Meet the Fosters

Somehow these orange boys steal your heart 🤦‍♀️🍊🐈 Tajin “TJ”

https://nativespride.com/justcaca22

I hope I see her all grown up. 😻 Venus

Sleepy boy 😂

Venus and Tajin are back home from surgery!! They act like nothing happened yesterday. Off to their new home this weekend

❤️

The orange cat that lived at the Boston Children's Hospital on Longwood Avenue was not supposed to be there. 🐾
This is the beginning of the story and also its most technically accurate statement. He arrived — or rather, was discovered — in the radiology corridor on a Tuesday in September seven years ago. He was an elderly orange tabby, approximately twelve years old based on the veterinary team's assessment, in good health, with no microchip and no owner that the hospital's lost animal inquiries produced. He appeared to have been living in the hospital's service corridors and garden areas for some period before he was discovered.
The hospital's facilities management team reported him.
The administrative review took eleven days.
During those eleven days the orange cat, who had been quietly named Jupiter by the radiology staff, was observed in seven different patient rooms.
Not the corridor. Not the waiting areas. Patient rooms.
Pediatric oncology specifically.
The administrative review team received, during those eleven days, fourteen individual written requests from nursing staff to reconsider the removal decision.
The review team also received three letters from parents.
Jupiter was allowed to stay. 💔
He has been on the pediatric oncology floor at Boston Children's Hospital for seven years.
He visits who he decides to visit.
The nursing staff document his patient contacts with the gentle attention of professionals who have accepted that something is happening that their training does not fully account for.
His specific interest is the most isolated patients — the ones whose family cannot always be present, whose treatment schedules are most demanding, whose days contain the most difficult hours.
The nurses have noticed this pattern consistently across seven years.
He does not visit every patient equally. He chooses.
The little girl in Room 14 was nine years old. She had been on the oncology floor for three weeks when Jupiter first appeared in her doorway. Her mother worked nights and her father was stationed overseas and the grandparents were in Maine and the logistics of love across distance meant she had more hours alone than any nine-year-old in a hospital should have. 🤍
Jupiter appeared in her doorway on a Wednesday evening.
He sat down.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
She said: "Hi."
He walked to the bed.
He got on the bed.
He curled against her side.
She put her arm around him.
The night nurse checked the room at eleven p.m. and found them both asleep.
Jupiter visited Room 14 every day for the following six weeks.
He was there during the hardest treatments. During the nights when the medication made her sick. During the mornings when she was too tired to talk. He was simply there — warm, orange, steady, present.
Her father came home on emergency leave in the fifth week.
He walked into Room 14 and found his daughter asleep with Jupiter.
He stood in the doorway for a long time.
He told the nursing staff afterward that he had not known what to do with the guilt of being overseas when his daughter was sick. 😢
He said: "She wasn't alone. She had someone."
He said: "That matters more than I know how to say."
The little girl is in remission.
She came back to Boston Children's Hospital for a follow-up appointment last spring.
She went to the oncology floor specifically to find Jupiter.
He was in the corridor.
He saw her.
He walked to her.
She sat down on the floor of Boston Children's Hospital and held him.
Jupiter is fourteen years old now.
He still works the pediatric oncology floor.
He still chooses. 🐾❤️

Dropped the kids off to get fixed tomorrow 🙀🙀