MAVIS LOST HER EARS AND WE’VE NICKNAMED HER ‘VOLDERPUSS’
RETIRED Barbara Parsons, 60, is married to 61-year-old civil servant Will and lives in Newport with their cat Mavis, 16. WE ADOPTED Mavis from friends who went travelling when she was just 18-months-old.
Until then, we’d always had black rescue cats — Mavis was our first white and we didn’t know they were prone to sunburn on the ends of their ears.
But in 2013, we noticed the tips were slightly red so we took her to the vet, who said it might be skin cancer.
We were told to keep an eye on it. After that I tried putting factor 50 suntan cream on her ears on sunny days, but she wasn’t having any of it — she’d paw it off.
But within a year it had got much worse and the vet said it was time to remove her ears. We booked a date for the surgery and went on holiday for a week, leaving Mavis in the care of our next- door neighbour. We came home to find the tumours on her ears had erupted — it looked like she’d caught one on the cat flap and shaken her head because there was blood all over next door’s house. It was horrifying and so we took her straight to the vet, who performed the operation immediately. Within two hours we got a call to say ‘come and take her home’. Seeing her without her ears was a shock. She wore a cone around her neck to stop her scratching the wounds and felt very sorry for herself. We took her home and over the next three weeks — until the cone came off — she gradually improved. We nicknamed her Volderpuss because she looked like the villain in Harry Potter. She’s now 16 and very sprightly. She still loves fresh chicken, mousing and sleeping in bed with me like she did before. And she still doesn’t like my husband and won’t eat the food he puts down. People do a double take when they see her — but to us she’s the same old Mavis.