Kidney Stones and Growing Kittens

Hello again from the animal house. Things have been a little crazy here lately because I ended up in the ER with a kidney stone. Just in case anyone was wondering, I do not recommend it, it is very painful. And me, being me, things did not go normally. 4 ER visits, 2 surgeries, 1 severe allergic reaction, 1 ambulance ride, 2 shots of epinephrine, and 2 stents later, I am finally kidney stone free and (knock on wood) on the mends.

Of course, during all of this, April's babies have been growing like weeds. They are now about five weeks old and finally all have names. We have the girls, Batty, Buffy and Bubbles and the boys, Bailey, Quinn and Eric.

We have also had a few health issues. April, the mom, had an upper respiratory infection and was dehydrated. I tried to supplement the kittens with formula to help her out, but they would not have it. Thankfully, April LOVED the formula and just drank it herself. So I started adding it to her food everyday and between that and the meds, she is doing fine. Batty and Bubbles were born with some sort of eye infections and each had one eye that would not open and had puss coming out of it. Bubbles' eye responded quickly to meds, but Batty's just finally cleared up. Bailey, looks like he might be coming down with something so I will have to keep an eye on him over the next few days, but over all they are growing and developing like normal. They are now starting to eat solid food - although mom is not that keen on sharing. Here are some photos of them growing:

Mom, April resting with Buffy


Quinn and Bailey at about a week


Sibling Love. I love how they are hugging each other

More Cute Kitten Photos

Here are some more photos from the past month with April and her babies:

Batty with a half closed eye due to infection

Bubbles (her eye had healed by this point)

Bailey

Quinn

Buffy

Eric


The kittens one month birthday cake. With a 5 year old foster mom in the house, you celebrate a lot of birthdays.



Bucket of Kittens (first trip upstairs without Mom)

Meeting foster brother, Doyle. And no, they are not that tiny, he is that big.

Lucky Day

April Fool's Day is usually a day for jokes and pranks but here in the Animal House it was one lucky day.

After days of setting humane traps in my yard in an attempt to recapture my missing pregnant foster cat, I was ready to give up. I had managed to capture 6 of the various neighborhood outdoor cats and scarily enough, one opossum. But on Thursday morning, I checked the trap in the front yard and there was my missing foster cat.

She appeared to still be pregnant, but I was not sure how to tell so I called the shelter. We decided that it was likely that she was still pregnant and that I should watch her. That night at around 10PM she went into labor and had her first kitten at 10:50PM!

Not only did I manage to be lucky enough to find her, I was lucky enough to get her inside to have her kittens! Throughout the course of the night she had six kittens. She was very tired after her days outside and going through labor when she was underweight. Because of this, after she delivered her third kitten, she stopped taking care of the cord cutting and other disgusting stuff.

After a late night (1AM) phone call to our wonderful always on call foster coordinator for some over the phone instructions on cutting an umbilical cord, I was able to help her safely deliver and get all six kittens settled in and nursing.

I have two orange tigers, one buff (lite orange), one brown tiger, one black and one orange and white kitten. Right now they are all happy, healthy and doing well. And thankfully so is Mom. She is a wonderful Mom. She is protective, but very tolerant of me handling the kittens to weigh them and check them over each day. This is an important thing to do to be sure the kittens are growing well and especially important with these little ones since she is a small underweight cat who is trying to feed six kittens. If they start not growing quickly enough, I will have to help her out by doing supplemental bottle feeding on the smaller kittens, but so far so good.

Here is the new family:

Missing in Action

Well things are not going as planned in the Animal House. I brought home a pregnant female flame point Siamese cat on Sunday so she could give birth in foster rather than the shelter. Unfortunately, she was an outdoor cat before she was surrendered to the shelter and she got frightened on the way into the house. She managed to break open the carrier she was in and bolted into the neighborhood.

Somehow she was strong enough to actually bend the door latch away from the carrier so when I set it down to unlock the door to the house she bolted and was gone before I turned back to pick up the carrier. So I spent quite a bit of Sunday evening searching the neighborhood for her with no luck.

Yesterday I got some humane traps from the shelter and have been setting them in my front and back yard. So far I have caught (and released) one really annoyed neighborhood cat and had an intelligent animal eat the food out of the trap in the backyard twice without getting caught in it.

