KATA Alumni

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“Doctor Larsen, I visited my therapist today, and she told me to find what motivates me and run with it,” Vicki said. “She said, ‘if that happens to be cats, then do cats.’ I am going to start a cat rescue, and I am wondering if I can get some support from you.”

“That sounds like a big project, and there is a definite need around here,” I said. “The County gives no help for cats, and the Humane Society is not much better. Cats definitely are relegated to the back seat.”

“Well, we are going change things,” Vicki said. “Doris is on board with me. We will start small, but we have big plans.”

“I would guess you are going to have to define your operations pretty well, or you are going to be overrun with demand. But I will give you all the support that I can afford. I don’t have real deep pockets, you know.”

Following the initial brief conversation, Vicki and Doris embarked on their project. They had lessons to learn along the way, sometimes they were hard lessons, and as I predicted, the job soon became more than two people could handle.

They started working with colonies of feral cats. Sweet Home had more than enough of those colonies. The life of a wild cat was difficult and short. 

Their goal was to capture, neuter and release. Once captured, they would test for feline leukemia and then vaccinate the negative cats for rabies and feline distemper. The cats would receive a broad spectrum dewormer and then have a trip to a low-cost surgery at the humane society in Salem. There they would be spayed or neutered, as determined by their plumbing.

Once treated and rendered sterile, they would be released back into the colony. With a distemper vaccine onboard, the cat’s survival was greatly enhanced. Distemper is one of nature’s mechanisms to control the population of the cat colonies. In young cats, it is a highly fatal disease. The colonies would experience periodic epidemics where the virus would eliminate a significant portion of the kittens. The feline distemper portion of the vaccine given to the captured cats is one of the best vaccines science has produced. With vaccination and periodic natural exposures to the virus, cats remained solidly immune. The average age of the colony indeed doubled.

The first significant attempt to provide primarily free neuter and spay surgeries locally were undertaken with the aid of the Feral Cat Coalition. The FCC operated a mobile truck set up with three surgery tables and a prep table. Caregivers could bring feral cats in for surgery and vaccinations done by volunteer veterinarians. There was no fee for the procedure. Although, a donation was expected.

My first experience volunteering for the day was when they had the truck at the Holley Grange. I found the day exhausting and the environment in the surgery room hot and lacking adequate ventilation. But we accomplished close to a hundred surgeries. I am sure that some of the cats were less than feral.

After that experience, the Kitty Angel Team took off like wildfire. They grew in numbers of volunteers helping them. The number of cats that they helped, actually saved, also increased. 

They arranged for periodic visits of the Feral Cat Coalition surgery truck. When that wasn’t enough, they would transport cats to low-cost clinics and the humane society for spays and neuters. They held adoption clinics in Petco’s in Albany and Corvallis. And with their tax-free organization status, they expanded their all-volunteer, no-kill cat and kitten rescue to serve the entire mid-Willamette Valley. Their name also extended to the Kitty Angel Team Adoption, KATA.

They were obviously the only choice for Sandy and me when we were tasked with finding kittens for our two California granddaughters, Addison and Olivia. We gave Vickie a call.

“Vickie, we are looking for a couple of kittens for Dee’s girls,” I said.

“You’re in luck,” Vickie said. “Doris has a bunch at her place that are just about ready to go. I would guess that we could release a couple of them early to your care. I will call Doris and tell her you are coming if you would like. Do you know where she lives?”

“Yes, we have been by her place often,” I said. “And it would be great if you could give her a call, that way I don’t have to know her phone number. I know you two try to protect your privacy as much as possible.

We can get up there this afternoon. We are not going to California until the end of the week. But we can hold the kittens at the clinic until we leave. That way, we can make sure they have all their shots and deworming.”

Doris was waiting for us when we pulled into her driveway.

“I have these kittens in the old chicken coop,” Doris said. “This spring has been pretty productive. We have almost twenty kittens in there. I have a few more isolated, just for that mild upper respiratory stuff they get sometimes.”

We followed Doris into the chicken coop, and we were immediately swarmed with kittens. I think they were expecting to be fed. There were all kinds and colors. They all looked to be six to eight weeks old, and I could only spot a couple with a bit of discharge in the corner of their eyes.

“We keep the younger ones with our foster caregivers,” Doris said. “Then, when they are about six weeks old, we move them in here, so they are a little better socialized to the ways of being a kitten.”

“Picking two out of twenty might be a little difficult,” I said.

I had no more than spoke those words when two kittens launched themselves onto my pant legs and started to climb up. They were a couple of tabby kittens, and they looked so much alike that they must have been littermates. 

“It looks like these two made a choice for me,” I said.

We gathered the two kittens up and made a generous donation to KATA. The kittens shared a kennel at the clinic. It was a couple of days before our trip, and they seemed to enjoy being away from the crowd.

***

The trip to South San Francisco proved to be uneventful. The kittens, in their carrier, had no issue with traveling. We stopped for a visit with cousins at Fortuna. We stayed in a motel, but the kittens stayed with the cousins. They were almost adopted by Lorrene and Jim. We could have easily left them there.

We picked up Addison and Olivia from school on our arrival at Dee’s. To say they were excited to see the new kittens would be a colossal understatement. 

It did not take long for Wishbone and Crystal to become fixtures in the family. They have individual personalities, but they also remain very close to each other in their daily routines.

And most of all, they remain a living testament to the great work done by Vicki and Doris and their cadre of volunteers.

