Poly Styrene almost made it to 7.
See, about seven years ago (in 2018) I was in between jobs. I'd been laid off by one company but almost immediately gotten picked up by another company and since old company was laying off so many people they had to give us 90 days notice that we were being laid off and because they didn't want soon to be laid off people hanging around spreading whatever mischief they thought of for 90 days they told us all to go home and I basically had a three month vacation with pay before strolling into the new job.
Fortunately the World Cup was on.
About a third of the way into it my partner Laurie was getting ready to go to work and heard her car meow at her. Since this wasn't a usual noise for a car to make we looked around and under the hood and eventually saw a very, very small furry thing wedged into the exhaust manifold.
Very glad she didn't just hop in the car and go to work.
Since we already have two cats, I retrieved one of the cat carriers while Laurie put on some sturdy gloves and we extracted the tiniest thing and very much against her will deposited her in the carrier with food and water.
She was so, so tiny. No chip. So we decided to get her cleaned up and looked over and see if we could drop her off at a pet adoption place. We already had two cats! We quarantined her in one of our bathrooms until we could figure out what to do.
She was mostly healthy, except for FIV. We had trouble getting in touch with pet adoption places, none would get back in touch with us, especially for an FIV+ cat. But we did the research and as long as our cats were not routinely engaged in blood-sport we were pretty much safe.
So after a month or so of quarantine we decided to let her out into the rest of the house and get familiar with the rest of the gang. There was a lot of growling and hissing on their part until they saw how small she was and then the other cats looked sort of embarrassed.
She grew up quickly, eventually reaching her "field hockey player" figure and becoming accustomed to the shifting allegiances and malleable hierarchy of our cat family.
But, this year she seemed a little listless and a bit wheezy in late spring. It coincided with pollen and wildfire smoke, so we took her in and the vet determined there was no fluid in her lungs and sent us home with antibiotics and we commenced to have a pitched battle trying to get her to take them. We eventually reached a rhythm of tracking her down and getting the liquid in her mouth and then she'd forgive us in a few hours.
But, it wasn't a respiratory infection, and we ended up taking her to the NCSU vet school. They found a cancerous mass at the back of her throat working on obstructing as much as it could as quickly as it could. There were no good chances and no good options for her.
It all happened so quickly, but ultimately the call was ours and we made the call to say goodbye. It was still really, really hard.
We try and keep in our minds and hearts that ultimately she was a fantastically lucky cat. To crawl into a car escaping whatever she was escaping only to escape again being pulled out of what would very quickly become a dangerous environment and then into our arms for seven very comfortable years even if her "brothers" were annoying.
Even with all that, it seems especially cruel she was taken so soon. She deserved one last bit of luck, I think.
