Mimi

Litter number: 10
Kitten number: 35
Gender: f
Color: tortie

Nickname: Me-my
Siblings: Cousteau, Pierre

We came to call her Miracle Mimi, for it is a true miracle that she survived. Mimi and her siblings, Cousteau and Pierre came to us as 8-oz bottle babies who were already sick with vomiting and diarrhea. We got them on meds and gave them subcutaneous saline often. Although Cousteau died in my hands a few days in, Mimi and Pierre hung on through some very stressful days when we were sure they would follow their brother's fate.

But one night, after we thought we'd turned the corner, we checked in on the nursery, and Mimi was prostrate in bed...barely breathing. We gave her saline about three times and dripped Karo syrup onto her tongue with a syringe about every 20 minutes. Soon, her tongue hung out of her mouth and she was panting – we'd never seen this in a kitten. We took her temperature and froze when it inched up to 108 – she was dying of fever!

Ted grabbed our kitten care book and I began patting her down with a cool compress in front of the fan. The book said to focus on her ears and paws to cool her down. In a little while, you could see her start to breathe more normally and her tongue was no longer hanging. Her fever had broken. It was 2am, about 3 hours into the drama, when we decided to put her to bed...expecting her to be dead in the morning. When we turned on the nursery light at 5:30am, she toddled out of bed! A miracle! The vet said later that 108 degrees is incompatible with neurological functioning, and yet she seemed to develop perfectly normally from there on out.

Mimi will forever be one of my favorites – not only for her perserverence, but also because she was so attached to us, even though we'd inflicted so much on her in our attempt to keep her alive. We would wrap her and Pierre up and let them hang out with us while we watched the baseball playoffs on TV...they just loved to hang out with us. Although Ted and a few visitors thought she was a little homely with her mottled, tortie face, I thought she was absolutely adorable. I wasn't alone, because she was adopted immediately after she became available. Her adopter, a woman, never had any idea what our Miracle Mimi had achieved in her short life, but I'm sure she appreciated Mimi's bright, friendly spirit.

Arrival date: 9/9/2007
Departure date: 11/5/2007