gallery
this is my son wrigley. he's my first cat (outside of my family pets) and he means the world to me. i adopted him on september 28th, 2024.
i am constantly struck by just how gentle this little creature is. before i adopted him, he had a pretty rough go of things. he was a stray and got bit by a dog in his arm. by the time the shelter saved him, it was so badly infected that it had to be amputated. plus, he is positive for FIV & i suspect he has FHV. he probably saw a few scrapes with other kitties on the street. we rescued a lot of cats in my family growing up & so i was fully expecting my little guy to be a little skittish or aloof given his background, but wrigley is genuinely so loving and trusting of me and anyone i bring into the home. he is a total lovebug and absolutely loves to snuggle. even my partner has told me they've never met a cat as clingy as he is-- he always wants to be included whenever we get cozy.
as for his name, the shelter called him "squid" which is very cute but just didn't fit his personality. i think it was because he has little ink spots on his fur. as per family tradition, his shelter name is now his middle name. i had a list of names i had brainstormed before i adopted a cat, and wrigley was the only one that felt right when i met him. he's my chicago boy after all.
when my partner and i moved in together, he finally got to live in an apartment more than 300sq ft & he had a new friend in their kitty, roman. you can see the two of them hanging out in some of the gallery photos. they're both such sweet and friendly cats. roman is used to living with big dogs and wrigley had been an only kitty until now, so watching them interact is kind of funny. they tend to just nap nearby each other on the cat trees or chase each other when they get the zoomies. recently, they've started wrestling.
wrigley often has flair-ups of some kind related to his skin and eyes. i have been to four different vetrinarians at this point, and nobody has been able to give a satisfactory answer or solution. the latest hypothesis is that he has a combination of chronic dry eye in his left eye and an indeterminate allergy that irritates his skin. basically what it means is that i periodically have to give him eyedrops otherwise he starts squinting in one eye... and that sometimes he has to wear a cone, because he has a spot under his chin that every so often he will scratch til it bleeds. this is why i believe he may have FHV, and i've been doing research about that to see if there are any ways to better combat flair-ups. i say to my family 'who would have thought that the cat with three legs would have health issues?'... joke being that his issues have literally nothing to do with being a tri-ped.
we've upgraded him from his orginal plastic cone since my mother bought him what we refer to as 'the donut'-- a padded cloth ring that goes around his neck. he looks fucking silly but it's the best defense i have currently. he doesn't mind it at all and treats it like an airplane pillow.
(or, things me and my family call him)
my partner's nickname for him. when i told them it didn't make sense, they said that i just didn't understand the complicated bond they have.
my ex-gf (who i was with when i adopted him) used to call him 'pookie', but i tweaked it because a pooka is a cool mythical creature. sometimes its just shortend to 'pook'