Photo by DeLaine Larsen, PhD

I Don’t Understand

D. E. Larsen, DVM

We were still getting settled into our house and I was busy trying to light a fire under the contractor building the clinic. That project was months behind schedule. Sandy and I were laying awake, in bed, on Sunday morning. Hoping we could get a little more time before the kids woke up. And then the phone rang.

“Hello, this is John, I live up the creek from you,” John said as soon as I picked up the phone. “I was hoping I could get you to look at my dog this morning.”

“It’s Sunday morning, you know,” I said. “What kind of an emergency do you have?”

“She is an old Golden Retriver and the vet in Lebanon took a mammary cancer off of her a couple of months ago,” John said. “She gets fluid on her chest now and he has had to drain that fluid about once a week. We had her over there on Friday and she is already having trouble breathing.”

“That doesn’t sound very good for her,” I said. “Has he taken a chest x-ray?”

“Yes, but he couldn’t see anything but fluid,” John said.

“Well, you have to take the x-ray after you draw the fluid off her chest,” I said. “If the fluid accumulates this fast, she likely has cancer all through her lungs. You are just buying her a short time and one of these days, in the near future, you are going to be up with her a three in the morning and she will be in a respiratory crisis. Has he talked to you about that possibility?”

“No, he just says as long as we keep the fluid drained, she will be okay,” John said.

“Well, I think you should call him this morning and let him draw the fluid off her chest,” I said. “If you can’t get ahold of him, I will do it. But if I do it, we will take an x-ray following the procedure and with the emergency fee, it will probably cost you more than you will spend over there.”

***

John went to the vet in Lebanon that Sunday but he was back at my door on Tuesday morning.

“John, I will take care of Sally for you but after I draw the fluid off her lungs, we are going to take an x-ray,” I said. 

“I don’t understand why you think she is so bad,” John said. “You act like she is going to die or something.”

“Are you telling me that the vet in Lebanon hasn’t talked to you about why the fluid is building up and what the prognosis is for Sally,” I said.

“No, he just says this is just a complication of the cancer,” John said.

“I shouldn’t say anything until we get an x-ray,” I said. “But if I was in Reno, all my money would be on Sally being dead before the end of the month.”

“Maybe I should stay with the vet in Lebanon, at least he is more optimistic than you are.”

“That is fine, John,” I said. “I think I would encourage you to do that. If he makes you feel better, that is what you need to do.”

***

It was the following Sunday when the scene repeated itself. The phone rang. I looked at Sandy, and she just smiled.

“No rest for the wicked,” Sandy said as Derek started to cry.

It was John on phone. He was so excited, he could hardly talk.

“Doc, this is John, Sally is laying on floor gasping. She can hardly breathe. Can I bring her down and have you draw some fluid off her chest.

“Okay, John, but be careful handling her. She is probably hanging onto life by a thread.”

We got up and dressed quickly. Sandy started taking care of the kids and I went out to meet John who had just pulled into the driveway.

“She is dead, I think,” John said. “It was terrible to watch. I just don’t understand how it happened.”

“John, when the dog has an aggressive mammary tumor, it spread throughout the body. We usually see it show up in the lungs first. When fluid is building up in the chest as fast as it was with Sally, that say the lungs are full of cancer. In the dog today, there is not much we can do at that point. You have a couple of choices. You can do what you did and keep drawing it off, but that is a short term fix. The other choice is to put her to sleep before you put her through a death like you witnessed this morning.”

“Well, why didn’t you tell me all of that before when I was here?” John asked in a stern voice.

“If you remember well enough, you would remember that I tried, but you were not prepared to listen,” I said. “You made the election to stay with your vet in Lebanon. It would be inappropriate for me to change his course of treatment at that point.”

“So, why didn’t he tell me that? Surely, if you know all of that, he would know it also.”

“I can’t speak to what went on in your conversations with him, John,” I said. “A lot of times, we will tell clients something, and if they are stressed by the situation, they just don’t hear. That is why I try to write things down for folks.”

“Why didn’t the surgery solve the problem in the first place?” John asked.

“It is sort of the luck of the draw,” I said. “We remove a lot of mammary tumors that never cause a problem. Some of that is because the tumor is benign and sometimes it is because the dog’s lifespan following surgery is short enough that we don’t see a problem. But when the tumor is a hot tumor, it has gone elsewhere in the body before we remove it. Then there is not much we can do. There is only very limited chemotherapy and radiation available and that is with high price tag. That usually means sending the dog to a Vet School Hospital for treatment.”

“If I was with you, you would have just put her to sleep then?” John asked.

“That is always a hard decision, and it is different for everyone,” I said. “I would have definitely offered you that option, up front. But when the fluid draws started happening every couple of days, I would have encouraged you to make that decision. Just because it was not fair to Sally to have her die in respiratory distress.”

“I want to be mad at someone, but you make it sound like it was just going to happen,” John said. “So now, what do I do with her?”

“Right now, I don’t have a lot to offer you,” I said. “You can take her home to bury or I can have that county dog control pick her up.”

“And what happens to her if the county picks her up?” John asked.

“If the county picks her up, they send her to a rendering plant and she ends up in fertilizer,” I said.

“An odd ending for good dog,” John said. “I guess I will call the grandkids to help me dig a hole. They will be upset with her passing.”

“Losing a pet, even a pet of the grandparent, is a good lesson for kids,” I said. “I think it is one of last gifts that pets provide. They teach young people how to grieve.”

Photo by Anthony Maina on Unsplash

From the Archives, one year ago

The Bite of the Chigger