Please Help My Emotional Support Animal
It was inevitable, I suppose, that I’d discover a reason I should have retained my Twitter account and its thousands (somehow!) of followers when I quit social media for the sake of my own mental health. The reason? I’ve had to launch a fundraiser for the veterinary care for the first of my two cats, Meru, and I don’t have a following at which to blast it.
At her annual wellness exam this month, her veterinarian spotted a rotting tooth that Meru’d been showing no obvious outward signs of having. It needs to come out. Meru’s been my emotional support animal since 2014—two years before I officially received a midlife autism diagnosis.
Meru’s veterinarian currently is scheduling such procedures about a month in advance. She needs to have it done with the next three months. In addition, they’d like to do blood work thirty days ahead of the procedure. The sooner Meru hits her goal, the sooner I can schedule the surgery.
(Meru, being a cat, does not work and so cannot pay for the surgery herself. Me, being disabled and unable to work, cannot do so either—without your help.)
I adopted Meru from Oregon Humane Society a week after Scully, my cat of eighteen years, died—much earlier than I thought I’d be ready for a new cat. She’d initially been rescued by Multnomah County Animal Services, then sent to OHS several days later. No one knows for sure how old she is; OHS estimated she was born in 2006, making her around sixteen-years-old now.
The county had named her Dancer, but I renamed her Meru after the protagonist in the epic Matt Kindt comic book, MIND MGMT. Since my first cat in Portland had been named Scully, I’d wanted to find the name of another pop culture redhead.
Please contribute what you can to help Meru stay happy and healthy andto help her continue to make my own life more sane and stable.
The funds raised here will allow Meru to go to her own veterinarian clinic for the procedure, where they know her, and know me. They only do two such procedures in a day, rather than Meru having to go somewhere she’s never been where they crank through a dozen or so procedures each day for clients and pets they’ve never even seen before.
Any funds in excess of what’s needed for this procedure, if any, will be donated to Oregon Humane Society, unless any additional veterinary needs crop up. No funds will be used for personal purposes beyond these veterinary bills.