Thursday, February 23, 2012

The Spaying/Neutering of my Rescued Cats


A few weeks ago, my friend and I took our rescued cats to the vet. It was an answered prayer. Prior to this, we were brainstorming for ways to get our pet cats neutered/spayed at a low cost.  It's hard to take care of cats especially when there's a lot of them, not to mention the time and of course the financial side of it. We don't want our cats to multiply exponentially. 

It was God who led us to this wonderful veterinarian. When I stumbled on a Facebook page called 'Open Paws' which is based in Riyadh, I chanced upon a familiar friend on FB, Dr.Khumbulani, who is also a follower of this page, understandably himself a vet. Dr.Khumbulani was the doctor of my cat Paquito who unfortunately died last year. So I messaged him and asked about the spaying/neutering services and how much it would cost us. And he said that it would cost about 400 Sr. each, but he can lower that down to 300 Sr. each. Still it's very expensive and we can't afford to spend that amount of money for each one of them. 

Obviously Dr.Khumbulani knew of our financial constraint and instead gave me a name of a certain lady vet on FB and told me that she could help us in our predicament, but mind you, not kind of big time. When we contacted her through phone, she said that she's willing to spay/neuter all of our cats for free including those of our neighbors' pet cats. Yes, that's right, for FREE. Okay, paint a picture of how shock we were when confronted with such incredible generosity. I couldn't believe it, from 400Sr. each to absolutely gratis. I can't thank God enough for directing us to Dr.Ingrid. 

As she is based in Riyadh, Dr.Ingrid scheduled us a specific day for us when she gets to Jeddah. In fact she had herself soldiered up for a tough day for her expected 9 patients. (We promised her 9 but unfortunately we were only able to carry 6.) Her place was not that hard to locate. There could be no stupid mistakes of not trailblazing her private clinic as a familiar smell itself will lead you to where she is. True enough, there were more than a hundred cats living with her in her home. I've never seen that many cats in my life before. She has rescued all of them. I can tell how much effort and money she has invested in them by the looks of their healthy and happy demeanor. Or did I say some of them are too heavy to even carry their tummies? Lol! As soon as we dumped our cats to their cages we were told to pick them up in the evening. By the way, Dr.Ingrid is such a lively spirit to engage in a conversation, but we could not further waste her time as she has already rolled her sleeves up to start her day. When we returned to pick them up, they were all still groggy because of the anesthesia. The good news was, they were all spayed and neutered except for one, the youngest of our 5 cats, which we  thought was a girl but he turned out to be a boy. He/she will be back next month together with the rest of our cats (and the neighbors' cats) that haven't been spayed/ neutered yet.  

Thank you Dr.Khumbulani and Dr.Ingrid for all your help, you're a blessing to us and also to some of our dear friends who are helping us with the rescued cats, thank you for your support. And of course to our Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you very much dear Lord for listening to our prayers. To you all the glory!



Here's the video of my 5 cats when they arrived from the vet, after the operation.