Woman reunited with cat after life-saving op

A woman has been reunited with the cat she never thought she’d see again.

Tracie Couch was distraught when family pet Smokie Joe didn’t come home one day. She frantically put up posters and printed out hundreds of lost cat leaflets to post through letterboxes.

After several weeks, she was beginning to give up hope until she got a call to say that not only was Smokie Joe safe and well, he had also survived a major operation thanks to The Blue Cross.

Tracie said: “We got Smokie Joe as a kitten and he’s 12 now. It’s not like him to wander off, so for him to go missing after all that time, I just couldn’t comprehend it.

“The weather had been nice and a lot of people were out gardening. I thought ‘what if he’s gone into a shed and they’ve locked it and don’t open it again until spring’?

“I even called the council to see if they knew whether a cat had been run over – at least then I would have known. The not knowing was awful and I had just about given up hope.”   

Then last month, a few weeks after Smokie Joe’s disappearance, Tracie got a call from Tim Sillis, centre manager of the Blue Cross adoption centre in Torbay, to say they had a stray that could be him.  A delighted Tracie went to the centre and confirmed that it was indeed Smokie Joe.

He had been handed in by someone who thought he was a stray – but then when they saw a missing cat poster, they passed the details on to The Blue Cross.

A few days into his stay at the adoption centre, Smokie Joe had fallen ill and had to have life-saving surgery.

Tracie said: “When Tim told me how ill he’d been I couldn’t believe it.  I never thought I would see him again so to have him home with us is fantastic.

“I have four cats and now I’m going to get them all microchipped – that will be their Christmas present. If Smokie Joe had been microchipped he would have been home a lot sooner.

“I will definitely be setting up a Direct Debit to The Blue Cross and have already started getting donations to give to the charity. If it hadn’t been for them, Smokie Joe wouldn’t be here.”

Tim said: “Smokie, or Fred as we called him, came into the centre on October 28 as a stray. He was with us for five days with no problem then out of nowhere he didn’t seem himself.

“I took his temperature and it was high, also his breathing was rapid and shallow and he was very lethargic. The vet came out as an emergency call as it was a Sunday.

“Our vet made an instant decision to take him back to the surgery. It soon came to light that Smokie Joe was unable to breath properly.

“X rays revealed that he had an infection in the chest cavity. He had to have a chest drain put in as an emergency under general anaesthetic. He also had to be injected with antibiotics and his chest needed to be flushed daily for a week.

“Without this surgery he would have died. It was touch and go in the first few days due to the level of infection so our vets did a great job.”

Tim added: “In the second week of Smokie Joe being at our vets I had a phone call to report that a missing cat poster had been seen in the area he had come from. I phoned the local vet and they gave me a description of the missing cat. It sounded very similar.

“When Smokie Joe came back to the centre I rang and spoke to Mrs Couch and she came up and had a very emotional reunion with her baby boy.

“As a result, Mrs Couch is going to bring all her cats to the centre to be micro-chipped so that if they go missing they can be reunited with her.”