Introducing...Miso!
Meet the latest addition to our household...and how this cute little kitten picked us!
First up, a reminder that the July promotion continues and you can get an annual paid subscription at 20% off. Details at the bottom of this post!
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Posting stories with celebrity interviews (like the podcast of my 2018 interview with Bob Newhart, who passed away last week), winners in the recent Television Critics Association awards or even a tribute to my dearly departed mother has really helped build Coffee, TV & Me, which is nearly 8 months old! But I was pleasantly surprised when last month I wrote about a cat named Mango, our beloved feline and how she joined me and my husband Boyd from Los Angeles to Bangkok, and received so many comments, direct messages and some texts from my fellow pet lovers.
One of the things I wrote about in Mango’s story is how we’d now been in Bangkok for a year and we hadn’t yet gotten her a sibling to play with yet. Well, guess what? That all changed a few weeks ago.
Boyd’s birthday was coming around (it’s still his birthday month so feel free to send him a Happy Birthday note!) and the one thing he said he wanted more than anything? To finally adopt our new brother or sister for Mango. He had been researching a veterinary office that also served as a shelter for cats (with adoptions possible) so we set aside a day just before his birthday to check it out.
On July 5, we ventured over to Vibhavadi Veterinarian hospital to look at the kittens and cats and see which one just felt right. Since this is our third cat adoption together, Boyd and I knew it’s always best to just go with the flow and keep expectations at a minimum. For example, we both thought about another black cat since we’d already had two and black cats normally are not typically the first cats to be adopted. (Not good luck? We beg to differ!) We also thought about naming her or him with an M name to follow in our tradition after Maddie and Mango but we also would be open to whatever sounded right. (‘Miso’ was a frontrunner name but we knew we wouldn’t know for sure until we actually found our new addition.)
I also personally wanted a kitten since Mango came into our life as a kitten and we were able to get her started with things like nail trimming without it being a big deal. And, come on, little kittens are just adorable beyond belief. That said, I hold nothing against mature cats (our first cat, Maddie, was 3 years old when we adopted her in NYC) but they are more set in their ways.
Boyd had seen on the vet’s Facebook page that there was a young black kitten around 8 months old that had been brought in so we thought maybe it’s fate…but when we got to the vet office and were taken to the upstairs hotel to hang out with the 15-20 cats there, we found the black kitten pretty quick but she was a stray who had just arrived at the shelter and hadn’t had time to develop social skills and was afraid of people so we knew she wasn’t ready to go home with anybody yet.
Sitting on the floor in this big room full of cat cages and towers for the cats to sleep and play on, we noticed three little kittens nearby playing in one of those plastic expandable hoops for animals to play in. It turns out it was two brothers and a sister (they were all 3 months old and from the same litter) and they were just so playful, cute and fun.
Suddenly one of them - the female - ran over to us and was suddenly leaning up against my leg and purring so hard and loud. She didn’t shy from my touch when I picked her up and just immediately seemed at home with both of us. One of the vet nurses came up to sit with us and talk about the different cats, giving us some of their history along the way. All this time, the little female kitten just kept leaning against me and I wondered ‘is she the one?”
After that, the kitten ran off to play around the room and Boyd was talking to the nurse about the kitties. Suddenly, that same kitten came back to us, sat between us. Boyd looked down at her and said to the nurse, with tears in his eyes, that she was the one. The nurse agreed. The little kitten had picked us. (He’d also cried when Maddie picked us in an ASPCA shelter in Manhattan when she came into our lives in 2007). We told them we wanted her and the arrangements were made to pick her up on July 8 which just so happened to be Boyd’s birthday. She needed a kitty vaccination as well as being microchipped so it would take a few extra days. (And for those wondering, adopting all three kittens wasn’t an option for us since our pet-allowing condo has one big rule that a two-bedroom condo is only allowed two pets, period)
From having brought Mango into our lives back when we lived in Los Angeles, we knew that it takes some time to integrate a new cat with the resident cat. Mango had been passive next to the more dominant Maddie (who was 19 years old when we had to say goodbye to her before our Thailand move) so we were curious how she’d be once we brought the new kitty home.
And, yes, Miso as a name did end up fitting from the start so we had a name for her that could go on all the paperwork with the vet. And I have to add that the staff at the Vibhavadi Veterinary Hospital/Cat Hotel were just wonderful. You could tell they were all cat lovers and they were so happy we were going to give Miso a good home.
The next big step, of course, was bringing Miso home and getting her and Mango used to each other, which we knew you didn’t do by just throwing them together. It takes time for cats to get used to each other’s scents and, for Mango, get comfortable with another cat being in the space she’d been in solo with us for over a year.
Once we got Miso home, we kept her in her carrier and let Mango look at her just start the process. There were no aggressive growls or hissing so it was a good sign. After a little time had passed, Miso went into the office space in our condo where she had her food, water, litter box and her own scratch pad as well as a few toys. Mango would have the living room and bedroom to roam in but she was very much on high alert since she was very aware things were changing in a big way (see photo below)
On day two with Miso, I was playing with her in the office when she sneezed several times. I knew it could be nothing (she was in a new place, after all) or it could be something. Boyd came home from work and I mentioned it so we decided not to take any chances and, since there was another vet office within walking distance from our place, we decided to take her over. Sure enough, she had a cat cold, which is very contagious to other cats so from that point on we had to keep Miso and Mango truly separated. While Miso having a cold wasn’t what we would’ve wanted for her or us, it did force more time (roughly 10 days) for the two to be separated. And while we spent time with Miso and she continued to be the cutest thing ever even if she didn’t feel great, we also made sure to spend time with Mango so she wouldn’t have any feelings about being left out.
The vet had given us liquid medicine to give Miso - one dropper would be to help clear up the mucus that had built up from the cold and the other medicine was to stop an infection from starting. At three months old, her little immune system wasn’t that strong yet so the meds were necessary so outside of the meds, we also had to take her back to the vet for the first four days so she could get a breathing treatment that would help her cold. Then, twice a day, 12-hours apart, Boyd and I took turns holding Miso while the other took the little plastic syringes with the medicine and squirt them down her throat. Or tried to since sometimes she’d take the medicine while other times she’d spit a lot of it out. And she also showed us a few times that she’s got some fight in her and we realized (after Boyd got some nasty cuts on his wrist from her trying to get out of our grasp), that we also had to make sure her nails were trimmed! If you have cats, you know how razor sharp those nails can get!
After those first ten days when she had stopped sneezing and the congestion we could hear had disappeared, we could tell her cold had gotten better. Once she had a checkup with the vet, she was deemed over her cold and it was okay to start letting her spend some time with Mango…which unfortunately is where I need to end the story for now.
I don’t really mean to leave you hanging here since I know a lot of you want to know how Miso and Mango are doing together. But I’ve got some pressing freelance assignments I need to finish in the next few days and I don’t want to skimp on the details or rush through it all so I promise Part 2 of Miso’s story will continue very soon!
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Until next time….
Good eye! We're huge fans of Nala! And thanks -- she's livened up our household, for sure!
Miso! Aunt Nancy says hello right me-ow!