A driver of a vehicle hit the roughly 6-month-old cat in January and left him for dead, flattened and frozen to a street near Woodlawn Cemetery. Thanks to the compassion of a passerby about two hours later, Percy is on his way to recovery. "He's got a strong will to live," said Deb Finnegan, a veterinarian and owner of Pet Medical Center on Third Street. "Don't you, mister?" she asked Percy, petting the cat's head. Justin Stoltman found the nearly unresponsive animal on the 19th of January. He didn't think the cat would live, but didn't want to abandon him in the street. He picked the cat up and drove it to Pet Medical. Percy, named by a vet technician shortly after his arrival, had extreme frostbite and was in shock. Finnegan needed to raise Percy's body temperature and rehydrate him. Staff inserted a catheter and an IV. X-rays showed the collision had broken Percy's hips in four spots and shifted them about 2 inches forward. Percy surprised Finnegan by making it through his first night in the hospital, and the vet decided to take a chance on the fragile feline. She bought a $400 metal plate and screws to fix Percy's hip, then donated her time to perform the necessary four-hour surgery — an expensive procedure most often done by an orthopedic surgeon, not a general practitioner like Finnegan. "It wasn't an option for him to have orthopedic surgery like that," Finnegan said. "It would have cost about $4,000." The next morning, Percy stood, briefly — something that hadn't been possible before the operation. "It was a moment of victory for all of us," Finnegan said. With his hips set to heal, Finnegan kept an eyes on the cat's frostbite. Thursday, she amputated three inches of Percy's tail that had frozen and wasn't healing. The pads on his small paws still are raw and scabbed, but Finnegan expects Percy to recover. He will be on cage rest for much of the next four weeks. No one so far has reported Percy missing or come forward to claim him. Finnegan said if the cat's owners do contact her, she likely would be willing to work with them to set up a payment plan for the medical costs. And if no one speaks up, Finnegan plans to make Percy a permanent member of her family. "We thought about giving him up for adoption, too," Finnegan said, "but I'm kind of attached." |
