After my visit to the doctor, I went to the other compounds asking around if they’ve seen an orange cat. Nope, they said. So what I did was, out of desperation, I called pssssswwwssssss pssssssswwwwssssss as I always do with all the cats that have gone through me.

Then I heard it, the small meow. As I traced the source of that meow, my pssssswssss grew louder and the more the cat responded. After a lengthy search, I finally found Oyen, locked in one of the halls in the church next door.

He hasn’t eaten in three days! If I hadn’t been proactive in searching for him, he could have died with dehydration and starvation.

I knew he was alive and was stuck somewhere. He isn’t that mature enough to go gallivanting far, as males in heat usually do.

Cats normally just roam around within a 200-meter radius, as one dude here in this uni campus found out. He put a tracker on the strays cared for by a volunteer group called Cats of XXX (name of our uni). Then he plotted the whereabouts of those cats for xx months in different cat territories. So that’s how he found out that cat colonies have specific areas they guard as their own and they never or seldom stray within that 200-m radius.

Anyway, that background info made me hopeful Oyen is just somewhere near. Unless he was picked up by someone, I believed he can be found soon. I was right.

I feel sad for Ninja though. She is separated from her family and her carefree life here but it is for the best. She is going to be well taken care of by my friend who I know has been a cat lady for a long time.

A family friend messaged me that he and his wife are going to talk it over if they can adopt the remaining cats for their homestead some towns away from here. He hasn’t messaged back yet 😕.

For now, I know all the kittens are alive and thriving and I’m at peace with that. Two already found loving homes, the remaining three are still waiting to be adopted. But I think we will keep Tabby/Gorilla/Tiger. (Twin I keeps on calling her Gorilla 😑)

Since I’m on a roll this week, I continued with my quest to do the important stuff that I keep putting off—this time is oil change.

Good thing that I only choose to have mineral oil (every 5k km change) instead of the synthetic one (every 7k to 10k km) because I want my car to be checked more frequently. Because of that, the mechanic found that one of the oil plugs has lost its threads and must be changed. If it weren’t for the more frequent oil changes, I wouldn’t have caught it and I would have a very leaky car traversing SLEX and EDSA.

I thought this is the last day I would be checking in with a doctor. Nope. I would be passed on to a plastic/facial surgeon on Tue to excise the lump on my forehead. Need to see what it is really and while it is not a cyst because this lump is hard, it’s better to check if this is benign and not worrisome. I would have to ask for a leave of absence on the day of the surgery.

This is the price I pay for making sure that I’m healthy so my kids won’t be burdened with my medical issues later on. As my friend who I met yesterday said, I shouldn’t neglect these things. His mom’s breast cancer came back and had a mastectomy last month. She would go through a month of daily radiation treatment in June but thankfully she doesn’t have to go through chemo again. She said chemo just killed her body the first time around and it was so rough going through the whole series.

“Yeah, you should do you sono-mammogram every year, even if you don’t have a family history,” he said. His sister is starting her regular monitoring now. Their aunt died of colon cancer so they have to be doubly careful.

Hoping all things are ok with me so my kids have less things to worry about.