Virginia the Cat Had an Expensive Surgery

Here's the short story:

We are Jack de Quidt and Kat Brewster, and we have a little cat. Virginia, the cat, recently underwent emergency surgery to remove a potential blockage that vets found on an x-ray. The blockage turned out to be benign and was removed, and she’s recovering very well. To operate on a little cat, though, at three o'clock in the morning no less, is extremely unexpectedly expensive, and not something that either of us are able to cover on our own. As such, we’ve set up this GoFundme to ask for help from those who are able.

Here's the longer story:

Virginia had not been feeling good for a few days, but on the night of the 2nd of August, she started seeming a lot worse. She was irritable and anxious, not touching her food and vomiting bile. She walked from room to room leaving a miserable little trail. At midnight, we took her down to the emergency vets, who ran blood-work and took x-rays, and noticed an unusual object just between her stomach and her small intestine. They weighed up the risks and, wary of letting a bad situation progress, began exploratory surgery to identify the problem and see if there was any intestinal damage.

There was not, it turns out. The object was a “Bates Body," a kind of benign “necrotised fat,” about the size of the top of your pointer finger. Her vomiting and distress was brought about by an inflamed pancreas, although the doctors weren’t sure whether this was a primary cause in itself or exacerbated by her vomiting and anxiety. They didn’t have to make any intestinal incisions, which bodes well for an easy recovery.

None of this, of course, comes cheaply. While we are immensely relieved and glad we ruled out any serious danger, the costs of the surgery and aftercare are a substantial and unexpected expense that we are not able to meet on our own. It is not easy to ask people on the internet for help, but we know that there are folks out there who have enjoyed hearing Virginia come trotting up to the microphone on Kat’s Twitch streams, or donated bits to feed her a little treat, or simply rotated the image of this small fluffy animal in their brains. If you are one of these people and you’re able to help with a donation of any size, we would appreciate it immensely.

Virginia is a cat with a heart the size of a fire station and a brain the size of one of those candies they sell in boxes of seven hundred. When she sees us in the morning she makes a sound like someone has stood on a squeaky toy. Her fur is very soft. When she rolls over and you pet her belly she stretches her back legs out and it looks like she’s wearing a huge pair of calico trousers. She has hobbies but they are indiscernible to us. On cool evenings she sits at the window and watches people in the street. Sometimes she frightens herself with her own leg. We love her very much.

Here's what we'll do if we raise the money

We know that raising money to pay for a little cat's surgery does not need to be transactional -- her recovery and health isn't something we'd ever want to gameify. We do, however, want to put together a little collection of events (streams, things like that) to celebrate what our cat means to us-- and to celebrate the support of people coming together to care for that little cat. Here are some goals we have, and the things we'd like to do when and if we meet those goals:

$1,000: Boscho Returns (we stream Hieronymous Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights)

$2,000: AI Dungeon (we collaborate with the computer to play AI dungeon; cat- themed)

$3,000: Stray LP (we play through the popular cat videogame, Stray)

$4,000: Hammacher Schlemmer: kitty cat edition 2022 (60 fps)

What happens if we raise more than the goal

This is honestly unfathomable to the both of us, but if we manage to somehow raise more money than our goal we have an idea of what we would do. The excess would be split in two, with half donated to local shelters here in Long Beach. The other half would go into "Virginia's College Fund," AKA an emergency fund in the event of any future healthcare needs. We're still figuring out whether or not any problems with her pancreatitis will be acute or chronic, and we want to be sure we're able to give her the care she deserves.

In conclusion

Every dollar is a little kiss on her apricot head.