Engine Trouble
May my engine never purr again
We have been in our new home for almost six months now. Four adults, two teens, and a high-energy ten year old. Oh, and four rabbits, a green-cheeked conure, an old dog, and cats.
Meeko was our first feline addition to fulfill a promise made to my traumatized daughter. Figaro was a reluctant but beloved added member to our clan. Two felines is more than enough.
Our neighbor’s barn cats frequent our yard. Ten year old Ella so badly wanted to adopt one she named Coby.
For a while, I resisted. Two cats is more than enough! He took to living on our deck. So friendly. So sweet…
Fine. Fine. Fine! I gave in after he became quite ill with a respiratory ailment. One stipulation, though. He must be free of the deadly FIV, which has no cure and can spread to other felines. It is roughly equivalent to HIV in humans.
The vet gave us meds to lower his high fever and antibiotics to help him recover. Then she shattered Ella’s world. He was FIV positive. He will not be able to live with our boys, who are healthy. The risk is too high. Coby is already in the active stage.
Barn cat life is rough. Ella started bringing me newborn kittens, cold and abandoned for whatever reason. I spent half a day using my nursing skills to work on one who was occasionally gasping.
I tearfully called it hours after that last gasp.
While working on a puzzle several weeks later I glanced out the window to see a golden tabby crawl out from my vehicle and skitter away. Huh.
Over the next couple days we noticed her hanging about my vehicle a lot. Hold up! Look! Three kittens eagerly crawled out whenever she came near.
Not good. I was thrilled to see her leading them away, a pretty calico, a bland brown tabby, and trailing far behind, a smaller black babe who seemed to crawl more than scamper like its siblings.
About a week later I was going to run some errands before heading off to work. A shadowy figure moved underneath as I was about to get in. My engine rustled. It scuffled. It meowed.
Ugh. I popped the hood. Alex, Ella, and I prodded from above. We reached as far as we could into the under-skirting. Shadows. A small white paw. Beady eyes. More meowing. Finally I held the skirting away from the wheel-well and Alex grabbed.
She hissed. She clawed. She bit. His bloody hand held strong. We brought her inside. Offered her food. Water. I ran to the small dollar store a couple miles away after rechecking for any other kittens. Litter and a box. A bed and kitten food.
She watched us watching her. A couple hours later she warmed up to us. What to do? I can’t let her back out. She’ll just go back under the car! Mother cat most likely weaned them. She looked about 5 weeks old. Plus, I needed to get to work.
I came back to this:
For now. She can stay for now. Before work the next day I sent Caleb and Alex out to do a quick kitten check. Perhaps I was paranoid, but the nightmarish thought of maiming a kitten by starting my engine was sending my anxiety sky-high.
Alex came back in and grabbed our broom. I cringed watching him jamming it repeatedly between the skirting and engine. This time he was smart enough to wrap the kitten in his shirt.
This little babe was a bit smaller than Mya. It took a couple days to warm up to us, too. Mya seemed glad we had found her sister.
Right when we were starting to bound with the girls, Casper took a turn for the worse. She stopped eating. Well, perhaps we should just let nature take it’s course. About a week after we brought her into our home we awoke to her screaming and bellowing in pain. I couldn’t let her go that way. We brought her to the vet, who took this:
out of her neck! She was instantly better. We brought her back home, and after daily cleaning and strong antibiotics, she healed up just fine. Soon she was as big as her sister!
Alex became mother cat. He feed them four times a day. He played with them. They soon figured out how to climb into his bed with him at night. They amused us for hours with their antics.
We slowly introduced the boys to them. Figaro was pretty wary, but we got to meet a whole new side of Meeko.
Figaro eventually came around, when he thought we weren’t looking.
The kittens really helped me get the rest of the way out of the flashback-funk I was stuck in. Joy filled everyone in the house. They whole household aura gained a youthful optimism.
Trust me, I could share a bazillion more photos. But the tale (tail?) isn’t quite done yet.
A month had gone by. I had stopped checking under my car weeks ago. We were under yet another extreme-heat advisory when Ella came running in from outside, waving a small black kitten about by the neck. “I found it! I told you it has no eyes!” (K. So Ella had been giving me reports of third-kitten sightings. She was always adamant of the belief it had no eyes.)
At first I thought it was dead. It was as small as Mya and Cassie were when we first brought them in, a month ago. But no, it moved. I quickly offered it water and food. The eyes were crusted over tight. I managed to coax one partially open with a warm compress, but the eyeball just seemed to roam about aimlessly. How do we even help a blind kitten?
We brought her and Mya, who wasn’t eating much, to the vet. She de-wormed them both (Cassie had been de-wormed during the whole neck-fiasco.) Mya started improving, and is still on a high-calorie diet to assist her. Silver’s right eye is looking pretty good. She must be able to see out of it pretty well, but lacks any sort of depth perception.
She doesn’t seem to let it slow her down. Mya and Cassie mostly ignore her, but she tags along after them like a typical annoying little sister.
I am going to bring Silver to the vet again next week to see what, if anything, can be done about the red mass covering her left eye. Project Kitten isn’t over yet.
It has just begun.
