why someone should sponsor cocoa the cat

a lot of folks may not know this but even for saints, cocoa a very unique little cat. he is just a small little black guy with a bit of white but he has incredible eyes...perfectly round and wide like a deer in headlights.

cocoa has been thru the mill and back. he had a good home who loved him very much but he developed crystals in his urine. while his family tried to deal with this, things just went from bad to worse. diet apparently did not work and multiple surgeries were performed when he obstructed....they tried to surgically rebuild him by re-routing the urethra so he wouldn't obstruct so much.

nothing worked and in the end, something i had never heard of being down to animals was done.

cocoa was given a permanent opening directly thru the abdomen and into the bladder. it is marginally similar to a human version of an urostomy (minus the collection bag)...he has a permenent slit in his belly that constantly leaks pee.

so the problem of obstructing crystals was somewhat solved. the new opening was big enough for most crystals and small stones to come out. but a new problem arose...cocoa was now a constantly urine leaking cat and the leaking could not be controlled.

the owner tried to make due...keeping cocoa confined in one room, trying to get him to wear diapers, anything to prevent her entire home of being saturated in urine.

cocoa wasn't happy being confined and he absolutely loathed being diapered, his young owner was close to bankrupcy from the cost of his medical care, and her stress from things going from bad to worse without the hoped for miracle cure was adding up too.

sometimes due to deep love for our animals, we go too far into a place neither they nor we can comfortably live. and we don't realize we can't live there, until we actually get there and really feel how hard it suddenly is.

anyway...none of this was cocoa's fault..he got dealt a crappy hand with having a chronic, life threatening crystal problem. he didn't get to make any of the decisions, he certainly didn't get any choice in what he was dealt.

he has just had to live with all of it...with the pain of obstruction, with the stress of multiple surgeries, with chronic leaking of urine, with losing his home and now having to spend the rest of his life in a shelter because no one will ever adopt him and give a chronically bladder incontinent cat, a home of his own.

it pretty much sucks to be cocoa, life did not end up being very fair or kind.
he would like to come to the gala and have the great challenges he had and continues to have in his life...acknowledged and recognized.