When I adopted Bunny the sweet old ladies at the shelter cried because they were afraid nobody would want her; she was shy and generally pretty odd because she had grown up in quarantine as a kitten for panleukopenia, a deadly disease that’s the feline equivalent to parvovirus. It has a low survival rate and requires aggressive supportive care but it’s easily transmitted, even from human to cat, so the only contact she got was during medical treatments.
Bunny stayed timid because she was afraid of my husband but she had started showing a little more personality after we moved from our small one bedroom apartment into a large house and he got a job. She would come out of her shell when he was not nearby and then retreat and hide when he was around. Now that we’re far away from him, the change in her demeanor and confidence in just a little over a week has been astonishing.
The woman at the shelter who helped with the adoption told me that I was meant to find Bunny and that we would heal each other. She didn’t know how right she was.