Nanami’s Love Story

“All of you at Ellie’s Rainy Day Fund made the difference between happy and broken hearts. We are so incredibly grateful to all your donors for keeping our family together by making all this possible. Thank you!”
– Nanami’s Mom & Grandma

When we read the listing on Craigslist, we drove almost 5 hours to help keep this accidental litter of kittens from being turned in to the local shelter. I told Mom we’d just go look at them, knowing full well she’d fall in love with at least one of them. We came home with Nanami and her brother Chucky. Upon our return, my brother swept Chucky away for his own. In both cases, it was love at first sight!

My Mom has MS, and at that time had also just had her third abdominal surgery (she’s now up to #6). I had just ended my engagement, and was struggling with seizures and fainting spells from a recently diagnosed neurological disorder. So we were having big challenges, to say the least. We named Nanami after one of our favorite Annamae characters. A young girl who persevered through hard times and brought the world hope.

This little orange kitten is does that for us! From the time she arrived, she wasn’t afraid of our other pets. In fact, there was no hissing from either side! Everybody loves her, two-legged and four. She is full of spunk and fire. Though she also knows how to relax. More often than not, you’ll find her with her belly in the air, with a look on her face that says “life is good!”.

One day, when Mom got out of her recliner it wouldn’t close all the way. We were mortified to discover Nanami was inside it! Her breathing was shallow, so we spent our November rent to get her seen at the ER. We feared internal bleeding.

We were relieved to discover that wasn’t the case. But our relief was short lived as it was discovered our baby was in HEART FAILURE! How could this be? She’s less than a year and a half old. She needed to stay in oxygen in the ICU until she could see a cardiologist. That was definitely out of our price range.

Mom and I work hard to take care of our fur family. Our options are limited with our physical challenges. But we’ve figured out that if Mom drives (she has trouble walking) and I get out and deliver (I don’t drive because I sometimes pass out), we can deliver for Doordash. Which we do 7 days a week.

So you see, all of you at Ellie’s Rainy Day Fund made the difference between happy and broken hearts. We were planning to start pawning everything we could to try to get our baby the care she needed and be out of pain. Now that she’s on medication for her cardiomyopathy we’ll be able to afford the pills going forward. And thanks to this accident, Nanami’s heart condition was diagnosed. Without that, we most likely would have found her dead one day. We love our girl so much. We are so incredibly grateful to all your donors for keeping our family together by making all this possible. Thank you!

–Nanami’s Mom & Grandma