Nutmeg: if you stick around long enough, good things can happen
I was editing some photos of our current foster (Lucky) this morning when I realised that today was the third anniversary of our foster fail first arriving to stay with us. So I figured I would instead share a few photos of Nutmeg - a few of my favourites and a few that capture the long journey that she went on.
Nutmeg (a.k.a. Nutter butter, Twenty-Nine, Nunu, Charging Chuck, General Pants) was out third foster cat and our first and only (so far) post-orthopaedic surgery cat. She had come into RSPCA Queensland (Wacol) with a badly broken left front leg. The wonderful team there operated to try fix the breaks, and she had a metal plate inside her leg holding the broken bones together. Unfortunately the break never healed properly. At one point she went back in for surgery to have the plate removed and for a few weeks had a big bandage on her leg that basically made her leg into a big club leg. She had to stay at the vets a few nights when they removed her bandage - I got to visit her during a volunteer shift and it nearly broke my heart seeing her in there, not being able to explain what was going on, why she couldn’t come back home with us yet.
RSPCA Queensland spent so much time and money trying to repair her little leggy. In the end it became clear that it was never going to fully heal. By that stage she had been living with us for nearly a year. We had spent so much time and energy trying to find someone we new to adopt her, fortunately without success. She had completely won our hearts. And by some miracle, here was a cat that didn’t bully our other little baby cat Cola (more on him another time).
We absolutely love this little girl. My phone is filled with photos of her (but I swear that’s also because she’s so much easier to photograph than the other three black cats).
She absolutely loves to come sit on our laps. She used to be a half-on / half-off lap sitter, but she’s now a full lap girl. She also used to be fully on Team Foster Dad, but since getting her permanent residency she has totally become a little mumma’s girl - she’ll only snuggle under covers with her mumma (traitor!).
She’s learnt targeting (to boop her nose onto targets), she’s learnt to beg with both front paws up, and she gives the daintiest little high fives with her gammy leg.
I am so grateful for all the investment that RSPCA Queensland put into saving her and trying to heal her little leg. It’s absolutely criminal how cheap her adoption fee was compared to how much they spent on her. Of course, we made an extra donation and hopefully my volunteering hours gets us close to breaking even.
