NONFICTION | READ OR DIE | ANIMAL RESCUE | CATS | INSOMNIA
Insomnia and Our New Cat Hannah
The cat we didn’t know we needed…
My husband found her in the parking lot a little over a week ago. She just ran up to him and started screaming at him. So, I guess technically she found him. He petted her for a while, the tiny little thing, and then he called me.
He asked me what he should do, knowing full well what the answer was. I asked him if he was able to pick her up. And apparently she got quite comfortable. I said alright then, bring her inside. It was forty-one degrees out.
She is so small, we assumed she was a kitten. We brought her into the bathroom, where we have a litter box, and we gave her some wet food and some Churu (a special cat treat.) She devoured both things in a matter of minutes. She was starving.
We moved a litter box into our bedroom that night and shut the door, so that she wouldn’t have to interact with our other cats. And we gave her a little bit of dry food and some water. We were concerned that she would eat too much too quickly.
The thing about Hannah is, she is a night owl. She is wide awake, and she’s been waking me up in the middle of the night, screaming, every day we’ve had her. I don’t know if it was just safer outside, or warmer to sleep during the day.
But regardless of the reasons, she isn’t helping my insomnia issue. I take my sleeping pills at ten, and usually fall asleep by midnight. And if I’m lucky I manage about five hours, and then supplement with a short nap or two during the day. But it’s been three nights in a row now that Hannah has woken me up at two-thirty screaming for wet food.
I sent an instant message to animal control the day after she found us. And I included a picture. Then I called our vet and made an appointment to have her looked at. All of our cats are rescues, and they all have issues. So, we have an account with them. It’s honestly a little bit ridiculous how much money we spend on them a month. But what are we going to do? They need us, and they’re worth it.
Regardless of whether or not she was chipped, she needed looking after. They checked, no chip. Animal control is so over capacity, there was no way we were going to burden them with one more cat, and we certainly weren’t going to throw her back out onto the street. Plus…she is beautiful. She has dark brown fur with orange patches scattered around randomly and little, delicate features. She looks so much like the Unsplash picture, it’s uncanny.
She was in rough shape. She had fleas, a distended belly from worms and she was older than we thought. The vet estimated that she is ten months to a year old and she has had at least one litter of kittens. I have no idea how she managed that with her tiny, stunted body. She was sluggish for a few days from all of the vaccinations, but she perked right up after a while.
Now she haunts me in my sleep. Meowing until I wake up. And right now I have three cats on the bed. Two were sleeping, but then a third hopped on, started wrestling with a blanket, and woke the other two up. Hannah is on my leg, her purrs are vibrating my right knee cap.
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You can check out some more of my writing, and follow me here. (She, Her) I am a writer and a freelance editor. I edit all genres, and I specialize in Romance. I write a little bit of everything, whatever is on my mind at the moment. Get an email when I publish a new story.