While walking along Howe Road outside Toledo in early October, Linda Kann and I found a friend — a little gray kitten trailed behind us and then dodged beneath the torso of Linda’s Australian shepherd mix, Patches, keeping pace with the pooch.
Drivers in passing cars stopped to comment on the adorable kitten, and we soon learned that someone had dumped a litter of six in the woods.
That night, a second kitten joined the first at Linda’s house, and when we walked the next day, both followed us.
At the top of the hill, we saw several people in the woods.
“Are you looking for a kitten?” I shouted. “We have two.”
Megan Filla and her mother were indeed searching for the rest of the six abandoned kittens, worried they could become feed for coyotes. She mentioned that one terrified little kitten had bitten her finger when she reached into blackberry bushes to rescue him.
We had met Filla’s fiancé, Dr. Adrian Miller, a few years ago when he stitched up Patches after a Thanksgiving Eve brawl with a younger dog.
“Once we found out about them, we’re both the kind of people that we can’t leave something like that out there,” said Filla, a 2008 W.F. West High School graduate from Toledo who met Miller while working as a veterinary technician in Oregon City, Oregon. Her heart broke thinking about the vulnerable kittens fending for themselves in the woods. “I will find them even if it’s pitch black. I’ll go out there with a flashlight.”
Filla carried our two kittens to her garage, where they joined three others she and Miller had rescued the previous day.
Yet one remained missing.
When I drove home after our walk, I spied the sixth quivering kitten near a driveway and tried to coax her into the car. She darted behind a garage.
“We had heard there was another one out there,” Filla said. “We had kind of given up in the dark.”
The next morning, after nighttime temperatures had dipped to 37 degrees, Miller found the sixth kitten curled up in a metal manure bucket near the garage where her five siblings mewled inside.
“They were so friendly, it’s hard to think of them as feral, but nobody knows because somebody just dumped them,” Filla said.
In the months since, Miller, who works at Ocean Beach Animal Hospital in Longview, has devoted after-hours efforts to curing the kittens’ upper respiratory infections, deworming and vaccinating them against rabies and leukemia, and neutering the four male cats. He plans to spay the two females too.
Meanwhile, Filla has lived out the sardonic idiom: “No good deed goes unpunished.”
As a vet tech for five years, she had been bitten and scratched so didn’t think much about it. She entered the house, where Miller was cleaning scratches inflicted by the claws of one of the terrified felines, and told him she’d been bitten by a kitten. When he asked where, she said, “The finger joint of the right hand.”
He thought she was joking.
“I’ve been mauled by a cat before,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Ha, ha, really funny.’ Because it’s the worst place you could possibly get bitten.”
He knew a veterinarian whose ring finger had been amputated after a cat bite.
The kitten’s bite pierced both sides of Filla’s right index finger at the joint capsule. Anywhere else on the hand would have been fine, she said, but bacteria thrive without oxygen in the capsule’s synovial fluid. She initially received oral antibiotics, but the finger swelled and reddened, warm from infection.
Because the cats were feral, Filla needed a series of four rabies shots in the finger joint, which left her sick and feverish. “They took the immunoglobulin and stabbed me probably like 10 times in the finger at least,” she said.
A doctor said she could lose her finger, so she underwent orthopedic surgery. Diagnosed with septic arthritis, she then spent four days at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, where they drained the infected fluid, cleaned the finger, and gave her intravenous antibiotics every six hours. She could have no visitors because of coronavirus restrictions.
After her discharge, she drove to Providence Centralia Hospital daily for two weeks to continue IV antibiotics on an outpatient basis.
Filla, who always wanted to be a nurse, had started at Lower Columbia College’s nursing school in September, but the cat bite derailed her education. She obtained a medical leave and plans to resume her studies in April.
Her medical bills soared toward $100,000, although insurance covered all but $4,000.
She has another follow-up appointment next week. The finger has healed, but it’s still stiff and aches when it’s cold.
Miller, who grew up in Milwaukie, Oregon, earned his bachelor’s degree in zoology from Oregon State University in 2006 and graduated from Murdoch University of Veterinary Medicine in Western Australia in 2014. He returned to the Pacific
Northwest after seven years because he missed the rain.
He encourages people to take strays to no-kill animal shelters.
“They’re dropping them off like it’s not going to hurt anybody,” Miller said. “But when we know there’s a kitten out there … we see coyotes out there every day.”
Filla and Miller already own a dog and four house cats. He’s planning to give two of the seven-month-old kittens to his mother and perhaps sell the rest, if only to recoup his expenses. Being a responsible pet owner isn’t free; animals need food, vaccinations, and sometimes medical care.
“I just want to have the cats go to a good home,” he said. “I don’t want people to have this idea in their head that this is a free cat; it’s not going to cost me anything. Those are the kind of people who aren’t going to want to pay veterinary bills.”
Miller said he doesn’t understand why people abandon pets.
“I don’t know what it is about this road,” he said. “Maybe they see a barn or something and think — oh, barn cats.” He encouraged people to spay and neuter their pets to avoid unwanted offspring. A female cat can have four or five litters a year, giving birth to as many as 30 kittens annually. “I’m thinking they probably didn’t even get her fixed, and it’s going to happen again.”
That’s tragic for the kittens as well as the people who might try to rescue them.
“After everything that’s happened to me, I don’t regret what I did,” Filla said. “I would do it again. It’s just the kind of person I am.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.
