Hi everyone, Sasha here. I’m creating this fundraiser to help us cover some of the cost of Scar’s emergency surgery.

The short(ish) version: My mom adopted Scar in the fall of 2016, after he’d started life as a feral cat in Lindsay, ON. He’s the friendliest cat I’ve ever met. He first experienced a urinary tract blockage in 2019. My mom woke up to him near death at the bottom of the stairs and rushed him to the vet. He recovered, and we have been incredibly on top of keeping him on specialty food, cranberry, and making sure he’s hydrated. At the beginning of the summer, we switched to a less expensive food with the same magnesium percentage (this is important for urinary tract issues) and things seemed fine.

Fast forward to August 18th, we got home from a weekend away to a note from our neighbour saying that Scar had peed a couple times on the kitchen floor, which is very unusual behaviour. After watching him for a while and realizing he was straining to urinate, our neighbour offered to have her friend, who is a vet tech, come and take a look at him. She gave him a once over and said he had to get to the vet ASAP. We rushed him to the emergency vet, and they said that if we hadn’t brought him, he definitely would have died overnight. Today, he is unblocked and doing much better, but they want him to be cathetered for another couple of days just to be safe.

My mom paid the cost upfront: $3500. It was put on a credit card, but the reality is that we don’t have money to pay it off.

In the last year, my mom has had to go on temporary disability due to a torn meniscus, have two carpal tunnel surgeries, continue fighting her siblings in a litigation, and deal with almost debilitating depression at times. As a household, we had the ground line rip off our house last November which ruined our furnace, washer, and dryer, and our fridge died this past June. Personally, my workload has been inconsistent the last several months, with some weeks having almost no hours, meaning almost no income. Just last night, after my mom had taken Scar to the vet, I went out with the dog, and realized my car had a flat tire … it feels relentless, and has been one of the hardest years of our lives.

We are trying desperately to keep ourselves afloat, and this was not something we could afford to have happen - but we also weren’t going to let Scar die, obviously!

So we are reaching out in the hopes that we might receive some community support. It’s not easy to lay all your cards out and be vulnerable like this, but do so because we need help.

Thank you in advance for reading all of this, for donating, for sharing, anything you do to help us out.