ft.) and 2 kitties would've been 1 too many. When we moved into our house in April, 2005, we decided to wait and let Callie get settled in and then get a cat. Mark really wasn't sold on a new cat, but we went to look anyway. We'd already been to the Humane Society and we'd looked at kitties from local rescue groups when they were at the local pet stores, but no kitties really "grabbed" me. I had been perusing Petfinder.com for months whenever I needed a "kitty fix", and saw the cutest kitty at the local pound listed. Off we went on a very cool, windy afternoon to see if this particular kitty was still available for adoption. Of course it wasn't, but we looked at the kitties in the kitty room anyway, certain we wouldn't find a kitty to take home.

I'll never forget that visit. The kitty room was tiny and lined with cages on 3 walls, 3 high and about 5 or 6 cages across. There were teeny tiny kittens crying their heads off and reaching out through the bars. There were older cats cowering in the backs of their cages scared to death. It was really quite sad. We didn't really see any cats that we liked, and were turning to leave when I saw a kitty on the very bottom row of cages, sorta hidden behind the door, scarfing down some food. The poor thing was starving! The attendant took her out of her cage, and that was it for me. For $50.00, not to mention the large amount of money we'd spend on her in the coming weeks, we adopted a precious approximately 7 month old female cat that only weighed 4 lbs. She was microchipped before we left with her in a cardboard carrier provided by the shelter. (See, if we'd really planned on adopting a kitty, we'd have taken our own carrier!!)

Here's Hannah when we brought her home. With me, so you can see how small she was. You can also see the cardboard carrier we brought her home in!



In Mark's lap enjoying the lovin' and attention. She's still a Daddy's girl!



Here she is today, plump, happy, and sassy!





On a side note, we recently found out that Hannah's bacterial infection is caused by the pseudomonas bacteria. We've been researching it online and it doesn't look too good to be totally eradicated from her body. She's been on Zeniquin, an antibiotic, for a week already and has now started an additional 3-week round of it. We're waiting on a call from Dr. Bean to find out more specifically which pseudomonas bacteria is causing her problems and what the prognosis is. From what we've read, most of the pseudomonas bacteria is resistant to drugs in felines, so we might end up treating the symptoms only. We also don't know if it's contagious to our other cat and if she also needs to be on some kind of antibiotic. Being owned by this cat has been a huge educational experience for us.