When I first met Ember, my two-year-old rescue cat, she was about six months old. I had recently started volunteering at Cat Town, an adoption center-cat café in Oakland, CA. I began volunteering a few months after moving to Oakland under difficult circumstances: my boyfriend, Nathan, who was living in San Francisco at the time, had been in a near-fatal bicycle accident and sustained a severe traumatic brain injury. I had never been involved with any kind of animal rescue before, but, as a lifelong cat lover, I thought it would be a good way to meet new people and get my mind off things.
