We hope you had a great New Year’s Celebration, and one with a lot less drama than ours. For the last 10 years we have been blessed to have a mostly wild cat living with us. (Actually, we have 2 cats, but one is as domestic as can be and the other is seriously wild.)
As nearly as we can tell, Darci is the result of breeding between a species of wild cat, called: “African Black-Footed Cat” and some form of domestic cat. Since we broke her out of the local cat and dog jail when she was a tiny kitten, less than 2 pounds, we really do not know her lineage. Most likely someone in the area had one or more African Black-Footed Cats who escaped and then mated with domestic cats. Apparently, this sort of thing is more common than one might think. Who knows?
Anyway, Darci has lived with us for about 10 years, and has always been super healthy – that is until a couple of weeks ago.
Darci, being mostly wild, is surprisingly friendly and affectionate with us, but not so much with strangers. She spends most of her time outdoors, and likes to hunt. With her background, I guess that is no surprise. She comes in for occasional meals, for the same good alkaline water that we drink, and for a good scratching and petting session from time to time. All of this is strictly on her terms, of course.
Many breeds of wild cats cannot retract their front claws. Darci is no exception. If she runs across the kitchen floor you can hear her claws clicking throughout the house.
A day or so before New Year’s we noticed that Darci did not look so good. She was lethargic, and not very responsive. We figured maybe she just had some sort of bug and did not pay it any mind. Perhaps we should have, since she had never even had a single day sick the whole time she has lived with us.
By the next morning we knew something very serious was wrong. Darci was clearly in trouble. She was having difficulty walking, would not eat or drink, and had lost control of her bodily functions. And she was barely responsive. She did not seem to be in pain, but it was clear that her functions and organs were in the process of shutting down.
My wife and I had a conference to decide what to do. We thought about taking her to the local animal emergency center. That was an attractive option as I did not really want to be responsible for her life and death decisions, and although I often work with people who are gravely ill, I do not do this with animals and do not feel well qualified.
On the other hand, we knew from past experience that we would run up a $2,000 bill or more. And worse, they would not be likely to save her. They would most likely run a bunch of tests, determine that they could not do anything and then tell us it was hopeless. Further, Darci, being quite wild, would not do well even for the short car ride to the animal hospital. And staying there away from us overnight would put her under a great deal more stress – the last think she needed at that point.
So we decided to do what we could for her here at her home. For the first day, which was 2 days before the end of the year she was almost completely non-responsive. She was not in a complete coma, but nearly so.
I kept track of her respirations, which were very slow and shallow, and I checked her pulse throughout the day. I massaged her Chinese lung points, and did hands-on energy treatments throughout the day. She gradually started to become more alert.
At about 24 hours into this whole affair she seemed like she was starting to improve. In addition to the energy work and the acupressure to keep her lungs clear I kept her hydrated. She was not drinking at all on her own, let alone eating.
On New Year’s Day Darci was able to walk just a little. She went to the front door and it was clear she wanted to go out. I was reluctant to let her, but since she is essentially a wild animal I knew that confining her was not going to work.
To make a long story short, she did go out, and for the next 24 hours we did not see her or have any idea where she was. My wife and I both prepared ourselves to accept the very sad conclusion that Darci had decided it was time for her to die. And as wild animals, and particularly cats often do, that she had gone off into hiding to die all alone.
We were both so sad we could hardly think straight. Frankly, I have always found the Holiday Season a bit of an emotional challenge, but not like this. We were sure that Darci must have transitioned to the great hunting ground in the sky. She had been gone, outside for nearly 30 hours, without eating or drinking, and with no shelter. The day-time temperature was just above freezing and at night well below. In her weakened state we did not see how she could have survived for that long.
We began thinking of some sort of ceremony we could have to celebrate her life and to give us some closure. But then a miracle occurred: Our other cat, Mickie, (he has several posts here on this blog – look for the oldest posts), was staring out the front window and sort of pointing. His tail was pointing straight out behind him like a hunting dog’s tail.
We looked out the window and there was Darci. She was obviously in very bad shape. She could not walk and was barely able to move at all. I went out and gently and carefully picked her up. (The fact that I could underscores just how weak she was. Normally, you do not pick Darci up unless you like skin grafts. She certainly is not mean, but she also is not a domestic cat and she startles pretty easily, which is not beneficial unless you own stock in the local skin graft clinic.)
Once we had her inside, I made the decision to keep hydrating her. While she was gone I think she was deciding if it was time for her to die or if she wanted to try and recover. I think that by showing up like that just outside the front door she was letting us know that she had made her decision and that it was not yet her time.
