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Reversals of Fortune

Saturday
4/21/2012

Until last night, the seven Spies and four Z-cat kittens were on auto-pilot, and almost all of our attention was focused on mom-cat Zola, who I’ve been hand-feeding since her arrival on Wednesday night.

Maybe it was the quantity (about 80cc) of slurry and Nutrical she got daily by syringe, or maybe it was the dose of appetite-stimulant Mirtazapine she got yesterday, but Zola’s digestive system seems to have been kick-started. The wet-food bowls were empty this morning, and Martha watched her eat both dry and wet food for almost 15 minutes after I refilled them.

We looked up the Z-names of her kittens in the HT database, and Zander was the sick buff kitten. He started recovering as soon as he got here and regained five ounces in three days. We’d noticed he wasn’t fully using his back right leg (reminiscent of last spring’s Gem Fever), but that weakness seems to have disappeared. For the last two days, he’s been playing at full speed with his sibs.

Who all look great. But they aren’t eating much, and they aren’t gaining weight. Zane (big buff) is down .8 oz over the last three days. Dark tabby Zofi (who reminds us of Ringo) is down 0.4 oz over the same period.

Patchy tabby Zariela (where did they find these names?) is down 0.3 oz over the last two days. Even Zander has shifted into reverse after his surge, and is now down 0.4 over the last two days.

As of now, we think it’s a weaning-related fluke, since all Zs are playful and active.

But if things don’t pick up on the growth front, we’ll be breaking out the Nutrical in the bunkhouse.

On to the villa, where things look a lot less rosy today.

We did a supplemental bottle-feeding last night and then watched the Spies toddle around. Martha remarked on how great they all looked and I said, “yep, now I’m just waiting for something to go wrong.”

Two hours later we saw Smiley vomit up a clot of milk. Not a big deal, if it was an isolated occurrence. At 10pm, I found more milk vomit, and while I was bottle-feeding someone else, Smiley had yellow liquid diarrhea on the floor. I gave him a dose of Metronidazole for the diarrhea and 2cc of Nutrical by syringe, then weighed him: down 0.8 oz.

This morning he was the last kitten to leave the nest and didn’t want to bottle-feed (though Martha got some milk into him an hour later.) Noticeably weaker and down another ounce. We discovered that Galore, Ninety Nine, and Larrabee all had vomit on their fur. No more diarrhea from Smiley as far as we could tell.

We gave him subcutaneous fluids and another 2cc of Nutrical. He wandered around a little this morning but is clearly feeling bad. When I checked on the Spies an hour ago, he was napping at the bottom of the pile. One by one his sibs woke up and wandered out, but Smiley never opened his eyes or moved. I had to watch for a couple of minutes before I concluded he was still breathing.

If it’s panleukopenia (our first fear, given our recent experience with Groundhog), he may not last long. We gave him another dose of Metronidazole, an injection of Baytril, and a dose of Azithromycin. The combination of vomiting and yellow liquid diarrhea in a kitten his size is ominous. That’s what we saw with Hobie and Drew, the first two kittens we lost.

Of course, we didn’t have access to meds four years ago, and the vet we took them to strangely didn’t prescribe anything for Hobie or Drew.

We’re hoping that Smiley is fighting something less deadly than panleuk, like maybe an intestinal bug or short-lived virus. And we’re especially hoping that his siblings don’t come down with it.

In case it is panleuk, we vaccinated the other six Spies today, even though they’re barely four weeks old and we usually wait until they’re six to eight weeks. We’d rather take our chances with the vaccine than watch a whole nest of Spies go down.

filed by: TS

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