Stray animals are a fact of life and inevitably they arrive in our hospital from time to time. George the ginger cat, who now lives in the nurses' room at our hospital, was callously hit over the head during a robbery.

Sooty the black cat's arrival was almost as unusual. Returning home a little after 2am one Sunday morning after a good night out, a young couple were devastated to find what appeared to be their much-loved black long-haired cat lying injured and unconscious in the gutter outside their house.

Their frantic phone call woke me up. I jumped out of bed and drove down to our hospital to find the nurse on duty just registering the cat. As I started to examine it, the cat began to recover consciousness.

It blinked and lifted its head. Although its breathing was shallow its gums were a healthy pink and its pulse was strong. From its teeth it looked less than a year old.

As I examined its hind-quarters I could feel that its pelvis was broken. I also noted that it was an un-neutered tom. My nurse had registered the cat as a three-year-old neutered female.

I was just about to say something to the client about this when his mobile phone rang. His girlfriend had just found Flossy, their own cat, asleep in her basket at home. By the time I finished examining the cat the client had departed as swiftly as he had come, leaving the nurse and I the interesting question of what to do with him.

I scanned him for a microchip but he did not have one. Nor did he have a collar. I gave him some pain-killers and drugs for the concussion and put him to bed. Next day I x-rayed his chest and his fractured pelvis and castrated him.

Because the bones of the pelvis form a box shape with the opposite sides supporting other, I was confident his fractures would heal without an operation. At first I kept him in a large cage with a bed, his litter tray and his food and water, then after two weeks I let him walk about a small level area. It took three weeks before he could walk without pain, and still has a lop-sided gait.

No-one ever claimed him or paid for his treatment despite notices and checks with welfare groups, but after a while I gave in and brought him home where he now lives, generally harmoniously with our other three cats.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.