I’ve started this GoFundMe me campaign to raise funds for an urgent surgery needed by one of my foster cats, Aphelion Aura. Our sweet foster kitty swallowed a very long piece of thread. Despite being so careful and never having such an emergency with foster cats before, this silly boy came shooting out of the litter box with a whole tangle of threaded poop. We have been in rescue for a very long time and we recognized this as a very urgent issue that required immediate veterinary attention. We rushed him to our local emergency vet where they confirmed the worst case scenario. It was unlikely he would be able to pass the string naturally and it was likely anchored somewhere in his stomach or intestines and required surgery. There was no possibility of waiting. The string would continue to tighten among his internal organs causing cuts and fatal damage. When we sent the estimate to our rescue for approval to move forward we received the horrible news that they did not have the available funds to pay the deposit. My husband and I have fostered over 150 cats with this rescue and we’ve loved every single one of our feline friends, and we simply could not fathom euthanizing this young 22 month old cat without giving him a chance. So we

took a deep breath, plunked down our care credit card, and paid the staggering $6069 deposit to the vet.

Surgery proceeded just a few hours later. The surgery was complex and required several exploratory cuts to find the string anchor point to safely remove. The next 24 hours were spent fundraising and shoring up the rescue account as quickly as possible so they could cover the remaining balance of approximately $4000 to save Aphelions life and bring him back to home to recover. The rescue is still trying to recover their portion of the amount spent but we the fosters now have a very large care credit balance. We believe every life in our care matters and have given so very much to caring for the numerous cats that have passed through our home. Urgent medical cases and particularly neonatal kittens who required round the clock care, well that’s been our jam and we love fostering and saving lives. If we had the extra funds to spare we wouldn’t even blink at saving Aphelion with our own money, but those funds were intended for one of our foster failures to have a specialized lip to lid surgery later this year. Our kitty Fae was one who came to us at just four weeks old, horribly injured with a festering infection in her facial skin, a dislocated jaw and fractured skull. This little girl was such a fighter and we spent months caring for her and driving to MRI appointments and meeting specialists at UofI vet school. Fae lost a large portion of skin on her face, the eye lid around her left eye and most of her left ear. Despite all these injuries she remained as regular a little kitten as you could imagine! Feisty, playful, obsessed with churu. She went through months of care and healing, surviving seizures as we fought to identify and fight the infection left from her injury. She healed in miraculous ways, but it was finally determined with her last MRI that she may still have an infected brain abscess with a high chance of injury/death to pursue surgically. Her brain tissue and scar tissue that developed where she had lost skull fragments were likely bonded and surgery could cause brain damage or death. Despite wanting to do everything in our power, the risk was deemed too high and at that time the rescue decided to just allow our feisty little girl to stay exactly how she was and to only risk surgery if symptoms reappeared. That space could be an infection brewing or it could simply be static fluid. So we adopted Fae and hoped for the best while giving her as amazing a life as we could. And a year went by. And then another, and another with no sign that what the MRI revealed was an infected abscess. We consulted with her primary vet, and veterinary ophthalmologist this winter to discuss how best to continue to care for her injured eye. With no signs that she had any impairment and was anything other than a healthy little cat, her care plan went from stay the course as hospice to a much better prognosis with hope and a more aggressive treatment plan for her eye. We believe that a partial lip to lid surgery is now in the cards for our girl to improve her quality of life and help her eye stay safe and functioning through the remainder of her life. At this point we are hoping to recoup the funds spent on Aphelion so we are ready to tackle Fae’s surgery when the time is right. A dear friend covered a whopping $3500 of the $6069 we spent so we’re not too far from our goal to get back to flush. If we exceed our goal we believe the right thing is to first offer the excess to the person who helped us out in a dire moment and anything in excess will go towards upfront payment for Fae to have her surgery.