It was quite the emotional moment back on May 19 when Raymond McNamara reunited with his 20-year-old blind cat, Lily, after she was lost for two long months in Florida.
“Hey Lily, you happy to be home? Happy your daddy’s got you?” Kathy Bieniek, who is the vice president of Saving Sage Animal Rescue in Miami, can be heard saying to McNamara in a video shared on YouTube. “Daddy’s happy too, I can tell.”
“She’s never going to get away from me again,” McNamara stated on camera, fighting back tears.
McNamara had been traveling cross-country at the time from California with his beloved cat when the long-haired Himalayan wandered off and got lost in South Florida. Devastated, McNamara alerted the authorities for some help.
“Animal control and the police department were looking for her when she was first lost. He stirred up a lot of attention because he was frantic,” Bieniek explained to ABC News. “We organized the search party trying to find her but unfortunately she was not found. He left thinking his cat was gone. Two months later I got a message on Facebook that a lady found a cat at the construction site where she was lost. We pieced it together … that was definitely was his cat. Lily did not have a microchip, but I had his mom’s phone number from when I was dealing with him earlier.”
Lily, who is blind and also deaf, had survived two months on her own “in the heat and in the bad weather with torrential rain,” stated Bieniek. “She was terribly matted and sick.”
The staff at Saving Sage teamed up with Pet Express Animal Hospital in order to nurse her back to health until McNamara was able to make the trip back cross-country to pick her up.
“She was very dehydrated and very sick,” stated Daniel Rayment, the hospital’s veterinary practice manager. “She had some liver issues. We hospitalized her, put her on IV fluids.”
Once McNamara arrived there, he was so overcome with emotion to see his best friend again.
“He broke down in tears and is never going to let her out of his sight again. She is his world,” stated Bieniek. “He’s got her. He’s excited.”
What a sweet story! How we love happy endings!
