Allow me to clarify one thing: Grover is a girl! I suspected as much when she was a kitten and so I originally named her Brandy. During that time, I was trapping cats
and taking them to the Humane Society for surgeries and vaccinations. I had registered the outdoor felines as a feral colony. At the time, that enabled me to get these procedures done at no cost provided I care for the colony for a lifetime.

I was a one-cat woman for many years. Babette was my cat ever since she arrived, ravenous, at my doorstep when I was going to school at UCSC. I never planned to have so many cats! Yet there they were, in the backyard, so that was that.

grover_jenny.jpg

I always dreaded going to the Humane Society. The woman I had to interact with at the front desk was cold, cranky and didn’t appear to care one bit for animals! She exuded a wrath most macabre. When I picked up ‘Brandy’ I was told that my furry friend was a boy! I didn’t question this; after all, the spay/neuter surgery had just been performed. So I settled upon the name Grover.

Grover was a sleek, muscular cat in ‘his’ youth. ‘He’ spent most of the time outdoors and was probably a skilled hunter. The less I know about hunting the better! One day Grover came home with a large abscessed wound. A traveling vet was able to come right away and treated Grover in the bathroom where I had ‘him’ confined. This vet knows her business. She definitively declared Grover to be a girl! I saw no good reason to change Grover’s name yet again. Having a boyish name all this time did not appear to have given this sweet kitty an identity crisis!

The vet doesn’t know what’s wrong with Grover. Her lower lip is completely mangled and raw. It could be the result of an injury, it could be a growth. If she doesn’t heal from antibiotics in two weeks, then a sample of the tissue will be biopsied.