Pair of survivors reunited Man recovers from surgery to find his cat alive -- on TV Friday, January 12, 2007 KATY MULDOON Found: one happy cat owner.
Geoff Earnest caught the tail end of a TV newscast Wednesday evening -- a story about a rotund tomcat delivered to the Oregon Humane Society after he'd chowed down inside a Gresham garage, then gotten stuck exiting through a doggie door.
"Wait a minute," Earnest remembered thinking, "that looks like Hercules. I thought he was dead."
Hercules lives. Earnest reunited with his long-lost cat Thursday morning at the Oregon Humane Society, proving ownership by sharing photographs of his furry friend.
"There was no doubt in our minds," said the Humane Society's Barbara Baugnon. "It was obvious these two belonged together."
Earnest and his cat have tales to tell. Hercules declined to give details, but Earnest was forthcoming.
The 5-year-old, double-wide tabby that those at the Humane Society had dubbed Goliath, but whose real name is Hercules, started hanging around Earnest's Gateway-area home three or four years ago. He belonged to a neighbor but seemed to prefer Earnest, and when Earnest asked the neighbor if he could adopt the cat, the neighbor agreed.
Earnest, who is 30, has cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that affects the mucus lining of the lungs and leads to breathing problems. As his illness worsened the past three years, Hercules would rub against Earnest, lie on his stomach and play with his oxygen tubes. Except for the cat's inclination to spray, he was one fine companion.
When Earnest traveled to Seattle on June 5 for a lung transplant at University of Washington Medical Center, he asked a housesitter to look after Hercules. The housesitter, Earnest said, opened the door one day to find a stranger holding one big, mangled cat. The details get sketchy here, but the cat apparently looked so beat up that the housesitter assumed that the stranger then took Hercules off to be euthanized.
Earnest's parents kept the news from him for two months. They didn't think he needed the heartbreak as he recovered from transplant surgery.
"He'd been through all my hospitalizations with me," Earnest recalled. "I loved that cat."
Thursday the two found one another again at the Oregon Humane Society's cattery, where Hercules will remain for a couple of days to undergo surgery of his own: neutering.
In the meantime, the beast's brush with fame fluffed up with help from the Internet. A video of Hercules schmoozing with Humane Society personnel had nearly 2,700 hits on YouTube by midday Thursday.
Earnest took a little umbrage with those who describe his cat as corpulent. In fact, since he last saw Hercules, the 20.2-pound feline had lost about 5 pounds.
"He's all muscle," Earnest said. "He's not fat at all."_:D