The Tabby That Changed Its Spots (Strokes in Pets)

Member Name: Mad_Wicca

Product:	Strokes in Pets
Date:	03/09/01 (2537 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A dedicated organisation that save thousands of cats each year.

Disadvantages: None.

Leo came to us from the Cats Protection League five years ago. He was a tiny fluff of a kitten, a ticked tabby with beautifully symmetrical black blotches and swirls where you would have expected plain old stripes. Even as a tot he had huge green eyes that never missed a thing that was going on.

To say he had had a bad start in life would be putting it mildly. He had been born on the stone kitchen floor of a large, rambling old house that belonged to a rather pompous man. This man felt that it was his cats natural right to have litter after litter of kittens, he wanted to keep her genes going, and so he refused to have her spayed. When Leo and his brothers and sisters popped into the world the man chose the two that he most liked, Leo and his almost identical brother, and drowned the rest. He did this with every litter.

The cat and her kittens were left to fend for themselves on the cold, hard stone floor, no bedding and not much human contact. When it was time for the kittens to be weaned from their mother they were fed on only Wensleydale cheese. By the time the kittens were big enough to start exploring the kitchen the man decided that they were ready for the next phase in their lives and he did what he had always done; he rang a volunteer from the CPL.

Now this volunteer had dealt with the man before and she asked him if he had drowned the rest of the litter. Of course, he replied that he had. For the hundredth time the volunteer begged him to ring her when his cat had kittens and she would take the ones he didn't want, even if they were only a few hours old. The man replied that he would think about it, but in the meantime he had two more for her to find homes for, he would deliver them to her tomorrow.

The next day the man put the two kittens into a cardboard box, which he taped up and put to one side. There were no airholes in the cardboard box and they sat there, in the dark, from 9am until the man dropped them at the
volunteers home at 1pm that same afternoon. To the volunteers relief the two kittens seemed no worse off for their prolonged confinement and they fitted in well with the rough and tumble of a house full of cats.

It was a hard choice between Leo and his brother, but my husband and myself liked the 'spectacles' around Leo's enormous green eyes, his little cream coloured chin and the way his teeny pink nose seemed broader than other cats, giving his face an unusual oval shape and his mouth a tiny smile. And so he was the one who came home with us.

Our other CPL cat, Alfie, fell in love with Leo as soon as he saw him, although he seems to do that with anything that has four feet and fluff! Alfie brought Leo his toys, cleaned him, showed him around the litter tray and the best places to sleep in the house. It all seemed too much for Leo and so he decide to take a poo on my husbands trousers!

As the days and weeks passed Leo's personality began to emerge to us. He loved Alfie and followed him everywhere, rushing over to him whenever he felt playful or overawed by something new, always reassured by a couple of licks round his chops. With us he was more reluctant, never wanting to come and sit on our laps, always hating to be picked up or petted. We knew about his start in life and that he needed time to settle down and so we waited patiently.

I will never forget the first time he voluntarily sat on my knee. Alfie had just arrived back from the vets after being neutered and Leo took one sniff at him, raised his hackles and ran off to a dark corner. Alfie didn't smell like Alfie anymore.

Leo sat huddled in the corner of the room, shaking and looking scared to death. Slowly I sat on the floor next to him, my hands staying down by my sides, and I began to talk to him softly. After about an hour of this Leo slowly crawled across the floor and up on to my lap, still shaking. Gently I ran a finger over his back a
nd I suddenly felt a rhythmic purring against my legs.

We must have sat like that for an hour or more, until Leo finally plucked up enough courage to have another sniff at Alfie. By this time Alfie had come around from the anaesthetic and it didn't take Leo long to realise that his beloved friend was back. I felt as though I had made a major breakthrough with Leo and that he would warm to my husband and myself a bit more. But it was not to be. The next day he was just as aloof as ever and as time passed we realised this was Leo, this was his personality. But even so we still loved him, he was still our boy.

One day, when Leo was about two years old, he came strolling through the lounge and went to jump onto the arm of the settee, on which I was sitting reading a book. Crouching down, he wiggled his rear end a couple of times, sized up the height and leapt. In midair he suddenly seemed to go totally off course and ended up hitting the arm of the settee and sliding gracelessly to the floor. As all cats will, he righted himself quickly and stalked off in way that suggested that was what he had intended to do all along.

At the time I had thought it odd that he should miss, what was for him, such an easy target. But I supposed that, like humans, cats couldn't get it right everytime, and so I thought no more of it that day. The next morning Leo was waiting for me on the landing, as usual, when I came out of the bedroom. I headed down the stairs to give them their breakfast and Leo trotted down in front of me. Straight away I could see that something was wrong with him.

As he headed down the stairs he was weaving from side to side, unable to keep a straight line. His back legs seemed to be going faster than his front, trying to overtake his head, and forcing him to go faster and faster down the stairs, but the faster he went the more his back legs kept swinging round. He was going so fast that in the end he missed the bottom step
and fell in a heap.

