My friends stepped up in a big way when I needed their help for Bessie

By David McElroy · August 15, 2012

When I looked at Bessie’s injured paw Tuesday morning, I was horrified. What had been a slightly swollen but normal-looking paw had changed. It now looked more like a limb that had been caught in a meat grinder. The bones of her paw were exposed, because she had stripped away the dead flesh. It was gruesome. (Here’s a picture if you’re interested.)

You might remember how this whole mess started. Bessie somehow got her paw caught up in the threads of some fabric under my bed. The harder she pulled to get away, the tighter the threads became. She was trapped, but never made a sound. I even saw her underneath the bed 24 hours before I realized there was a problem, but she acted so normal that I didn’t suspect a thing.

When the vet saw her last week, he thought the flesh was still healthy enough to survive, but he told me to watch out in case it turned hard or crusty. Bessie noticed it was dead before I could, and she chewed it off by Tuesday morning.

I had her back at the vet’s office just a few minutes after I found this. I thought she might have to have much of her paw amputated, but I still didn’t understand how bad it was.

The vet told me I had two options. The first was to amputate her leg at some particular bone. After he explained all of that one, I waited for the less-radical option — maybe just cutting off part of her paw or a portion of her leg. But then he told me the only other option was ending her life. Amputating the entire leg was the only way to save her.

(Without going into a lot of the details that he explained to me, you can’t just leave a leg bone sticking out back there for a cat, because he’ll keep trying to use it as a leg, even though there’s no paw there. He’ll keep punching through the skin and it will stay infected permanently. That’s the condensed version.)

I had to leave Bessie at the vet, because they wanted to try to get her strong enough for surgery. If she’s good enough by this morning, they’ll operate today. If she’s still not strong enough, they’ll wait and do it Thursday or Friday. If you judged by the irritation in her face at the vet Tuesday morning, right, you’d have thought she was strong enough to kill someone.

The cost was a problem. I wasn’t prepared for the $1,500 price tag that the vet estimated, much less the $1,800 that the office manager told me a few minutes later was more realistic when I included follow-up visits and care for the probable small complications. When I was working in politics, an unexpected expense of a couple of thousand dollars would have been unpleasant, but it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. I was making a lot of money. But I gave up that high income as I moved away from political consulting. I had no idea how I was going to pay, but I knew I had to save her life.

I was a bit discouraged as I drove toward home. I posted the update on Facebook for my friends who had seen the news of her turn for the worse, and I mentioned the cost. One of my friends suggested that I set up a fundraising page. Honestly, my initial reaction was to think it was a sweet, but impractical, idea. Why would anyone out there be willing to shell out $1,800 to help a cat they didn’t have any reason to care about?

But several people encouraged me to try. I got a number of private messages from people letting me know they wanted to help. I still found it hard to believe, but I set up a page at Indigogo. (Here’s the project page.) I didn’t expect much, honestly, but I was surprised to find amounts trickling in — $25, $30 $50, $75 and so forth. Then in the late afternoon, someone gave $1,000. I still don’t know who it is, because the name wasn’t attached to the email notification that I finally got, so I still have to figure that one out.

As of 10 p.m. Tuesday, the amount raised stood at an incredible $1,580. Just about 12 hours after I discovered that I had a serious need, the vast majority of it was covered. The amounts have varied greatly, ranging from $5 to $1,000 from 27 different people so far. Friends were posting the link on their Facebook pages and their friends were donating. I don’t even know a lot of these people, but I love and appreciate every one of them.

This is a typical comment. It’s from a woman in Washington state who I had never even heard of until today. She made a donation and then made this comment on the Facebook page of our mutual friend who had posted the link:

When I was about 12 years old, “Boc,” our orange farm cat went missing for about a week. He finally came back, but his hind leg was shattered, probably from being hit by a car. We didn’t have the money to get it repaired or amputated so Mom and Dad put him down. I couldn’t save Boc, but at least I can do something for Bessie.

Humans are creatures of such extremes. I see the ugliness in them so much of the time. When you have your eyes on the political world, you can’t help but see it. But there’s incredible generosity and kindness in many people, too.

If you’re among those who donated to help Bessie, I want to thank you. The money means a lot to me, but the fact that so many people have been willing to step up and help means even more to me personally. It makes me happy, and in an odd way, it gives me just a little more faith in people than I sometimes feel like having.

Thank you.

Update: By late Wednesday morning, the goal had been reached. Bessie is scheduled for surgery Wednesday afternoon.

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I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

After Tampa Bay, Fla., musician Colt Clark had all of his gigs canceled last year for months on end, the entire family felt trapped at home as most of the world was on quarantine lockdown. His wife, Aubree, had an idea that would let Colt make music and involve the whole family in making music videos to share with their friends and family on Facebook. Aubree is a photographer and homeschooling mom to a daughter and two sons, who range in age from 6 to 11. After their friends started asking to share the videos, they made the performances public — and a few of them are now on YouTube, where they go by the name of Colt Clark and the Quarantine Kids. The younger son, Becket, is on drums. The older boy, Cash, plays keyboards, strings and guitars. Dad supplies lead vocals and plays guitar, while 6-year-old Bellamy mostly dances but sometimes does backup vocals. There’s even a dog who makes an occasional appearance. The Clark family has just raised the bar for what I need to create with my future children. And best of all, they seem to be having a great time together. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.

Have you ever wondered how the social media world works for so-called “influencers”? I find it comical, so I thought I’d share with you. I frequently get offers such as what I’m about to describe. And if I’m getting such offers — as a relative nobody in the online world — you can only imagine what people with huge audiences are offered. It starts with an email appealing to my ego: “We came across your online presence and we LOVE your style. We’d love to have you as one of our Brand Ambassadors. To celebrate our new [Brand Name] collection, we want to give you a FREE Watch so you can post a picture of you wearing it and drive more exposure to our brand.” Did you hear that? They love me. They want me to be seen wearing their cheap $59 watch so other people will think, “If this amazing influencer wears that, surely I should buy one.” They even offer me commissions on the watches sold from people clicking from my site. So the next time you see some alleged “influencer” touting something online or on social media, remember that this is what it’s probably all about. It’s laughable.

Modern culture is going insane. The latest evidence comes from the effort to redefine children’s author Dr. Seuss as a racist whose books should be banned. Why? Because a few images in those books don’t meet modern political standards. The drawing you see here is one of those “dangerously racist images,” and it comes from the Dr. Seuss classic, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” The book catalogs all the wild diversity seen by a child on one street, including the offending drawing of a Chinese boy. What’s racist about it? Apparently, it was racist to show the boy eating rice, wearing a funny hat, using chopsticks and (worst of all) having eyes represented by a slit. (The bearded man near him has dots for eyes, but that’s apparently OK.) In other words, the stereotypes are considered racist today. (Oddly, the culture warriors who fret over such things are never concerned if a white southerner is depicted as ignorant trash living in a trailer. Some stereotypes are great, especially if the left hates those people anyway.) Theodore Geisel — the name of the real-life Dr. Seuss — was a product of his time and nobody at that time would have seen any of this as racist. Using stereotypes and exaggerations is how artists depict differences in simple ways. You can argue that it’s better to achieve the end result in a different way, but it’s insane to pretend that everybody from the past should have his work erased because it doesn’t match the preferences of modern leftists. Unfortunately, the company that publishes Dr. Seuss books has caved to the insane people — and six of his popular works will no longer be published. The world has simply gone insane.

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