Kitten Update

We've had the little sick kittens for just over a week now, and there have been some major improvements in one of them! The other one, not so much...

Let me introduce you to Cosmo:

And in case you're wondering, yes she is sitting on the Cosmo magazine...and that's how we named her. Before we were just calling her "kitty" and the sick one "sick kitty." Cosmo is MUCH better and will be going back into the barn with her mommy soon.

Originally there were three kittens in this litter. When my sister went to bring them home since the mom wouldn't take them, she could only find these two. We thought the other one had died. Lo and behold, the kitten turned up the other day, somewhat healthy, and the mom had been feeding it. So we're going to try and bring Cosmo back to her mom today, and hopefully the mom will start feeding again. If not, we'll have to buy some kitten food, which the vet said she could be eating any day now.

We are all eager to get Cosmo out of the house, because she has a LOT of energy. She likes to climb with her sharp little claws, right up your arms, legs and neck. She never stops mewing and sometimes she will bite your face. Yeah, she needs to go back outside :)

My cat Toonces (who looks like a giant here) saying, "WTF are you doing...that's the edge and you aren't big enough to jump off!"

Smoke getting in a little nuzzling. He loves Cosmo, loves playing with her, and taking care of her.

This is where she likes to hang out...and claw at your flesh like it's a scratching post. And bite your face.

This is as still as she gets these days!

Aaaand, this is how she crawls around on you.

 Onto the sick kitten, or Binx, as we have named her. (Yes, like the cat on Hocus Pocus!)

Last week I called the vet to ask them about what the kittens had. I described their sickness and the vet said it sounded like a respiratory infection or virus. He suggested getting eye ointment to help clear out their eyes. We got that and started putting it on both of them. While Cosmo's eyes cleared right up, Binx's didn't and she continued to sneeze and basically lay around all day. She only ate maybe 2 eye droppers full of food per day.

After a couple of days she still hadn't gotten better and her eyes still looked like she was blind. I brought her into the vet to get checked out. She has something called Conjunctivitis, which is a severe form of the respiratory virus, that gets into their eyes. The vet put some numbing eye drops in her eye, and then scooped a qtip into both eyes. The part that was covering her eyes, which made her look blind, was actually called the third eyelid. It hadn't retracted because of the infection, and had stuck to her eyes with all of the goop in them. He cleared that out and got all of the gunk out of her eyes. She got some pretty blue peepers behind all of that! He also gave us some antibiotics for her to take twice a day.

That was last Friday, and she is doing a little bit better. She ate 9 whole eye droppers full of food yesterday, but she is still really skinny. We still put the eye ointment in her eyes every couple of hours, and the infection seems to not as bad as it was. She can actually breathe without wheezing and she doesn't sneeze anymore. I am still a little concerned because all she does is sleep all day, doesn't move around much and wants to keep her eyes shut the whole time.

I guess for now we'll continue her on the antibiotics and see how she does. Hopefully with her eating more she'll start to gain some strength and fatten up.

I'll let you know how Cosmo does being reunited with her mom!