I had been frozen in my tracks, watching all this from the top of the stairs. I had never seen anything like it before and knew there was something seriously wrong with Leo. His landing on the hall carpet brought me too my senses and I raced down the stairs after him. However, by the time I had reached the bottom Leo had recovered and was up and away to the kitchen, wanting nothing but his breakfast.

I inspected him closely, persuading him to walk up and down the kitchen. How odd I must have seemed to someone looking through my kitchen window that morning; a rather scared looking woman in her dressing gown, with wild, uncombed hair, talking to herself whilst walking backwards and forwards tapping a spoon against a tin of cat food! Still, I didn't care, my mind could only think about one thing; what was wrong with Leo?

Whatever had been wrong with him on the stairs there seemed no sign of it now in the kitchen. He was his usual self, desperate for breakfast, but walking and moving normally. However, I wasn't convinced and myself and my husband kept a close eye on him all day. By the afternoon we noticed that every now and again Leo would stumble slightly while he walked, or was trying to get up onto something. Sometimes he seemed to have no control of his back legs and they would cross over one another, causing him to trip. Then the head nodding started.

I was watching Leo through the kitchen door, whilst trying to wash the dishes, and for a moment I thought he was just cleaning himself. When I had finished I went into the lounge and saw that Leo wasn't cleaning himself, he was just sitting in the middle of the lounge floor, his head nodding ever so slightly up and down, sometimes from side to side. Kneeling down by him to get a closer look I saw that his eyes couldn't focus on me, he knew I was there but he would look at a point just to the left or the right of me, over my shoulder.

As
I talked to him he stood up to come nearer to me, and as he did so his back legs swung round and he stumbled over. In the matter of a few hours he seemed to have suddenly got incredibly worse. I called to my husband and it was out with the cat carrier, on with our coats and off down the vets, with one wobbly cat protesting very loudly.

Once in the surgery we explained to the vet what had been going on and then he asked us to get Leo out of the carrier. Now Leo has always been one of those embarrassing animals where, as soon as they get within two feet of a vet, all symptoms of the life threatening illness they were displaying naught but a second ago seem to have miraculously cleared up. Not so this time. He stumbled onto the examining table, head nodding gently around as he tried to get his bearings.

The vet gave him a thorough examination whilst my husband and I clutched each others sweaty palms and expected the worse. Finally the vet told us that Leo had had a stroke. We were stunned. A stroke? But he's only two? How could this have happened? What could be done for him? Would he be like this forever?

Thankfully the vet informed us that strokes in cats are not like strokes in humans. After a course of medication Leo would be fine, all symptoms would disappear and he would be back to normal. We heaved a sigh of relief and took a course of pills and our stroke-addled, wobbly, protesting cat back home.

At the end of his treatment, which was the course of tablets over two weeks, Leo was back to his normal self. Or rather, the wobbling, stumbling and head nodding disappeared, but Leo himself was not back to normal in every sense of the word, in fact Leo never would be back to normal. Don't get me wrong, he was a fine, healthy cat, running and leaping about with the best of them, but something in Leo had changed.

Suddenly he wanted to sit on our laps, curl in and out of our legs like a tabby snake and let us pet him
and tickle his tummy. We were honoured with slow blinks, chirrups, head rubs and his presence in our bed. He stopped going out as much, preferring to hang around the house, and us. Alfie he stilled loved as much as he always had, but suddenly he was letting us into his world as well.

For a while we thought this wouldn't last, that it might be a side effect to the drugs he had been taking, but three years on he is still the same, the only thing he doesn't like at all is to be picked up and held, so we let him off on that one and don't do it. But aside from that it has been like discovering another cat, still Leo but a new and improved version.

A year after his first stoke Leo had another. This time, when he started wobbling and nodding, we knew what we were dealing with, and like the first time, he recovered again with the help of the vet and a lot of loving care. Two years have passed since then and so far no more strokes, and his new personality seems here to stay.

After all that has happened to Leo I still don't know very much about strokes in cats, apart from what the vet had told us. I've looked it up in my many cat books and on the internet but have found nothing that can tell me about it in any detail, if at all. Even though it does clear up in cats it is a frightening thing to watch your beloved pet go through, not knowing what is causing these extreme symptoms, or whether it is life threatening.

What Leo went through may have changed him to a more loving, approachable, relaxed cat, but if I could have had him how he used to be, and spared him his strokes I would have done it in a heartbeat. Yet even with his major health problems I know that if it wasn't for the dedication of the volunteers at the CPL we would never have had such a fantastic cat as Leo in our lives to start with.

Three of our four cats have come to us from the CPL. The same woman that rescued Leo and his brother has alwa
ys been a great help to us, urging us to telephone her, day or night, whenever we needed any advice, or just to let her know how the cats were doing. Without her, and many others like her, I dread to think what could have happened to Leo.

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