https://www.facebook.com/1683735781664258/

Wendy's Place Cat Rescue, Staunton, VA (2026)

10/11/2026

*PLEASE WATCH THE ENTIRE VIDEO* We made some minor mistakes in what was said on the video and one major mistake in the drawing itself. It all gets sorted out in the end though.

We finally got around to our raffle drawing from the Queen City Mischief & Magic festival! Many, many apologies for taking so long this year. We’ve been unexpectedly busy over the last couple of weeks and have barely had time to sit down.

Congratulations to the winners:
Kay Zogg
Kelly Morse
Mary Combs
Alex Boozer
Rachel Bayliss

We’ll be getting in touch with all of you this week to get your prizes to you!

Thank you to everyone who participated. This was a fantastic festival for Wendy’s Place this year. We truly grateful to everyone who came out and supported us! 🐈🐈‍⬛
Frederick House Hotel

10/11/2026

*PLEASE WATCH THE ENTIRE VIDEO* We made some minor mistakes in what was said on the video and one major mistake in the drawing itself. It all gets sorted out in the end though.

We finally got around to our raffle drawing from the Queen City Mischief & Magic festival! Many, many apologies for taking so long this year. We’ve been unexpectedly busy over the last couple of weeks and have barely had time to sit down.

Congratulations to the winners:
Kay Zogg
Kelly Morse
Mary Combs
Alex Boozer
Rachel Bayliss

We’ll be getting in touch with all of you this week to get your prizes to you!

Thank you to everyone who participated. This was a fantastic festival for Wendy’s Place this year. We truly grateful to everyone who came out and supported us! 🐈🐈‍⬛

09/22/2026

Join us for a magical tea at the Frederick House Hotel during the 2026 Queen City Mischief & Magic Festival!

Tea is $25 per person and all proceeds benefit Wendy’s Place Cat Rescue.

Reservations are strongly recommended. This is a popular and very crowded festival and there will be very limited seats for walk-in guests. Reservations can be made via Ticket Tailor (link in bio on Instagram and in our event page on Facebook).

Tea includes:
~Your choice of tea, coffee, or hot chocolate
~3 courses of light eats (Sweet, Savory, and Dessert)
~Meet and interact with the adoptable cats at Wendy’s Place Cat Rescue

**PLEASE NOTE: The tea menu is a pre-set menu. All food is vegetarian but NOT vegan. We are NOT a peanut free facility. If you have any food allergies please let us know when you make your reservation. We will do our absolute best to keep any allergens out of your food, but we CANNOT guarantee no cross-contamination. Please let us know ahead of time if you’ll be needing gluten free food. We will have limited gluten free options available but cannot guarantee them unless you notify us before Saturday. Queen City Mischief & Magic Downtown Staunton, VA | SDDA Visit Staunton Waynesboro, Virginia Visit Augusta County, VA

09/18/2026

We’re in need of volunteers for this upcoming Sunday and for next Saturday during the Queen City Mischief & Magic festival. All volunteers will be thanked with a full meal from our Frederick House menu!

Sunday, September 20: We need a few people to help us deep clean and reorganize our cat space. We’ll be starting at noon and working until we get everything done. Duties will include scooping litter boxes, mopping floors, vacuuming, wiping down tables and furniture, moving furniture, folding laundry, and other jobs as needed.

Saturday, September 26, during the QCMM festival: We are in need of volunteers for 3 different areas. We ask all volunteers to commit to at least 2 hours:
1. Serving tea at the Frederick House (8am-6pm)
2. Running our table in Do-Good Alley (12pm-6pm)
3. Monitoring the cat space and keeping it clean and orderly while supervising visitors (10am-6pm)

All proceeds from our Wizard Tea go directly to Wendy’s Place. Each year we succeed at this festival because of our volunteers. We legitimately couldn’t do it without them. If you’re interested in volunteering please contact us via our social media sites and provide your phone number and email. Someone will be in touch with you as soon as possible.

More information about our tea can be found on our page. I’ll have an Instagram post up about it shortly! Downtown Staunton, VA | SDDA

09/03/2026

This post is overdue. There’s a specific picture of Dawn that I wanted to use, that encapsulates her personality perfectly, but I haven’t been able to find it. For now, this one also does a good job of capturing who Dawn was.

This one hurts more than I expected it to. Dawn arrived here as a 1 week old bottle baby in Sept 2018. She’d been found with her 3 siblings, covered in maggots & fleas. One of her siblings had already died. We weren’t sure if the 3 remaining kittens were going to live. Miraculously, all 3 survived! They became the .

