Saturday, July 3, 2010

Taking the good with the bad

Lots of chaos this past week. Lorinda and kittens are very happy and active in their office space. I haven't had as much time with them as I would like because I have been working long hours this week. However, I often slip into their room for a few minutes to watch the kittens play chase with Mama. She is so sweet with them.

All four of them are still sniffling and sneezing, despite a 10-day course of Clavamox. I am almost certain the whole thing is viral, but at least the Clavamox has ensured no secondary infections.

On a less positive note, it seems our elderly cat, Cosmo (age 15) has caught the URI. He started out "reverse sneezing" so we took him off to the vet. He *hates* being in the car, and the vet is nearly 30 minutes away. He was NOT a happy boy, but the vet told us his lungs were clear and he seemed healthy. However, the next evening he was extremely lethargic and when I did a skin pinch test, he was clearly dehydrated. So, off to the emergency vet service. The vet there said he had a fever. He had to stay overnight to get rehydrated, and to get a urine sample for culture.

We brought him home yesterday and quarantined him. So now two rooms in our house are "cat quarantine" rooms . Since he is going to be on antibiotics for a while, I thought it would be best to consider letting the kittens go back to the shelter. However, the shelter is very crowded right now AND a good friend of mine is set on adopting Orlando and Lady Jane (whom she will call Jethro and Requia). She offered to take mama and all three kittens as fosters until the shelter can give them their surgeries, then adopt the two she wants. I fully expected this plan to get bogged down in bureaucracy, but to my delight, the cat foster coordinator agreed immediately. I am thrilled to know that even though I have to give my brood up early, they are going to another great place without having to go back to the shelter at all. AND, I get to see two of them grow up :-)

All in all, despite Cosmo's illness, I think the situation balanced out positively. Now I just need to nurse my boy back to health.