Three Cats in Three Weeks
A story about survival, nursing instincts, and the Cat Distribution System
Three cats in three weeks. That’s a lot of cats for someone who’s allergic to them.
It started with a tiny black kitten.
She was scooped up by a man named Patrick who lives on the south side, on a street crawling with strays. He’d seen her and her sibling darting around for days before finally catching one and bringing her into a few local dive bars to see if anyone was looking to adopt a cat.
My boyfriend Dan was there. He’s a lifelong cat person, and I’ve been encouraging him to get a cat for years. But he always said the Cat Distribution System would deliver one when the time was right.
Apparently, the time was now.
The kitten perched on Dan’s shoulder like a pirate’s parrot.
And then she moved in with us. We named her Sylvie.
I told Patrick, “If you see her sibling, let us know.”
A few days later, he texted us a video-not of a sibling, but a mother cat. A spitting image of Sylvie.
“If you really want to save Mama,” Patrick said, “here she is.”
We picked her up that evening. She was young, petite, with long black fur just like Sylvie’s, but you could tell her giant green eyes had seen things. She had cool witchy/bohemian rocker chick energy, so we named her Stevie.
Then came the third text.
I know what you’re thinking: you cannot possibly be considering bringing home another cat.
But Patrick had found an orphan. That’s how he described her. A kitten that didn’t even look like a kitten. More like a cartoon mouse. She had a pointy little triangle face, half tan and half black, with giant ears and a butterscotch colored nose.
“Sylvie would love a playmate,” I rationalized.
All my cat friends said it’s better to get kittens together while they’re young. They also warned me not to get my hopes up about a family reunion. Mama cats and kittens don’t always recognize each other. This way, Stevie could have her space and the two kittens could entertain each other. Perfect.
So I texted Patrick: “We’ll come pick her up tonight.”
When we arrived at his duplex, we passed six street cats just walking up the sidewalk. When Patrick opened the door and showed us the kitten, Dan and I exchanged a look.
She looked dead.
She lay on her side, almost completely still. Her breathing was shallow and jerky, barely moving her sharp ribs. Her gums were stark white. I’m not a cat expert, but I am a nurse. And in nursing school they teach you: trust your gut.
Something was very wrong.
Patrick told us he’d found her lying in the wet grass of a neighbor’s yard, covered in flies. “Cats don’t do that,” he said. He thought she was dead. But her eyes were open.
He and his mom (an incredibly sweet woman in her 80s) named her Possum.
They’d already bathed her and spent four hours combing out fleas. We got in the car, and I thought about how hard we’d worked to pay off our credit card debt after I started two businesses last year. How good it had felt to finally catch up.
But I also knew I didn’t want to wake up to a dead kitten.
We took her to the ER.
The front desk tech took one look at her gums and whisked her to the back. Minutes later, the vet came in. “She’s severely anemic. She needs a blood transfusion.”
The quote was around $4,000.
I’ve worked in hospitals long enough to know that sometimes we keep creatures alive for ourselves, not for them. I told the vet, “If she’s suffering and she’s not going to make it, I don’t want to prolong it.”
But the vet said it was likely flea anemia. If we gave her a transfusion, she had a real shot.
We decided to give her one.
While we waited for updates from kitten ICU, I took Stevie in for her spay.
An hour later, I got a call from the vet operating on Stevie: “She’s pregnant.”
Sylvie’s siblings.
I thought of Possum hooked up to IV fluids, clinging to life. I told the vet to proceed with the spay. I felt sick.
Possum ended up needing two transfusions. Technically, they were supposed to charge us for both, but they didn’t. “It’s so stupid,” the vet said. “We are technically supposed to bill you for both, but we didn’t use the whole bag the first time. We just want to help the cat.”
When they brought Possum out after the second transfusion, her tiny head lifted. Her ears perked up. Her little possum face came back to life.
I felt a flicker of hope.
And it held. She survived.
The bill came to $2,000. And now we have three cats: Sylvie, Stevie, and Possum.
Patrick promised he wouldn’t send us any more photos.
Ten years ago, when I was a brand new nurse working at a pediatric residential facility, I remember being stunned by how many kids had no one. Or worse, had parents so neglectful it barely counted. The same kind of people who would leave a kitten in the wet grass to die.
I remember feeling overwhelmed by how much I couldn’t fix.
I have more capacity now than I did back then. More tools. More perspective. But the world still hurts.
Between the broken systems, the relentless news cycle, and this summer’s climate chaos, the existential dread has been loud.
But three cats who should’ve died are alive.
And maybe, for today at least, that can feel like enough.