This is Hiro Now
Holly and I heard him in the lowest level of the parking garage where I worked in the summer of 1999. A wailing pitiful cry that echoed through the place and was VERY hard to locate. You know, the acoustics of a parking garage. You could slowly zero in on the cry, but as soon as you got remotely close he would become frightened and go silent. After an hour in that garage sneaking around and listening we finally determined that he was somewhere in or around the giant white Suburban. Others wandering through the garage could not find him. Only while I was sitting there exasperated and silent for a while did he start to cry, and from my vantage I could tell he was inside the wheel of a spare hanging on the bottom of the truck. I lay on my back and tried to reach up in there and get the cat (at that point I couldn’t tell if it was a young adult or a kitten, but the cry was so frighteningly loud I was sure it was large enough to be armed with razor claws and needle fangs). Each time I blindly reached for it the cat made a spitting noise and scared the crap out of me. I was being a big baby so Holly slid up under the truck, reached in there and grabbed him. Heh heh. He tried to bite and claw but was so weak he could do nothing, and a second later Holly was holding him. He was so tiny and weak we rushed him straight to a 24-hour emergency veterinarian. Well, on the ride to the vet’s office we both realized that we could not give this cat to a shelter, and by the time we had arrive there he already had a name. Hiro.
He had a HORRIBLE first few days with us. A prolapsed rectum was only the start of his troubles, but a SERIOUSLY incompetent vet (or just plain sadistic, still not sure) made things much worse. This "doctor” just sewed the kittens rectum closed and gave us some canned formula to feed it. The formula turned solid in his system but little Hiro couldn’t poop! At the time I did not know what was distressing him so much, and the night he started trying to poop right through the stitches and crying in pain was one of the worst nights ever. To be so helpless while he was in such pain… Well, our regular vet gaped in horror as he learned what “treatment” the other vet had ordered. Our guy fixed Hiro up in about a day and the little boy cat was a healthy bounding kitten in no time.
Now he is all grown up and likes to get on the table and knock everything off onto the floor. That's appreciation.