Woman Notices Something Special About Cat Who Was 'Thrown Away'

With over a hundred rescues under her belt, there isn’t much that Hands of Mercy Cat Sanctuary founder Brenda Wilkinson hasn’t seen.

She’s used to taking care of cats with complex medical conditions, but when she brought an abandoned black cat home with her one night, she noticed something very unusual about him.

“When I held him, he curled up in a ball with his feet over his head,” Wilkinson told The Dodo. “Like a little silver bug.”

Wilkinson first learned about T’Challa after a Good Samaritan, who noticed the sick cat lying in someone’s yard, called her for help.

“He was hungry, thirsty and he couldn’t stand,” Wilkinson said. “I really did not expect him to make it through the night.”

But Wilkinson was determined to help T’Challa heal and hoped to get him adopted into a loving home, so she rescued the cat and brought him back to the sanctuary.

"All he wants is to be held and loved. I don't know what happened to him and his past or why anyone threw him away, but I just want to fix everything for him," Wilkinson wrote in a Facebook post.

Within minutes of taking T’Challa home, Wilkinson realized that he wasn’t like any of the other cats she’s rescued. Every time she’d pick him up to spoon-feed him or give him medicine, his body would curl into a ball and become really stiff.

“When I tried to get the medication in his mouth, his head tucked in really hard and fast,” Wilkinson said.

This happened every time Wilkinson held T’Challa, who was otherwise in good spirits, so she took him to the vet to figure out what was going on. But she didn’t get many answers.

“He’s gone through a whole bunch of tests and nobody knows why his body does that,” Wilkinson said.

T’Challa’s vet team suspects that it has to do with an underlying neurological condition, but they’re not sure which one, or how he got it.

“It could’ve been from birth or something that happened to him,” Wilkinson said. “Whatever it is, it’s something that he can live with.”

Wilkinson continued giving T’Challa daily treatments to help him heal. She also helped him learn how to eat on his own and how to balance again.

When T’Challa was healthy enough to go to a new home, Wilkinson brought him to the adoption center in hopes that the right family would find him. But his time at the center was short-lived.

“He completely shut down and stopped eating, so I took him back with me,” Wilkinson said. “When he got here, he just laid on the bed like, ‘I’m home now!’”

Since T’Challa was immediately back to his old self as soon as he returned to her care, Wilkinson knew that he was officially there to stay.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to T’Challa’s health, but one thing’s for sure: he finally has the loving family he deserves.

“He knows he’s home and that he’s not going anywhere,” Wilkinson said. “He’s a miracle.”