Lomloy walks

On the first of October, Mee was at an orchid farm on her flower rounds, buying cat food for the strays there, when a worker showed her a kitten that had been bitten. She was bleeding and could not stand. Mee put her in the car and drove to the animal hospital, and on the table, with the vet shaving the fur around the wound, she gave her a name: Lomloy, which means something like “rich lady”. It was a hope, not a description.

The first clip below is from that night. Mee is asking her followers for help, the way she always does. The vet’s first worry was the back legs. Lomloy had no use of them.

Five days later one of the hospital staff caught a hind leg moving and filmed it, because they could not quite believe it either. That is the second clip, six seconds long.

Yesterday Mee and I went to see her. She is still an inpatient, three and a half weeks in, in a cone and a little blue recovery suit. The staff took the cone off and put her on the floor, and she walked. Not well. She wobbles, she sits down after a few steps, and after a minute she is tired and lies flat. But she walked across the room to Mee’s hand, and the staff think she will get a bit better still. She is not ready to come home yet. There is more treatment to do, and I will post again when there is a date.

What it has cost so far, from the hospital’s statement for 1 to 26 October:

	baht
Treatment	9,200
Boarding, 25 nights	7,000
Laboratory, medicines, supplies, food, flea treatment, fees	2,576
Total, including 7% VAT	18,776

Mee paid all of it, in five deposits and a last 1,491 in cash at the desk on the day we visited.

In dollars that is about 540, which for a vet bill in America sounds almost cheap. Here it is not. Mee works seven days a week, between the orchid farm and her flower business, and what comes back is thin. She told me she has no choice: her bills have to be paid, and so does the cat food, so she keeps going. Eighteen thousand baht is weeks of that work, and she spent it on a kitten nobody else wanted. The meter is still running, at 280 baht a night for her bed plus whatever the vet does next.

The same arithmetic works the other way too. A gift that would barely register at a clinic in the US pays for a week of Lomloy’s boarding here, or her medicines, or a round of the treatment she still needs. Small amounts go a long way in Bangkok, and every one of them goes to Mee for the hospital. How to help explains the ways to send it.