A Four-Year Miracle.

The wife was going through old posts on her cellphone this evening, and discovered an old post about our “old man” cat Stryper. He’s been with us for four years. Miracle? Well, at the time he showed up, this old cat was literally just skin and bones, and was suffering from a severe respiratory infection. We weren’t sure he’d make it through the night, but when he did, we hauled him off to the vet the next day. The vet discovered he also had FIV (feline AIDS, basically), and gave him a maximum – a MAXIMUM – of 72 hours to live. He was so certain the cat would die, when he saw my wife at Wal-Mart a week later, he tried to carefully ask how the cat was doing, fearful Stryper had died. He was absolutely stunned to hear the cat was still alive, and hoped he would at least survive through the holidays for us.

So here we are, four years later. Stryper is still rather skinny, but he can raise hell with the rest of the cats. He’s still half-blind and half-deaf (more so when it’s convenient for him to not hear a correction), still FIV-positive, and still going. He’s lived more years than the vet gave him days to survive, and shows no sign of slowing down. So, a miracle? Well, an old, starving, half-deaf half-blind half-DEAD cat, chucked from a car (quite literally), found his way onto the porch of one of only two bleeding-heart animal lovers in a 5-mile radius. Call it what you will – he’ll always be my Old Man, keeping this old man going.

Advertisement