Ahh, much better news to share!
Our cat doctor phoned us yesterday. Junior is indeed positive for feline leukemia but we won’t need to put him to sleep. After the phone call Rachel rounded up the other three cats and herded them to the vet to be vaccinated. They’ll need to get a second shot in three weeks time. While not perfect the vaccin gives pretty good protection for Squeak, TickTock and Cleo against feline leukemia. So far they are getting along pretty well with Junior (still gives me the giggles to say “Onno Junior”…) and so the chances of fighting and biting (the main risk in contracting the disease) are very low. We have let Junior roam around the house for short periods and so far so good. Squeak largely ignores him. She did hiss at him last night and Junior was so surprised that you could almost see his lower lip quivering. TickTock thinks it is very exciting and follows him around. Cleo mainly lives downstairs and so hasn’t seen a lot of him yet.
Feline leukemia is similar to AIDS for humans. Junior will not get old. Most cats with the disease don’t live past their first year. He is 10 months. He likely contracted the disease within the last 2 or 3 months which explains why Lollypop Farm’s test came back negative (so I’m less angry at them now). Just like with aids he will very likely contract all kinds of ailments so he won’t be with us very long but we’ll do our best to give him the best life in the meanwhile!
Speaking of that, so far we have been spoiling him rotten expecting we had to put him down this week. We gave him milk, cookies, roast beef, let him climb on whatever he chooses to crawl up, in or under. Being 10 months old he has bundles of energy and it is just wonderful to watch him run around, explore. Yesterday Rachel and I were with him in Rachel’s office. He was walking around on her desk. Saw a pen, picked it up and ran over to a big box and hid the pen there. Last week he picked up his eye drop bottle and tried to hide that away.
We are very happy to have Junior in our family!