In Oct 2012, I went in to the cat shelter to collect my newest adoptee, Neh'h (pronounced N-heh, it's an ancient Egyptian word referring to an aspect of time), but when I did, I was asked by the shelter's vet if I could also take a little kitten with me as well, rescued from the same home as Neh'h who needed round the clock medicating. I agreed to foster the kitten while the vet went on holiday. So instead of coming home with one cat, I came home with two, good thing I have an understanding husband!

I settled the pair into the main bathroom which is quite spacious, warm and easy to keep clean. For contagion reasons, the kitten had to be kept isolated from my own two cats, British Shorthairs I had brought with me from London. 

The kitten was tiny, emaciated and needed antibiotics every few hours for an intestinal infection. The kitten immediately went to Neh'h who stayed inside the safe space of the carrier for the first two weeks of his life in our house. I found out Neh'h and Djet had been rescued from a hoarding situation where there had been eighteen cats, many of them starving and ill. When I saw Neh'h in the quarantine cabin, he was scrunched up tight into the corner of his cubicle, trying to make himself as small as possible. My heart aching for him in his abject misery, I asked what was going to happen to him and was told he would likely be put down since he was old. I was stunned because he didn't look old at all to me. They said they thought he was about three, which is old by Swedish standards, making cats that age hard to adopt. I said no way were they putting him down, that I would take him home as my own. (Side note - since then, my friend took over running the shelter and made it a no-kill shelter, so no longer do cats who get sent to that shelter need fear death).

Here is Neh'h with the kitten (whom I later named Djet), on the first day of their arrival to our house. 

Neh'h was very timid and shy, so I took my time with him, giving him lots of space, reassurance and love. It turned out, the vet asking me to foster Djet was the best thing we could have done for both of the cats. Neh'h bonded with Djet and once Djet was stronger and able to mingle with the other two cats in the house, I soon learned wherever Djet was, Neh'h was sure to be close by. 

We decided to adopt Djet. Tragically, in late March 2013 he fell ill after contracting borrelia from a tick bite. In June 2013 despite our desperate efforts to save him (including working with a specialist US veterinarian based in the States), we lost Djet to the wet version of the fatal disease FIP.  It was a terrible, terrible time for all of us. Almost exactly one year previously we had lost our little dog Harvey to primary epilepsy at the young age of two and ten days later our rescue cat Nahkla died to DKA, the fatal version of diabetes. I had grown extremely fond of Djet and I was devastated, the house felt empty without him.

For days, Neh'h searched and called for his little brother. It was heartbreaking. We did everything we could to comfort him, but he shed weight, refused to eat, and withdrew. I worried we would lose him, too. I bought every kind of delicious, tempting food I could find to entice him. Sometimes it worked. Eventually, he moved on, returning to his food and his routine, but he wasn't the same anymore, his heart was broken.  We worked hard to reassure him, to give him all the attention and space he wanted, talking about adopting another cat to give him a companion since my British Shorthairs were not particularly sociable. We decided to wait, mostly because it seemed wrong to adopt a cat just for the sake of another cat. Each cat needs to be adopted on its own merit.

In April 2014, we adopted Ninya, and when Neh'h met her, he cried out to her, a little plaintive cry. And the rest, was history. Neh'h and Ninya immediately grew very close, not as close as he was to Djet, but it was enough. He is content again. He is not alone anymore. Now, he talks to us, announcing his arrival into the house whenever he comes in from outside so we can brush him. He loves to ninja our food from our plates, coming up onto the table and reaching out with a little paw to steal a broccoli or piece of pasta. He will eat almost anything, though we try to control that, since not everything is good for him. We suspect his odd behaviour (since he has free choice food 24/7 and raw chicken mince twice a day) is an artefact of his life when he was in his previous home and had to survive on scraps in the garbage. 

When he first came to us he didn't purr. I wondered if maybe he couldn't. But one day, about a year after Ninya arrived we heard a sound: a soft, deep thrumming. My husband and I looked at each other, astonished. 

Neh'h, curled up on my husband's lap, was purring. Our little boy had finally found happiness.

Neh'h and Ninya together holding paws