Frankie’s Friends Hope Fund helped Olivier receive the lifesaving surgery she needed to remove a foreign body. This is an update from her family.
“We had wanted to adopt a cat for a long time and when we moved to a new apartment in Somerville in 2020 we chose one that allowed for cats. Once the pandemic happened we couldn’t find a cat to adopt nearby so when Molly went to visit family in Virginia she adopted Olivier and flew back with her to Massachusetts in August of 2020.
Olivier was always a loving, cuddly, energetic cat and in February of 2021 we noticed she had stopped eating food and was no longer her bouncing-off-the-walls self. Olivier had a pre-scheduled vet appointment for a week out, but when she hadn’t eaten for 2 days we took her to the ER. They discovered she had eaten a spool of thread and it was wrapped around her tongue, threaded through her stomach, and impacting her small intestine. Both Molly and I are students here in Boston, and despite having saved all our extra money to care for Olivier, we could not afford the surgeries necessary to remove the thread. We spent hours trying to find some way to get Oliver the help she needed and still be able to survive ourselves in the midst of a pandemic.
Thankfully, Frankie’s Friends was able to help us reach the funds Olivier needed for surgery and she was able to get the impact removed. Since then, she has (once the E-collar was removed) returned to her highly energetic and loving self. We play with her for hours daily and she has returned to being a happy, healthy member of our family (though with a shaved belly). Both Molly and I cried a lot the day we took her to the ER, we both moved here to Somerville from far away right before the pandemic and Olivier has been the companionship we needed to survive living in a new city in the middle of a worldwide disaster. We spent so much time with her, that the prospect of losing her simply because we had no way to pay wrecked me. Thanks to Frankie’s friends we didn’t have to lose our family member and we can now keep giving her all the love and attention she deserves.
I’ve attached some before photos from when she had a very fluffy belly, and some shots after when she had to wear her collar and how she looks with her shaven belly. My roommate has taken to recreating famous paintings with Olivier in them instead. Here she is in ‘Van Gato self portrait”.
We really, really, appreciate you guys <3 ”
