I have been writing about this all day in various avenues so I apologize if I'm unclear, I'm very sleep deprived and exhausted.

Last night, we discovered that our youngest cat had swallowed string when he began to vomit profusely and exhibited extremely watery diarrhea. We went to clean him, because he had poop on his butt, and realized there was string coming out of him in the tissue we were using to wipe him. Probably shocked by the weird feeling of having the string accidentally tugged on while we were cleaning him, he darted, and a full two feet of string left his body, after which it became stuck, and he crouched on the ground and cried, obviously in pain, and we realized what we thought was maybe an upset stomach was much much more serious.

We rushed him to the emergency vet, where they did xrays, and discovered the string had moved through his body causing extreme cinching of his intestines and making the risk for perforation of his intestines (and thus leakage into his body, resulting in extreme pain and death, very very high) extremely elevated. The veterinarian wanted to call the surgeons in to do immediate emergency surgeon, now 3 AM, but then informed us they would be unwilling to operate unless we could get them the full amount, $3300, up front. We just... don't have that kind of money, and we applied for the credit options they gave us, but were denied. We called other emergency vets in the area, since it was now 3-4 in the morning and the next day was Sunday, but all we were told that they would offer us without up front full payment was low cost euthanasia. Our year old kitten, that we rescued from a car engine literally a year from this week ago, was going to die from a stupid fucking string and no veterinarian would offer us a payment plan to save his life.

I opened a GoFundMe, hoping beyond hope that we could raise what they needed before it was too late, though we were told the chances of him making it to Monday were slim to none. Around 6 AM, a friend of mine overseas contacted me to tell me that, while she could not give us the money, she could loan it to us out of her savings. She is likely to lose her job soon, so this loan was of great personal risk to her, but she was willing to do it nonetheless to save our cat's life. Later that morning we were able to get him into surgery, and later that afternoon we received a call from the surgeon telling us that he did wonderfully, the surgery went perfectly, he's in recovery, and we can pick him up tomorrow.

We are emotionally drained, still on edge and stressed, hurt that not only was our cat so close to death but that the vets were more willing to kill our cat then let us pay the cost of surgery off over time, but also extremely awed by the generosity, empathy, and trust we were shown, and the support we were given, and now that he is out of immediate danger we need to focus on paying my friend back as fast as we possibly can to make the strain less on her.

Here is the GoFundMe account: https://www.gofundme.com/ey64m66w I understand that most people are struggling, but even $1 or $5 here and there have been adding up over the past day, and if you can spare it it honestly really does help very very much .

I am still backlogged on commissions so I cannot offer discounted commissions at this time like I would like to in an ideal situation to help raise this money quickly, but I AM open for normal commissions and have been steadily making progress on them, so if you do want to commission me, or make a purchase from my Etsy shop: http://greywombat.etsy.com now is an excellent time. Etsy orders are very low wait time, within a week to be shipped.

Please pass this around if you can. I owe my friend my kitten's life, and she deserves to get this paid back to her for her own security as soon as possible.