A broken bird and our cat is still missing

There’s a broken bird on my deck. A robin. I can’t quite tell what is wrong with him. He has a feather stuck in his eye and his leg looks broken. He keeps trying to get up. He keeps shaking his head trying to get the feather out, which does not help his concussion. I want John to hurry up and get home so he can stop the suffering. I feel so sorry for it. I’m sure it hit the window. That has been happening a lot the last few weeks. Loud bangs into the window and dead birds below. We even have things hung in the windows so they can see them and not think they go straight through.

Our cat is still missing. Her name is Sam. I hope she isn’t suffering somewhere. I can’t bear to think about it. She is an always inside cat, a never outside cat. I hope she isn’t broken like this bird. We have been searching for her since Saturday when we realized she was gone. We have not heard her meow at all. We don’t know where she would have gone. There was another cat hanging around and we wonder if that cat chased her away. We don’t think Sam would be able to find her way back home.

We have had Sam since she was about a year old. Tayler was little, about four. Sam is 14. Her birthday is June 1, 2003. I thought she was younger, but I looked up her vet records. We got her from the Humane Society. We saved her. She was really sick, although we didn’t know it. We weren’t planning on giving her soft food. Only hard food. She wouldn’t touch the hard food. John and I told each other she would eat it if she got hungry enough. Whenever she would try to jump off something her legs were really stiff and she could hardly walk. Well after about three days of not eating, we called the vet. She came and looked at her and she told us to give her soft food, because her teeth couldn’t chew the hard food. She was too weak. We felt awful! Here we were getting this cat to save her and we ended up almost killing her. Once she got some food in her she was fine.

She has been the best cat. She has been Tayler’s cat. She has been our cat. All of us. Even the big kids. She slept in the crook of my arm every night and then would move over to John during the night and sleep in the crook of his arm. When he would get up in the morning and sit on the bed to wake up, she would sit beside him, waiting to get petted and waiting to get water out of the bathtub faucet.

Every night when I would go to bed she would race me up the stairs and then plop down on her side at the top and wait for me to pet her. She was such a chill and cool cat.

We are holding out hope that she will come back or that someone will find her and return her. We live out in the country beside a sunflower field and across the road from the reservoir. There is plenty of brush and trees and things for her to get lost in. Odds aren’t good.

I pray that if she is no longer with us that she didn’t suffer. I can’t even imagine. It was so cold last night and she doesn’t have a winter coat or even know how to “be” outside. I can’t stand the thought of her suffering. It makes me sick to my stomach. I just pray that if anything happened to her it was quick. I pray that someone found her and took her in. Poor Sam. I pray she isn’t broken.