Hangin with Mr. Kooper

In blogs past I introduced you to our cat Kooper.  We adopted him when he was 5 weeks old and he has been a pretty good cat. He has lived and moved around Illinois and moved to Florida to live with Tim while he was in college, then he moved back to live with us after college, so he has been around some. Those of you who are not cat people are probably thinking there are no good cats.  LOL.  Kooper is 10 now and has adapted to living on Draco rather well. Guess he did not have a choice in the matter either.  He didn't much like boat living at first and hid a lot where he could find hiding places. Hatted hated hated it when we fired up the engine and tried to make himself very small when we did.  During rough weather he has gotten sea sick a few times but now seems to have gotten the motion of the boat pretty well.  We have sliding cupboard doors for access to shelves, not in the galley, and Kooper looked at me one day and wanted me to open the door to let him in I told him no but if he could open it himself he was welcome to get in there.  Well he got scared one day and pushed open the cupboard door and crawled up on the shelf and hid in there everyday for weeks when we started up the engine.  We called it his hidey hole.  He started slowly coming out when we were at anchor and coming into the cockpit and checking out the boat.  Now he has the run of the boat and most nights when we are at anchor he just sits on the bow and looks around.  Actually he usually stays out all night.  We set anchor turn the engine off and yell down to Kooper that we are done for the day and he comes out of whenever he has chose to hunker down that day.  These days he lies under the table in the center of the boat. When we got back to Lady's Island Marina in South Carolina we docked up for the month and we have to watch him very closely so he doesn't get off the boat.  If you were on a boat for 12 weeks and got to a dock you would want off too.  It was good during the day but 2 nights after we docked he jumped ship onto the dock and we lost him.  We looked everywhere for the entire day but could not find him.  Last time I saw him he was on the boat about 2 A.M.  We were sick with worry and did not know if would ever see him again.  Next night we went to bed but sleep did not come easy because we were missing our little guy.  Joe got up around 3:30 A.M and went looking for him again.  I hear him come back and he has an orange fur ball in his arms, alive but hurt, tears were shed that we had our buddy back.  Kooper was unable to walk his back legs would not work.  We had to wait until the vet opened to take him in and get him checked so we kept him still and warm until then.  He was in bad shape.  It kept going through my mind that we were going to loose him.  Once at the vet's office they examined him, took an x ray and determined that he had a broken pelvis and that it would heal on it's own.  Thank God.  They sent us off with pain meds and said he would heal up on his own just fine.  We will never know how he got so badly injured. We are sure it ate up a couple of his 9 lives.  He did develop an abscess

on his side that the vet missed I treated it for a week and it finally dried up and went away. Now 4 weeks later he is doing great and we are hangin with Mr. Kooper again.