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Let Them Eat Cake

Thursday
12/29/2011

We kept syringe-feeding Bonnie on Tuesday, and her ability to hold her weight and stop vomiting told us she might be on the mend. Sure enough, when we let her out into the back room with Clyde after dinner, she started playing a little tapping game with the hanging knobs on the blinds cords. Then she explored a tipped-over cardboard box and scampered around a bit with Clyde. All good signs.

When we reheated their dish of canned food an hour later and set it on the back-room floor, she wandered over and started snacking. Cha-ching! We haven’t syringe-fed her since.

She and Clyde are finishing their meals in the nursery once again and running around the back room and kitchen at full speed when we let them out for a few hours a day. And today Bonnie was finally able to regain the weight she’d lost and reach a new high-water mark.

What a relief, as well as a new reference point for us – excessive salivation doesn’t necessarily mean a life-threatening illness. I was more worried about Bonnie than Martha was.

So that meant we could focus our concern on the villa, where one or more Sluggers were still vomiting yesterday. But I was finding less and less on the floor, and nothing after yesterday afternoon. Since no one but Molina was touching the canned food, I started bottle-feeding them Tuesday, and I felt like Santa Claus every time I entered the villa.

Truly sick kittens won’t nurse from a bottle and will resist syringe-feeding – as Bonnie did a little. The Sluggers chugged away, which told us that they weren’t severely congested and were just having a problem with their food.

We’d ordered some high-calorie A/D canned food and it arrived yesterday, so I used that instead of the usual Pro Plan kitten canned food to make slurry (blending it with milk replacement formula). You’d have thought I was serving chocolate cake with coconut icing. They hit the nipple like starving wolf pups.

When I’m alone, I grab one kitten at a time from the table near the window, turn my back to the table, and bottle-feed on top of the nearby dresser. This morning I left Albert a sight-line to the feeding zone and he leapt up onto the dresser while I was feeding Cruz. So I guess he’s feeling better.

When Martha and I are tandem feeding, I use the dresser and she feeds on the futon.

No leaping required for Fat Albert.

You gonna finish that?

No more vomit in the villa this morning, and the weight gains tell the story. The Barrow Gang virus is in the rear-view mirror and fading fast. Now comes the tough part – taking away the chocolate-coconut cake.

filed by: TS

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