Flood left kitten without a family, so I gave him a new one
Last year, my home town flooded. For whatever reason, our area had a large population of stray cats. We kept finding the strays dead for days, even weeks, after the flood. It was horrible.
One day, I had Covid and was waiting on a doctors appointment, just driving around, when I saw this tiny black thing in the middle of the road. Didn’t know what it was, but saw it move and swerved out of instinct. Pulled an illegal u-turn and came back and found the tiniest little kitten in the world just trembling in the middle of the road. Too weak to even fight me. He wasn’t moving at all, and he was bleeding from his nose.
I was certain he had been run over and so I took him to an emergency vet and they handed me a bunch of paperwork and took him back. They asked me if I was willing to be financially responsible for him, and, I assumed he was about to be put down, so I said “of course!” They asked me his name… and I said the name of the street… Sydney… because I was short on unisex name ideas.
They let me back after I agreed to pay for everything, and the vet did an examination. He told me “Sydney” was a boy, around 4 weeks old, only 4/10s of a pound. He was severely malnourished and incredibly small for his age, but they guessed four weeks because of his teeth.
He told me had a sinus infection and was bleeding from the nose from a minor scrape, that he had no broken bones and was most certainly not dying. It was at this point I had to suck it up and tell my father (I was staying with him for a bit back then) that I had another cat… and that I needed him to look after him while I went to my doctors visit. After throwing a fit, he accepted and went home with Sydney. The first picture I have of him is from when they got home.
Had to bottle feed the little guy for a week or two, and started calling him “Syd” for short. Us both being sick at the same time definitely sucked, but it also meant I got the time off work needed in order to feed him as often as he needed (every 2-3 hours, per the vet).
These days, Syd is lively and adores his sister, Baby, who can be seen on the right of the last picture. They look IDENTICAL. The only difference is Baby is missing half an ear, and their eyes are slightly different shades of green.