Daisy the Flying Squirrel

I had to wait a few days to make sure that she was going to be OK before posting this, but it appears that she is. She's still walking with a pronounced limp, but all things considered she's doing GREAT.

I have posted several pictures of our furry friend performing death-defying tricks on the roofs and gutters above our apartment. Although we try to keep her from getting up there, she does occasionally get past us - she loves to be outside. So it was Sunday night - Holli and I were deciding where to plant some flowers on the rooftop deck and Daisy came up to join us. I saw her and went to grab her, but she ran towards the front wall, from where she can jump up onto the neighboring gutter. Which she did. Once getting safely out of my reach (I always stop chasing her once she makes the move to the gutter so that she doesn't have an accident from going too fast), she turned around to look at me and offer a soft and sweet "Meow." I turned around and started walking the other way when I heard Holli scream and the sound of claws on metal...


Some of you may know Daisy's history with cheating death, or at least her penchant for danger. Before she turned one year old, I got a frantic call from Holli after she had rescued Daisy from the washing machine (front-loader, about 10 minutes on the "Sanitary/ steam" cycle). Seems that she must have jumped in while Holli was grabbing a last-second piece of laundry from the other room:

She seemed to have no ill-effects, and was VERY white after she dried off! She still likes to look into the washing machine from time to time, but I haven't seen her actually jump in again.

With 8 lives still remaining, Daisy was undaunted. Over the next several months, she:
- Got stuck in the Maple tree outside of our house on Kenilworth (requiring a ladder and oven mitts to get her down)
- Had a mix-up with her lab results at the vet which made everyone think that she had eaten rat poison (or had eaten a mouse that had eaten it). She had to take some vitamin supplements and undergo close observation for several days before we found out that the vet had screwed up. I think that we still had to pay for all of the treatment... I'm not the biggest fan of that place!
- Was bitten on the base of her tail by some kind of critter (an opossum most likely). The bite became infect and she had to have some fairly serious antibiotics/
- Was hit by a car on/ near Bardstown Road, resulting in some bumps, bruises, and a chipped/ broken top fang. Took a few days for her to get her swagger back after that one!

With something like 5 lives left, she moved to Casselberry - still with quite a bit of cushion (the double-entendre is not obvious unless you have seen her!). She continued to push her luck.
- She spent some more quality time in one of our cedar trees, requiring me to get her out (those trees are no longer there, but that didn't stop her as described below).
- While visiting our neighbor's garage, he left - unknowingly locking her inside with open rat poison baits. When he came home and found her, it appeared that she had found the bait, so my mother-in-law (who was watching the house while we were on a ski trip) had to take her to the vet for an exam/ testing and another round of vitamin treatments.
- Then there was the weekend when she went missing. We noticed that she didn't come into the house on a Wednesday night. She didn't come around on Thursday, and by the time the weekend came we were very worried as she had never been gone for more than 12 hours. We walked and biked everywhere around the neighborhood and into the park, but could find no sign of her. We had a couple of responses to a Craigslist post, but they were for the wrong cat. A pretty bad storm rolled through town that weekend, and she obviously doesn't like being wet so that would have forced her home if she was out roaming. By Sunday, we feared the worst.
However... the across-the-street neighbors came back from a long-weekend on Sunday night and thought they heard a noise in the backyard, but didn't think much of it. On Monday morning they heard it again and went out to investigate in the daylight. They found Daisy sitting about 15 feet up in a tree - shivering, stinky, thirsty, and hungry. We got to use the ladder once more to extract her, but I'm sure she was very happy to see us this time!
- The last incident at Casselberry may have foreshadowed the most recent incident. While attempting to jump out of the 2nd-floor bathroom window onto the gable ridge above the front porch, she missed the landing, slid down the roof like she was on a playground, and dropped about 7 feet into a bush. As if she meant to do it, she made her way down to the ground and calmly walked off.

Running dangerously low on lives has obviously not affected her here in Amsterdam. She somehow managed to climb/ fall down the wisteria vine growing up from the street to the ledge below our first floor window (although that apparently didn't work out too well for her as she has not tried it again since).

I was 100% sure that she'd used them all up when I heard her claws on the metal gutter, which is about 45' above hard brick. I had to take a couple of pictures the next day to get a feel for how far that is.

Looking down

And looking up. The gutter is directly above the guy in the blue coat.

It takes a little over 1.6 seconds to fall 45 feet, during which time you accelerate to about 35 miles per hour - over 50 feet per second. Obviously (to me at least) not something that you could survive, let alone walk away from! Yet, when I looked over the edge I saw Daisy immediately get to her feet, take off down the street, and duck into a shop.

Holli and I flew down the stairs and ran after her, finding her below a table just inside of the shop, breathing heavy, but without any obvious major trauma. We got her back to the garage and inspected her more closely - a couple of small cuts (no bleeding to speak of), and a larger chunk of the same broken fang missing. Overall, she looked OK but she was breathing very quickly and had a little bit of a glazed look.

It took a little while to locate an animal hospital (given that it was a Sunday evening, I was somewhat surprised that one was even open considering much of the city closes down at 4:00 on Friday). An agonizing 15 minute drive brought us to a very nice facility on the West side. They did some x-rays, but Daisy would not cooperate with a thorough exam. She has developed an intense dislike of vets since we've been here. The x-rays showed no internal injuries nor broken bones; the doctor recommended giving her pain medicine and forcing rest for several days, keeping an eye on her breathing.

So far, so good - she's eating, drinking, and eliminating - all good signs. It hurts her to walk on at least one of her paws, but all-in-all she's doing very well. No matter how you count them, she's near the end of her "9-life" allotment.  Hopefully this will be a learning experience for her, but I have a bad feeling that it will not (she is, after all, a Hoosier).

I wondered if other cats had survived falls like this. Turns out that this is not at all uncommon, and there's a whole wikipedia article on High-rise Syndrome. So much for what is "obvious to me."

More entries about the family to come soon - just felt compelled to write this first.