When you read “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” do you catch yourself humming the famous nursery rhyme? Well, after this you might be thinking of four adorable kittens instead.
Kitten season is the busiest time of the year for shelters and rescues. While it sounds like it would be a magical time with their tiny toe beans, SPCA shelters become flooded with kittens who were abandoned, injured, or orphaned.
Kittens just like Eeny, Meeny, Miny, and Moe.
Struggling to survive as strays, these three-week old babies were brought to safety at the Pictou SPCA. To give them some extra TLC and socialization, they went home with a lovely foster family. All the kittens learned how to play, purr, and find the perfect spot for a cat nap.
To set them and their future families up for success, when the kitties were big enough, they went in for spay/neuter surgeries. This way, they would live longer, healthier, and happier lives AND they wouldn’t have accidental litters of their own.
But during that veterinary visit, the SPCA team discovered something unique. Eeny was diagnosed with a 2/6 heart murmur.
Normally, when listening to a heart you would hear lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub… but with Eeny’s heart, you would hear a loud shooshing sound. Eeny needed a special family that would monitor his heart condition and give him lots of love.
Luckily, Eeny met Alycia.
“I was searching the SPCA websites in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia,” remembered Alycia. “Eeny, now Ollie, caught my eye because of his heart shaped nose.”
“Out of all the kittens I saw, he is the one that caught my eye the most,” she continued. “They sent me a few videos of him and he couldn’t stop making biscuits.”
Although Alycia lived miles away, she felt drawn to him. They shared a special connection… Alycia also has a heart murmur.
“Having a heart murmur myself I was born with, it did not stop me from adopting him,” Alycia shared. “He settled into his new home right away and was playful, making biscuits. When I go upstairs he always beats me by running up the stairs and jumps on the bed waiting for me to join. He has a toy (a bouncy stick with a feather like toy at the end) I’ll play with him, but if I’m not he will grab the toy and walk it all around the house until he finds me to play with him.”
Their love has only gotten stronger from there.
“My son adores playing with him and holding him,” smiled Alycia. “And when my husband comes home from work in his truck (he hears it coming around the corner) he runs downstairs meowing at the window excited to see him.”
The family is truly in heartfelt harmony now.
“We lost our senior cat Sebastian of 15 years which brought a lot of grief to our family,” explained Alycia. “It has definitely helped with bringing joy back into our life’s, and our home doesn’t feel so empty.”
Heart murmurs sometimes scare some potential adopters away… but in this situation, it really hit home for Alycia and Eeny.
Alycia didn’t need the nursery rhyme to help her choose who to adopt. Their hearts spoke to one another, almost as a reminder that sometimes the most unexpected connections are the ones that heal us the most.