Well firstly, how she managed to escape.  I lived in a 4 bedroom place at
the time and had two flatmates.  There was a unit down below ours that had a
single tenant.  Her access was to go down this fairly rugged path and around
the back of the house.  There was also an internal door downstairs that was
lockable from both sides so we could access each other's place by mutual
agreement.

On this particular day the downstairs tenant was moving and so to make
things easier for her I suggested that she come through the internal door
and use my front door.  This made it miles easier for her to shift.  I then
went out after making sure Mindy was shut in the bedroom and left the
downstairs tenant to lock up when she left.

My door somehow managed to blow open and Mindy managed to escape without
being seen.  It should be noted she was in a lot of pain and really quite
out of it with the anaesthesia.  She managed to get out without anyone
seeing her.  Of course when I got home and found she wasn't there I was in a
real panic as I knew she was in no condition to be out and about.

I couldn't find her that night and so put out a lot of flyers around the
neighbourhood.  My husband (boyfriend at the time) came over to join in the
search.  We had only been going out a few weeks at the time so were still in
the early days of our courtship.  Down the back of my section was a patch of
extremely dense bush full of bush lawyer and cutty grass.  It was the sort
of bush that you would navigate about 10-12 feet into and then it was
practically impossible to proceed from there.  It seemed very likely that
Mindy had gone down there.  My boyfriend saw my concern and being a cat
lover himself proceeded to go down into the bush and try to find her.  I had
already tried it and found it way too difficult but he persisted and spent
quite a lot of time down there hunting for.  I was so impressed by the fact
that he was willing to do that for me that I decided at that time that I
wasn't prepared to let this guy slip through my fingers.

Later on we found Mindy in the patch of bush by our neighbours but when we
tried to get her out she kept on running off so I figured that it was best
if she came out under her own steam given the pain she was in.  My neighbour
rang up about 1/2 hour later to say she was under her clothesline.  DH says
that when I went out to get her the expression on my face made him realise
that he just had to marry me.

So although we didn't know it until several weeks later we both decided on
the same day that we wanted to marry each other and it was all thanks to my
darling moggie running away from home.  No doubt we would have decided that
we were going to marry each other anyway but this certainly was the eye
opener that we both needed.