Only eight more lives to go for Mountain the cat, if not less.
The domestic short-hair cat was found last Friday, severely dehydrated and cold, in a shed in Maple Ridge.
“He came in 10 per cent dehydrated, he was emaciated, barely conscious, ice cold. Literally, he was like 33 degrees Celsius, which they should be like 38, 39, basically as low as our thermometers read,” explained Dr. Adrian Walton, veterinarian at Dewdney Animal Hospital, where the cat was taken.
Mountain was in critical distress and Dr. Walton and his team were preparing to put the animal down.
But the person who brought the cat in thought he knew who the owner was. So Walton decided to instead make the cat comfortable to give the owner a chance to say goodbye.
By 5:30 p.m., though, Walton found that person wasn’t the owner.
“I was actually going to come back at 10 o’clock that night and euthanize the cat,” he said.
Then the person who found the cat also found a poster with the cat’s image on it. The owners reached out to Dr. Walton.
Mountain, though, was not doing so well.
The following day, the cat still had a heart beat, but remained freezing cold.
“Literally, my staff were coming to me every hour saying, ‘I think the cat’s dead, I think the cat’s dead,’” said Walton.
However, when the owners showed up at the clinic with their children, Mountain immediately perked up.
Walton did some blood work and found out the cat was severely septic with a white blood cell count through the roof. He started him on heavy duty antibiotics, fluids, and Mountain kept getting better.
It turned out that Mountain had a puncture wound on his right front leg that had gone septic and bacteria had spread throughout his body, almost killing him.
The real Christmas miracle, said Walton in the online video, is that Mountain had disappeared from his home one month ago and the owners had given up hope they would ever see their black and white companion again.
Mountain returned home Dec. 5.