Pet Talk: Tale of half-frozen cat named Icee will warm the heart
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She can purr and prowl now, but Icee had to fight for life, with the help of Teller County animal shelter angels, after she was found half-frozen, eyes closed, barely alive under a deck near Woodland Park, Colo., after a big snowstorm.
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You might imagine that a little shelter already filled to the rafters with discarded dogs and cats wouldn't exactly launch itself into code-blue alert to save a long-shot homeless cat.

You'd be wrong.


I happen to know this story because it occurred at the Teller County Regional Animal Shelter where I'm a volunteer dog walker. I also happen to know that it's the sort of thing that happens regularly in really good shelters all over the country.

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"Whatcha got there?" the shelter director, Mary Steinbeiser, asks when officer Cheri France arrives and puts the carrying crate on the counter.

"A cat," France says. "I'm not sure if it's still alive."

Steinbeiser pulls the black and white cat, so cold it's rigid, out of the carrier. The eyes are closed. There's no movement. This is an awful moment for anyone who loves animals. She steels herself. And then hears the tiniest squeak.


Over the next few hours, Steinbeiser and shelter workers keep substituting warm towels for the ones that have cooled down, a never-ending relay from the laundry room to the office where they've set up the temporary kitty ICU. They inject subcutaneous fluids. A dehydrated cat can't maintain its body temperature, and this was clearly a dehydrated cat, maybe so dehydrated there's been organ damage. By afternoon, he is stirring a bit when people approach, opening his eyes, reaching out a paw. They substitute the warmed-towel approach with a cozy crate next to a heater. He looks somewhat more alert. But his heartbeat remains erratic.

When the day is done and everyone is leaving for the night, he's not as close to lifelessness as he had been. He'd even licked up a wee bit of wet food, but "I'm still thinking it's possible he might not make it," Steinbeiser says.

The next morning, she gets a phone call from the early person at the shelter. "He's moving around!" she hears. He's wobbly. Real wobbly. And in some subtle ways doesn't seem quite as solid as he had the night before. So more fluids are injected, they wrap him up again for several hours and cover his cage with a towel to retain the heat and keep his padded recovery unit quiet and private. Each time anyone passes the cage, the towel is lifted and a soft, encouraging word is spoken.

By nightfall, it's clear he has fought his way back again, and he's determined to not lose his grip this time. He's purring. He's eating a bit. And he's making sure everyone understands that his demonstrated resolve to live is matched only by the boundless sweetness that resides within him.



"He is," says Steinbeiser, "an absolute love."

He'd probably say the same right back at her.

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