When Felix arrived at Dumbrava, the people who had been feeding him on the streets thought he had a problem with his back, his back was fine.
At first, there was nothing particularly alarming about him. He settled in, ate well, and behaved like any other cat who had finally found a safe place to sleep, then he started getting dirty. For most cats, being dirty is unusual as cats spend a large part of their day grooming themselves, so when a cat gradually stops doing it, it is often a sign that something else is wrong. In Felix's case, it was.
What followed was a year of veterinary visits, treatments, questions, and attempts to find a long-term solution. His teeth were removed. The lesions in his mouth were cauterized. We hoped more than once that we had finally reached the end of the story. We hadn't.
Felix suffers from severe stomatitis, a painful inflammatory condition that affects his mouth. Some treatments helped for a while, others helped less, but none solved the problem completely.
Today, Felix is doing better than he was a year ago, every month he receives treatment, and twice a day he needs additional care and cleaning. Three weeks out of four, you would probably think he is doing just fine... then comes the fourth week, the week when eating becomes difficult again, when he becomes uncomfortable, when we are reminded that rescue does not always end when an animal survives.
Many rescue stories have a clear ending: he animal is found, treated, adopted, and everyone lives happily ever after. Felix's story isn't like that, Felix is what we call a forever Dumbrava cat. Not because he isn't loved. Quite the opposite.
He sleeps next to us every night and during the day, he has favourite spots throughout the house, including the printer that somehow became his office chair while we work. He has perfected the art of demanding food with increasingly dramatic meows and has absolutely no hesitation in informing the entire household that his bowl should have been refilled five minutes ago.
The children who visit Dumbrava mostly remember him as "the dirty cat", and they know the reasons behind it.
What is not seen from our posts or pictures are the treatments, the careful monitoring of what he eats, the extra laundry, or the constant effort required to keep him comfortable. Felix cannot live in the cat house, dust and dirt would make managing his condition much harder. Instead, he lives inside a foster home, where his medical condition occasionally manages to spread chaos far beyond the room he is sitting in, through the trail of drool he leaves behind.
This is the part of animal rescue that rarely appears in photos, not the emergency, not the rescue itself, but the months and years that follow, the animals that survive, but never become completely healthy, the animals who need ongoing treatment, special food, regular monitoring, and people willing to adapt their daily lives around them.
For Felix, that means approximately 240 RON every month for wet food and around 1,000 RON for treatment.
It also means accepting that he will probably never be the perfectly healthy cat people imagine when they hear the word "rescued", and that's okay, because rescue was never about creating perfect animals, it was about giving them the best life possible.
If you would like to help Felix continue receiving the treatment and food that keep him comfortable, we would be grateful for any donation, no matter how small.
Rescue didn't end when Felix survived, for Felix, rescue is still happening every single day.
Support this story
