Rania the cat came all the way from Spain to her loving forever home

By Keith Testa - Mar 3, 2015 | 0 comments

Night night.

All that playing makes for one tired little kitty.

Talk about a happy ending! Look how much fun Rania is having playing with her toys at the Ghelli household.

Rania, who fit in the palm of the doctor’s hand, with her stitches in shortly after surgery.

It was a harrowing and difficult procedure.

Doctors work on tiny little Rania.

Rania’s eyes were in bad shape when she was first found.

So cute!

Rania, just prior to surgery.

Rania loves playing with her toys!

Cory MacEachern Ghelli plays with Rania on Rania’s favorite scratching post.

Listening to the scratching of paws against cat litter isn’t typically music to one’s ears. But to Cory MacEachern Ghelli and Matt Ghelli one night in November, it probably sounded like a Beethoven symphony.

That’s no knock on Ludwig’s catalog of work, by the way. It’s just the Concord couple was awestruck when Rania, the tiny kitten they’d adopted, the kitten that had just flown from Spain and been driven from New York to Concord, stepped out of the cat carrier and immediately ambled over to the litter box.

Maybe it was because the first bathroom Rania ever used was the trash pile that also doubled as her living quarters. Maybe it was because she’d survived a dramatic surgery that even the veterinarian performing it was convinced would fail.

But mostly it’s because Rania doesn’t have eyes.

If you were to stop by the Ghelli apartment these days, you’d see a typical playful kitten that chases toys and climbs easily to the top of her favorite scratching post and sleeps on the bed with her owners every night (you probably shouldn’t be hanging out in the Ghelli’s bedroom, though).

But the kitten wouldn’t see you.

Which means Rania’s also never seen Cory wipe away tears, which she did when she heard the tragic story of the first few months of her life and probably did again – for much happier reasons – that first night in their Concord home.

“I read her story and instantly started crying,” Cory said. “(When we met her), she wasn’t anything like I expected her to be. I thought she’d be very timid and scared. But the first night we brought her here, as soon as she was out of the cat carrier, she walked right over to the litter box.”

Given the tumult that marked the first few months of her life, that would have been a remarkable step even with the benefit of eyesight. But Rania lost both of her eyes at two months old, the result of extremely risky surgery after she was found living among garbage, starving and suffering from feline herpes, which has a severe impact on the eyes.

Rania was taken in by Let’s Adopt! Global, who put her story online. That’s where Cory discovered it before emailing the group’s founder, Ivan Jimenez, to ask if they’d found a permanent home for her yet.

Before checking in with Matt.

“I spent the next six hours figuring out how I was going to tell my husband. (When he got home), I told him, and he said ‘No way,’ ” said Cory, who along with Matt had already rescued two cats, Poe and Dorian, both 4. “Then I had him read her entire story and he looked at me and said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

The couple also had to sway their landlords, Dick and Taffy Johnson. No pets were originally supposed to be allowed in the building, but the Johnsons relented on Poe and Dorian. When Cory and Matt approached them about Rania, they initially thought “it probably wasn’t a good idea,” Cory said.

But, again, Cory shared Rania’s story, and it had the same effect it had on Matt.

“We talked to them some more and emailed them her story, and Taffy, teary-eyed, said, of course we could help this little life,” Cory said. “They were so nice about the whole thing and even asked for updates throughout the adoption process.”

It’s no wonder Matt and Taffy were swayed. At less than five months old, Rania was already a survivor in every sense of the word, having outlasted brutal living conditions and outdueled veterinary science.

When Rania was discovered, her eyes were so diseased they were discolored and bugging way out of her head. The need for surgery was urgent, but she was so weak and dehydrated the doctors couldn’t even draw blood for a simple test, Cory said.

They opted to perform the surgery to remove both eyes anyway, knowing the alternative was likely death, even though nobody thought she’d be strong enough to survive the operation.

“She was only a couple of weeks old, and it was a really bad infection. They wanted to get her eyes out but didn’t think she’d make it through surgery,” Cory said. “They were all very surprised she lived.”

The next step was finding a permanent home for her. Cory emailed back and forth a few times in October and later had a Skype interview with Ivan, who was in Turkey, as the group considered other applicants (and as Cory’s own family remained convinced the whole thing was a scam. “They said, there’s no way they are going to send you a cat from Spain,” Cory said).

Two weeks later, Cory received an email that her home was selected as the one for Rania.

“I screamed,” Cory said. “And then I texted my husband and said, Rania’s coming home.”

Which was no small journey. Rania flew from Spain to New York City, where someone working with Let’s Adopt! Global picked her up, rented a car and drove her to Massachusetts. That’s where Cory and Matt first met her in mid-November.

Total cost to the Ghellis for this whole ordeal? Zero dollars.

“They try to take care of everything,” Cory said of Let’s Adopt! “We didn’t pay a single thing, not a dime.”

What they have done is provide Rania a loving home, and she’s certainly reciprocating. After some tense introductions with Poe and Dorian, the three have grown to coexist, and Rania spends evenings sitting on Cory and Matt’s laps on the couch and nights sleeping in the bed with them.

She also loves to play with her toys, and even learned to play fetch with Cory.

“She’s a crazy kitten; she plays with everything,” Cory said. “I even play fetch with her. She goes and gets it and jumps right up on the sofa. It’s seriously so amazing. I really thought it would seem like a cat with a handicap, but she’s exactly like any other kitten.”

Well, most of the time. She has run into furniture and walls on occasion when she gets a little too excited, but she has mostly learned the layout of the apartment and can get around on her own. She finds her food and water dishes with no problem and even climbs to the top of the scratching post tower in the corner of the living room.

She’s learned what parts of the couch she can jump on and off without danger, and Cory said she and Matt place her down in the same spots (on certain parts of the couch, on the edge of some bricks in the living room) so she can orient herself after being held.

Rania – who is named after the Queen of Jordan, another strong-willed woman – also relies heavily on her other senses, which are extremely sharp. She hears stuff from a couple rooms away, and also can follow toys Cory waves in front of her, most likely by the combination of sound and the air movement it creates.

She’s essentially at home like any cat would be, getting plenty of loving head rubs and playtime. The journey to her home just took a few more winding paths than most.

“I didn’t really know what to expect. I thought it was going to be really hard, and it ended up being really easy,” Cory said. “It makes us feel good we were able to do this for her. It feels very good to save this little life. It makes you feel warm and fuzzy, to do something for another living thing.”