Some of you may recall the story of Aladdin, a kitten with a medical problem, detailed in the current (December, 2012) Letters from the President. Tammy has a sad update to this tale...

Our vets attempted to enlarge the opening for Aladdin to urinate thru and with some success and he was sent back to the foster family. The vets hoped to postpone the perineal urethrostomy until he was at least one pound bigger, making the surgical area larger and easier to work in. Over the course of several days the dribbling did return and the urine did build up in his bladder, requiring a return to the vet. On Saturday, the vet called and said that he had actually lost a little bit of weight, so we decided to move ahead with the surgery on Tuesday, despite his size, so that he did not continue to lose ground with his whole health.

The vet checked on him at 5PM before leaving for the day and he was fine, but when staff came to do checks at 12 midnight, he had passed away.

This came as a real shock to all parties involved because there was no indication that he was even close to death. Sometimes you can do everything imaginable, everything is going well and still an animal dies.

Our foster is, of course, very sad, but knows that, especially with kittens there is so much you can't control.

There was a lot of interest in Aladdin's story and we wanted to tell the rest of his tale.

Thank you for your concern and your support for all of our cats.

RIP Aladdin - you deserved better...