By this point, from the symptoms, which included liver failure, but without any fever or evidence of a pathogen at work, I felt pretty sure that Darci had eaten a poisoned rat or other rodent. (Our neighbors had until recently been under a monthly pest control contract, and I had seen several dead rodents in the yard, which seemed almost certainly to have died from some kind of poisoning. Thankfully, they have since cancelled that contract, realizing that if ever the “Law of Unintended Consequences” applies, it is to commercial pest control.)
My wife and I used muscle-testing by proxy, (a practical way to use muscle-testing for health matters with animals and infants, or even with adult humans who may not be able to talk at the time), to determine what Darci needed. She clearly needed the following:
- She needed to be kept warm.
- She needed to be kept hydrated.
- She needed to be given a small amount of colloidal silver every 4 hours. I honestly am not sure what she needed that for, but it tested very strong for her and we did it.
- She needed Organic Sulfur. Most likely this was to help her detox from the secondary rodent poison that was otherwise killing her. And it probably was for overall liver support, and maybe improved oxygenation, as well.
- She needed a small amount of tincture of Milk Tincture to support her liver and help it to recover.
I implemented these measures, and even kept special healing music playing for her next to her bed. (This is the same healing music that I use with many of my clients.) Darci has always loved music and in the past would even come from the other side of the house when I would put this music on.
After a couple of days, Darci showed real signs of dramatic improvement. She started to walk around the house a bit. She was still quite wobbly, and clearly had some serious neurological damage, but we felt there was really good reason to be hopeful.
By about day 5 Darci was definitely becoming noticeably more alert and active, even if the degree of improvement was modest. It was now clear to us both that she had decided to live and to try to recover. She had even started drinking on her own so I was able to stop hydrating her.
However, she still had not started eating on her own. By day 6 I was really worried about Darci not eating. Cats generally cannot go for a long time without eating without suffering serious liver damage, and she already had enough of that from the poison.
I had carefully and as gently as possible force-fed her a few times once she made clear that she wanted to live. But this was traumatic for all of us and clearly was not a real solution. My wife, Sue, finally had an inspiration towards a possible solution. Sue remembered that Darci loved to drink up the excess juice whenever we had tuna fish. So she bought some cans of good quality tuna and we opened one and offered Darci the juice. She lapped it up and even asked for more.
Within a day Darci was even eating the tuna itself, and within 2 days was starting to eat her own cat food again. As a long-term food, tuna is not generally very good for cats. It has the wrong protein profile. And fed tuna for too long many cats will develop serious urinary tract problems. This is more of a problem for male cats, but I have heard of it for female cats, as well. But in this case, the tuna was a brilliant move for a day or so to get Darci back to eating again on her own.
We are now a couple of weeks out from this crisis. Darci continues to improve a little more each day. I am not even sure why I wrote this and posted it. I think on some level this experience was so intense for me that I just had to express it. On another level altogether it really confirms the power of some relatively simple and readily available remedies to address even a profound health crisis. In this case, I believe the colloidal silver, Organic Sulfur, tincture of Milk Thistle, Chinese Energy Medicine, and the tons and tons of profound love that Sue and I poured over Darci made all the difference.
Darci is now in “cat physical therapy” – she chases a red laser pointer slowly (for her) around the living room floor for several minutes, several times a day. She is slowly getting her coordination and speed back. I think it will be a while yet before she is fully recovered, but she is doing well.
I have on order some special flower essences from Green Hope Farms in New Hampshire. I got some for Darci and some for me and Sue. We have some healing to do, as well from this experience. http://www.greenhopeessences.com/ I will post review of these flower essences onoce we have used them for awhile.
We are profoundly grateful that Darci survived this terrible ordeal. We hope that if you still use any form of chemical pest control that you will reconsider the practice. We have seen more than a few real tragedies arise from its use, including 2 where young children almost lost their lives. And I think we don’t’ even really understand just how dangerous it is to all living beings. Likely, as with most toxic chemicals, there will be longer-term consequences that we won’t even find out about until a great many people and other living beings have been harmed and possibly killed.
If there is a positive moral to this suspenseful cat-tail (pun intended), I think it might be this: Amazing outcomes are possible with the sensible application of just a few dollars worth of natural remedies, some determination, and a ton of sincere and unrestrained love. In this case, it seems clear that with these simple and nearly free ingredients we accomplished what thousands of dollars of conventional medical intervention almost certainly would not have.
In love and light,
Jeff Bell
I will post a follow-up pciture or two of Darci once she has completed her physical therapy. If you look closely at the picture at the top of this post you can see that something is still very wrong with her. She just looks kind of dazed and out of it. But she is making good progress and I hope to have much more lively photos soon.