Twiglet

Why 'Twiglet and Crew'?

We adopted Twiglet in June 2023 when she was about two months old after she had been pulled from a pile of burning branches and twigs in the countryside. Her mother and siblings had all made it out on their own, but she was trapped. One of her back legs and foot were deformed and had been badly burned. Her tail was also broken.

The months that followed saw a lovely little kitten learn to play and hop around on three legs and a crooked tail like there was no tomorrow. Her back foot needed to be cleaned daily, special ointment applied and then bandaged, but she loved to put up a fight and wriggle her way out of it. It wasn’t uncommon to find a discarded bandage on one side of the room and a triumphant Twiglet on the other! Her broken tail seemed to give her some trouble too, but the plan was to amputate the tail (and possibly her deformed back leg, which offered her no support) when she was a little older.

Eventually the skin on her back foot started to heal, but she was then faced with other problems that nobody could have foreseen. The fire and the trauma had caused internal damage and she developed a condition called megacolon, which meant the nerves that controlled her bowel and eventually also her bladder began to stop working. Weeks and weeks of different treatment, supplements, medication and working tirelessly with our vet to try to find a solution seemed to work initially, but gradually everything we tried stopped working. There was no magic cure. Megacolon can sometimes be managed with surgery, but it was considered too much of a risk to operate on Twiglet. There was also no certainty that surgery would have solved the problem, even if she survived the operation.

Things came to a head on 31 October 2023 when, despite fighting to the very end, Twiglet lost the battle and left us. She was just under six months old. We have lost a number of exceptional cats and dogs - Earl, Opus, Rupert, Biscuit, Molly, Google, Pesto, Pubert and Jellybean - and we miss them all. There are things around here that remind us of all of them. However, we named the website Twiglet and Crew in Twiglet's memory, so that she will never be forgotten. She was amazing. We thought she'd grow old with us here. Her time here was too short, but we hope that her name lives on. Rest in peace, Twiglet.