Joy was adopted several years ago, but Dawn & Ajax remained here with us, always overlooked by adopters. Dawn had no fears, but she was fiercely independent and standoffish to visitors. We joked that she was hand raised by humans, therefore she believed that she was a human. She was the smartest cat we had in our care. You could see her investigating everything around her & thinking through problems & solutions. I wish I had thought to teach her how to use buttons to communicate with us. I think she would have taken to that.

She went downhill so quickly that it’s still shocking to us. It started in April with an eye infection, which seemingly overnight became rapid weight loss & loss of appetite, followed by a few weeks of diagnostic tests, eventually leading to a diagnosis of large cell lymphoma. The worst kind to have. We did attempt chemo with her, which she tolerated well, but she only made it through 2 rounds. The cancer was much too aggressive & the chemo simply wasn’t able to keep up with it. We said goodbye to her on Saturday morning, July 11, 2026. Her 8th birthday was only 6 weeks away.

Her death hit us hard, especially after losing Geoff just 2 weeks earlier & saying goodbye to one of our personal cats in January. This hasn’t been a good year for us. It’s the reason why we were so nervous about Severus on Tuesday. We weren’t at all mentally prepared to lose another one. Dawn was far too young to die.

Financially, we’re not doing well either. There are too many vet bills & not enough money. If anyone would like to make a donation in honor of Dawn, please find our donation links in our pinned post.

09/02/2026

The third time’s the charm!! Severus had a cardiology recheck yesterday, followed by a successful enucleation! He’s now officially a one-eyed pirate cat 🏴‍☠️. He’s an old man, looking pretty rough around the edges, but he’s doing well ❤️. This has been a stressful adventure for more than a year and a half. Yesterday itself was beyond stressful as we waited to find out if he made it through the surgery or not. He was the last surgery of the day, so there was a lot of anxious waiting. We’re beyond grateful for everyone at Friendship Hospital who got him to this point: the cardiology department that got his heart healthy enough for surgery, the anesthesiologist who was there to keep an eye on him throughout the surgery, and of course the ophthalmologist who did the actual surgery. We’re also grateful for Dr Kelly at Augusta Valley Animal Hospital whose quick actions kept him alive during his initial enucleation attempt. We could have lost him that day, and yet here we are 18 months later!

Unfortunately, this has been an extremely expensive ordeal, and if anyone is able to donate towards the cost of Severus’ vet bills, we would appreciate it more than you can possibly know. I know quite a few of you have already donated, and for that we’re grateful! We absolutely couldn’t have done this without your support.

All donation links can be found in our bio on Instagram and in our pinned post on Facebook.

Now we move on to Step 2: Attempting to get Severus to take 4 different medicines, twice a day, for the next 10 days. That’s already proving to be its own adventure in itself. Wish us luck!

07/18/2026

Well…this might be the cutest video we’ve ever captured on our outside cameras. We have a new feral kitten that’s been showing up every day. We think it’s around 12 weeks old, but it’s hard to tell. This will be a new TNR project. In the meantime, enjoy the “ekekeks”, the yawns, and the adorable camera posing that this little one graced us with.

07/01/2026

Dawn update: We finally have test results & unfortunately she has lymphoma. This ordeal began in May with her injured/infected eye, followed by investigating the possibility of dry FIP, extreme weight loss, finding a mass in her abdomen, emergency hospitalization, & finally conclusive test results. Her prognosis isn’t good. She has a 50/50 chance.

That being said, we take a cat led approach to treating illnesses here. If she’s still fighting, then we’ll keep fighting, as long as we can financially manage it.

So far Dawn received a dose of Elspar 2 weeks ago, which immediately went to work shrinking her tumor. Elspar isn’t long acting though, & has already worn off. This was followed by some bad days, while we waited for her oncology appointment, where she refused to eat. She got an injection of a long acting steroid at the ER vet this past weekend that really helped. Yesterday, she started her first round of chemo. (It’s worth nothing that cats are known to tolerate chemo very well.) So far, she’s doing well. Between the steroid & the chemo, she’s gained her appetite back, she has energy, & her personality hasn’t changed.

We’re lucky that Dawn was a bottle baby, who grew up with almost zero fear of anything. She’s always looked at carriers as her safe spaces and spends her days sleeping in them. She’s easy to pack up for the vet. She’s not overly anxious or afraid while at the vet. She’s too smart for her own good though, & getting pills or liquid medicine into her is a challenge beyond what we’ve experienced with other cats.

