Freddy the Accordion Limbo Cat

One night we were coming home from church. As we turned onto our street I saw this cat sitting in the middle of the road in the strangest posture that I'd ever seen. I knew something was wrong. We put him in a box and took him into the house.

We didn't take him to a vet because we didn't expect him to survive the night and the vet would euthanize him. Half of his head was bashed in, swollen with his eyes popping out of their sockets. He was snarly and slashed anyone who touched him.

My husband wrapped him in a towel and squirted antibiotics down his throat with an eyedropper and also fed him the same way with milk mixed with baby cereal. We prayed for him a lot.

He recovered and climbed out of that box over two months after he came to us. He was fully functional except that he was blind in one eye and his tail had a very strange way of lopping over to one side. We'd never had a cat with a head injury survive before.

Since we already had rescued his brothers when they were kittens we put his age at around two years old. He moved into our home including using the cat box without being taught how to. He was popular with the other cats. He got along with all of them except when it was dinner time, then he got snarly and everyone stayed away from him.

One day while he was running through the house with the other cats he was dashing around the corner from the living room into the dining room. His front end kept going around the corner the while back quarters stopped dead in the middle of his run. My heart stopped in terror. Was there something terribly wrong with him? Then he scooted his back end up with his front end and continued around the corner. He became "The Accordion Limbo cat".

We figured that his brain injury caused some nerve damage which showed up occasionally. He was especially funny when he was running full tilt through the house with his front end while the back end stopped and his back stretched out longer than we could imagine, but it didn't stop him from running anyway. He lived to eleven years old.