Wish me luck that my missing foster turns up real soon and is either still pregnant or has her babies in tow.

Four down one to go

Of my recent litter of five, four are now in forever homes. Nora, Ranger, Riley and Panda have gone in to be spayed and neutered and have already been adopted. They went in on Wednesday for surgery. When I went back on Friday for a check up on my other fosters, everyone except Riley had already gone to forever homes. Riley was adopted thought and just not being picked up until Saturday. It was great news, but not surprising because there are no kittens in the shelter at this time of the year.

Their brother Neko, the kitten with a problem leg, was seen by the vet on Friday and is doing really well. He will need to stay on his medication for another two weeks and he has some muscle atrophy that he will have to work on. Muscle atrophy is muscle weakness that is caused when a muscle is not used for a while due to illness or injury. His muscle will get stronger the more he uses it, so it is just a matter of time. This is all great news because he was so sick and was in danger of not surviving when he first showed symptoms. Now he is full of life and personality. I do not know how much longer he will be with me in foster. The foster coordinator, vets and shelter manager will have to talk about him and decide if he will stay with me until he is completely better or if he will go up for adoption so that he can be living with his forever family while his leg gets stronger.

Monkey and Tiana are doing well too. Although I did confirm at their check-up on Friday that Tiana is a boy, not a girl, so we are going to have to talk about a name change for him. They are socializing well, but are very afraid of strangers and children, which is normal for kittens like them. They will probably go in for surgery in the next week of so, and come back to me to recover and then soon go up for adoption. I am very glad that everyone is doing well.

Time Flies - Happy Birthday Doyle

My baby Doyle is one year old today. For those of you who are new to this blog, Doyle was a kitten from my second foster mom cat, Muffin. He is also my first (but probably not last) foster failure. I could not bear to let him go and he is still with me now and celebrating his first birthday.

It is somewhat unusual to know the exact birth date of a cat or kitten you rescue from the shelter, but Doyle's mom was surrendered pregnant and gave birth in the shelter so we know what day his birthday is. He and his brother Domino, along with their mom came home to me for foster when the boys were only three days old. It amazes me how much he has grown in the relatively short span of time that has passed. It also amazes me how much he has stayed the same. He is still the same sweet, loving, tolerant, beautiful boy he was when I decided to adopt him at 8 weeks.

Of course, he is not very happy with me at the moment because we just got back from his check up and he did NOT like driving in the rain. He also out grew his carrier in the six months since his last vet visit. Thankfully, he checked out OK and is nice and healthy. I told the vet that I wanted to be sure that I was not over feeding him so he would not get fat now that he was basically full grown. (He is a big boy). She said that since appears to be part Maine Coon, he might still grow a little bit more and that I was feeding him just fine since he was nice and lean.

Lean! Twelve pounds is lean! Just how big is he going to get? ;o)

Anyway, no matter his size, I love him to death. Even when he gets nervous at the vet and tries to curl up on my chest and hide like he did when he was a baby. Of course, breathing becomes an issue then, but hey, you do what you gotta do to make your baby feel safe right?

In honor of his first birthday, here are some of my favorite shots of him:

Limping Along

Neko is improving slowly now that we know what is actually going on and he is on the right medication. He saw the vet again on Monday and the improvement in the swelling was promising.

He is now allowed to stay just in the bathroom rather than locked up in a crate all the time. He is also allowed outside the bathroom to roam the house in short intervals of time as long as there are no other kittens loose. If there are other kittens around he wants to jump and play with them and that is not good for him just yet.

He is trying to use the leg more and more each day. He puts it down and tries to walk on it, although it is still too weak to hold all his weight. But I have hopes that it will continue to improve as the days go one.

His siblings, Nora, Ranger, Riley and Panda are all almost big enough and old enough to go back to the shelter and be adopted out soon. Although Panda, being the runt is still the smallest and may have to stick around with us a little while longer than the rest of them. All of them miss Neko and meow at the door to the bathroom trying to get me to let him out, but I just can't let them play because Neko can not resist jumping and wrestling with them.

When ever they go up for adoption, they will all find homes in a heart beat. Not only are they adorable and really fun to play with, there are also not a lot of kittens to be found at this time of year.