A Langford family is relieved to have their cat Memo home after she was missing for 38 days.
Hadeel Albustanje says Memo had been missing since Nov. 15, and people had started to tell her that maybe she wouldn’t be coming home.
“My feeling she’s coming back. Everyone telling me just ‘you don’t have to keep doing it,'” Albustanje told CHEK News in an interview. “I said no, I’m not giving up. I’m gonna keep looking all around doing whatever I can ’til she comes back.”
Then her belief that Memo was coming home paid off on Dec. 23 when she got a call that Memo had been found.
“I couldn’t talk to the lady when she told me Memo’s back,” Albustanje said. She then handed the phone to her husband to talk to the woman who called saying Memo was found. “Then I just started running and I [stepped] on the snow because just I’m going, I don’t know where I’m going. Just I want to go watch her and see where she is.”
Later she learned the Memo had been picked up by Neill Wakefield, a tow truck driver with Westshore Towing.
Wakefield found Memo out on Humpback Road after he had pulled a snowplow out of the ditch.
“I saw this ball of fur in the middle of the road, and I wasn’t quite sure what it was,” Wakefield said. “I stopped, I got out and he tried to jump into my engine compartment. I grabbed him from jumping in there and put them in my truck because I figured obviously something’s not right, because a wildcat wouldn’t do that.”
Wakefield says he wasn’t sure what to do, because with the snow it was already a busy day at work, but Westshore Towing was also dealing with technical issues where the radios weren’t working.
“I got a hold of my work and my boss suggested to bring her in and he’d take her to a shelter for me,” Wakefield said. “He is in the middle of trying to get that solved so that we could continue working because the radios are crucial to our job and he still took time out to take that cat. So good for him.”
Neill Wakefield says his boss Dave LeQuesne took Memo to WAVES after the cat was found on Humpback Road. (Submitted)
Albustanje says she is very grateful for Wakefield and his boss Dave LeQuesne for their help in making sure Memo was returned to her and her family.
“She’s like, for me is not like a cat, it’s my daughter,” Albustanje said. “I’m super super happy. Really super super. I can’t tell you like how my feelings really about her and seeing our back here around me.”
Now that Memo is home, Albustanje says she has settled right back in and has been “eating like crazy.” Memo is booked in for a vet check up in the new year to make sure everything is okay, but she is underweight from the time she was away from home.
Laura Brougham