We do need help to continue her treatment & if anyone can donate we’d be beyond grateful! Money is always helpful, but we also have Amazon & Chewy wishlists that you can purchase from if you aren’t comfortable sending money. All donation links can be found in our bio on Instagram or the pinned post on Facebook.

We want to be clear that we won’t ever keep a cat alive for our own benefit. If Dawn starts to decline & lets us know that she’s ready to die, then we’ll follow her lead. Right now things are looking okay, and we can only hope that they continue on that path.

06/28/2026

We said goodbye to Geoff this past Tuesday. This one is taking a while to process as it was so unexpected & sudden. We’re never going to have clear answers but if anyone has experienced something like this, I’d love for you to reach out just because I’m curious about what all the possibilities are. We saw 3 different vets during this ordeal simply because we had to take whatever appointment was available at the time we needed it. All 3 had different theories about what happened.

On June 5, Geoff seemed lethargic, but otherwise okay. We took him to the 1st vet. He had bloodwork done & everything looked perfect. The vet noticed that he had severe dental disease, likely due to being FIV+ & suggested scheduling a full mouth extraction to relieve him of the pain. He thought the lethargy may be because of his discomfort & pain. Geoff was given an antibiotic & anti-inflammatory & got better almost immediately.

On the evening of June 20, exactly 2 weeks later, Geoff seemed lethargic again but nothing jumped out as an emergency. We decided to observe him. The next evening, Sunday, we noticed that he seemed off balance when walking. We called the ER vet who wouldn’t be able to see us until around 6am. So we opted to wait until regular vets opened at 7am. On Monday morning, he was struggling to walk. He also wasn’t reacting to anything in his environment. Ultimately, he seemed like he wasn’t mentally there. We rushed him off to the 2nd vet. She thought this might be neuro FIP or an infection. Bloodwork was run again but this time it looked horrible. Lots of things wrong. He got another antibiotic & anti-inflammatory & we were told to observe. On Tuesday he couldn’t move at all. We rushed off to the 3rd vet who suspected a systemic infection. She was about to re-do bloodwork when Geoff when into respiratory distress & essentially died right then. He still had a heartbeat though, so this wasn’t heart failure. We obviously euthanized him at this point.

We’re heartbroken for Penny (pics 2&3), who loved him so much. She seemed to understand that something was wrong with him on his last 2 days, but she doesn’t seem to understand that he’s never coming back.

06/20/2026

Some updates: We’ve been consumed with cat problems for weeks now. With limited space, I’ll try to sum this up quickly. We’re drowning in vet bills. We have some really sick cats on our hands & could use any donations that anyone is willing to give. All donation links can be found in our bio on Instagram or the pinned post on Facebook.

While waiting for Severus’ recheck for his heart & enucleation, Dawn has gotten sicker. I posted at the beginning of May that she had an eye issue, possibly an injury caused by another cat, though the cause was unknown. That’s mostly healed now. Unfortunately, a little over a week ago, her other eye started having issues. You can see her third eyelid covering half of her eye in this picture.

She’s also lost 2lbs since May. In May she’d lost 2lbs since October.

The short version of this: she likely has an aggressive form of lymphoma. She has a large mass in her abdomen, but tests are currently inconclusive. Or she might have the dry form of FIP. Never in my life could I have imagined wishing for a cat to have FIP, but that’s what we’re hoping for as we await more test results to determine if it’s cancer or not. She’s already been treated with some first line of defense cancer drugs. The meds given to her shrink tumors quickly, but wears off in about a week. We do have confirmation that the mass that was found in her abdomen appears to be smaller now. It’s good that it worked, but bad in what it indicates - likely cancer, and not FIP.

I’ll do my best to keep updating on a more regular basis, but right now we have to plead for some donations to help us cover our vet bills. Aside from Dawn, we still need to take care of Severus’ eye. Geoff is also sick & likely needs a full mouth extraction. Joyce has something respiratory going on. Sawyer needs a refill of his medicine. Charlie needs his annual workup with his specialist. Felicia has an ongoing ear infection likely caused by a small mass in her ear.

All of this combined is making it hard to maintain financial stability with the rescue. Any help, even $1, adds up and is immensely helpful to us!

Wendy's Place Cat Rescue

10/11/2026

10/11/2026

09/22/2026

09/18/2026

09/03/2026

09/02/2026

07/18/2026

07/01/2026

06/28/2026

06/20/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Listing takedown request