Family Who Lost Pet to Cancer Adopt Three-Legged Cat Almost Put Down

A three-legged cat that narrowly escaped death is embarking on a new life with a family mourning the loss of a beloved pet.

David, who is in Raleigh, North Carolina, told Newsweek his family has been struggling recently. “Last month, we had to put down our 14-year-old cat due to cancer,” he said. “It was rough.”

For some pet owners, the loss of a four-legged friend is not only akin to losing a relative or loved one. It can be quite literally heartbreaking.

In 2017, The New England Journal of Medicine reported an instance where a 61-year-old woman was admitted to the ER with severe chest pains. While digging into her personal history, staffers at the hospital discovered she was coping with “multiple recent stressors, including the death of her dog.”

Following a series of emergency tests, doctors concluded she was suffering from Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or stress cardiomyopathy, a condition known as “broken-heart syndrome” that they theorized had likely been brought on by her dog’s death.

While David and his family’s mourning might not have manifested in the same way, the loss of a pet they had lived with for nearly a decade and a half was keenly felt—and not just by them.

“We have another cat that was her best friend, and we knew it was going to be a rough journey for him,” David explained. “We knew he needed another friend.”

That “friend” turned out to be Stewart, a rescue cat who it’s fair to say had been going through his own share of personal trauma recently.

“Stewart was hit by a car and was basically dying on the side of the road,” David said. “Someone brought him to a local vet to be put down. However, the vet decided that he could save him but would have to amputate his leg.”

Stewart recovered from his injuries and was soon put up for adoption. That’s when David first came across him.

“My wife and I had been searching around locally online to try and find a new cat, but it wasn’t working out,” he said. “I actually posted about this on Reddit and how hard of a time we were having trying to find a new match.”

The advice they got was simple: Go to the local branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Though it had taken them a while to get to this point, a quick browse of the local shelter’s website was all it took for them to find the cat they had been searching for.

“We saw him online and fell in love,” David said. “We went to meet him last Saturday and knew immediately that we wanted him in our family.”

They took him home later that day. While it’s still early, David said Stewart is already helping ease the pain of their recent loss.

“He is so sweet and purrs like crazy, rolls over on his back and loves pets and scratches,” David said. “He is still recovering from the removal of his leg and learning to walk again, but can run after toys better than he can walk.”