Feed me, Seymour

He's here!

Tolly joined us Friday night, and has been staying in my office. He's an incredibly sweet and responsive kitty, will come over to see you if you talk to him or even click your tongue at him, and is just so grateful for every scrap of attention we can lavish on him.

The poor guy still has kind of a 'wild animal' look to him - scruffy fur and an underweight physique. We don't know how long he lived in his last environment, before he was rescued and brought to the home of his first foster mama, but it's going to take a while, with good nutrition and proper care, for him to fill out. Things are definitely moving in the right direction, though :)

Progress!

Tolly "has been diagnosed by [the] veterinarian. He had his biopsy last week and the results are in; the vet’s office will fax the results to us. He has an allergic reaction, isolated to his head area. It is not contagious, it is not fungal, and it is not auto immune. He’ll be getting a steroid injection very soon to see if that clears things up. The cause is not determined at this moment, perhaps stress, perhaps some other allergen. But first he’ll get the injection and go from there. Once we see him improving, we’ll touch base again. We’ll coordinate with the vet – once he’s improving we hope to be able to have you foster him, finally!"

Waiting, waiting...

We hope to have Tolly's skin biopsy report back in a few days... in the meantime, here are some pics of Truffle being cute and shiny and enjoying a new mod cat bed from LikeKittysville!

Left handed

We went back by to visit Tolly and drop off some food and toys.

He seemed quite a bit more at ease this time. His foster mother coaxed him out of the closet with one of the catnip mice we'd brought over, and he really seemed to enjoy having us stroke him while he played with the mouse and tried to munch on the catnip. I was so glad to see a bit of his real personality :)

He also seemed to like the EVO food we brought. (It is high quality food and is grain free, so if there's a food allergy involved in his skin issue, this should help.) He wolfed down a bunch of it, and then started playing a game: standing far away from the bowl, he'd extend his paw to fish a few pieces of food out of the dish; then he would find the pieces and gobble them up. He did this over and over, and always with his left hand, so we figure he must be left handed! (Well, they do say black cats are sinister...)

He's been started on a second antibiotic, and his foster mother says that his face looks better than it did. She's still waiting to hear back about the skin test results. (He didn't seem too bothered by it, as far as I could tell, which was good to see.)

It is hard to wait, but it's better for the health of all the kitties involved to make sure everything is resolved ahead of time.