Heart Attack Morning

This morning, or rather sometime last night, my indoor only kitty Button got outside. We've been house sitting for the past couple weeks, and while I've been coming home to visit her, she always gets upset when I'm away.

Don't leave me!

Yesterday we came home and I spent all evening cuddling her and went to bed thinking she had too. Instead, she must have followed me out of the bedroom at one point, and when I closed the bedroom door for the night, must have been unable to get back in. E and I are thinking that Milou may have chased her outside, they're very friendly with each other but when Button gets scared she isn't rational.

In the six years I've had her, Button has been lost once, when E and I went to visit our friends E and K in Oregon. When my mother, who was watching her, realized she was missing, we had to cut our road trip short and drive back to Los Angeles to find her. After days of searching for her, lost posters, and calling a search and rescue dog, it turned out that she had gotten scared and hid underneath our house. When she got lost this time, it was one of the first places we looked but I couldn't hear her bell jingling or a response to my calls.

This is not the face of an outdoor cat

Right about that time where I was beginning to really panic, E came outside to help me look for her and decided to look in our very back side yard where we used to keep our trash bins before the city supplied them. I followed him in and while he was looking behind an old kitty pool, I saw some silky black fur squeezed underneath a bag of mulch. It was her! The poor baby had probably been outside, squeezed under that bag of mulch terrified all night. I brought her back to her bedroom and aside from her general state of terror, she seems to be okay.

Button is not an outdoor cat, quite frankly she's not even an out of the bedroom cat, and it terrifies me to think of losing her. She would never come to anyone but me, making it really tough to find and catch her and I feel like she needs some kind of GPS tracking device. I looked into them the last time she got lost but they were all for large dogs and not sensitive enough to distinguish between the house and the yard. I'm hoping the pet tracking technology has advanced since then, I don't think I could take losing her again!

Ahh