Kitten saga - Day 3

Well, the kittens are all still with us! The little ginger boy (called Little Shane by Mini) is the most fragile and I still think he is likely to kark it at any moment, but the two little black girls (Stumpy and Genevieve) seem, touchwood, to be pulling along. Whether I will make it is another story... I am utterly knackered, having been feeding, toileting and generally acting as surrogate mum to the little dears every two hours round the clock. Thank GOD for Teapigs Morning Glory, McVities digestives and that emergency staple of every stressed out human - toast.

Unsurprisingly, given the fact they probably haven't had much to eat since they were born - and certainly nothing at all in the day before they came to me - the sudden upgrade in nutrition gave all the kittens the runs initially. Apart from being messy and smelly for me to deal with (bear in mind for those who aren't familiar with very young kittens, their mother has to stimulate them - ie. lick their bottoms - to make them pee and poo and therefore I am having to do my best to simulate this by means of a damp piece of kitchen roll applied to their rear ends), this is quite worrying as it is enough to kill very little, very weak, kittens. So off they went down the local vet. Now, I conduct a bit of a guerilla war with our vets because they annoy me. As we are in a rural location they make it quite obvious they regard sheep, cattle and pigs as the Higher Calling of the Vet, and they only condescend to admit domestic pets across their hallowed portals because they know these are the critters which pay for their bread and butter. One of the miserable so-and-sos I have semi-brought round (mostly because he is Welsh and we can therefore 'talk rugby') but the Other plainly regards me as a proto-Mad-Old-Cat-Woman and therefore a sub-species of the human race. Unfortunately it was The Other who was on duty yesterday.

He was plainly horrified by my new escapade, but graciously permitted himself to actually touch the kittens and decided to give Little Shane some antibiotics. To do this entailed a franctic scamper around the back office as he plainly doesn't have a clue where anything is - that's for the untermensch veterinary nurses to organise isn't it? - and eventually had to ask the said veterinary nurse where the antibiotic of choice was. She, good girl, questioned his use of it; to which he responded 'Oh it's just an orphan kitten, it will probably die anyway'. He must think I'm deaf, or the partition walls are somehow soundproofed, because there was absolutely no attempt to moderate his voice or be at all discreet about what he was saying... I will leave it to my readership to imagine just how flipping cross that made me. I contemplated giving him a piece of my mind, but common sense prevailed and I came to the rapid conclusion there wouldn't be any point. He's far too old and his head is far too far up his rectum for even one of my tongue-lashings to have any effect - I did, however make do with giving him a classic Angevin Death Stare when he re-emerged and then insisted he look at Little Shane's paws.

Little Shane only has two toes on both his front paws, and one of his back paws is turned in a very odd way. The vet was absolutely horrified and made no effort to stop himself recoiling - 'this kitten is INBRED' he intoned - I honestly don't think he could have been any more shocked if I'd announced I was a cannibalistic necrophiliac with a particular interest in fat middle-aged veterinary surgeons. 'Ah right, shall I put him in the gas chamber now, then?' I sweetly enquired, and for once had the satisfaction of seeing him lost for a response. Mumbling something about coming back in a couple of days if there had been no improvement, he scurried off... I suspect to give himself a full body detox following his encounter with me and my unclean, defective charges. Again, I'll leave it to my readerships' imaginations to guess at what I was thinking but, as a clue, the words 'tosser', and 'WHAT a' wouldn't be far off the mark.

All the above has made me very angry and even more determined to do the best I possibly can to keep these little scraps alive, if only to prove to the bigoted greaseball at the surgery down the road that he is not omniescent. Getting home, and going through the 'feed-toilet-clean-change hot water bottle' routine again, I then turned to the internet for assistance. And found a body of comment which suggested that mixing the formula milk up with Dioralyte or similar seemed to work for kitten with the trots. Two feeds of this later (ie. about 3am) and all three were looking a lot perkier and have continued to improve throughout today. God bless the internet, people who are caring enough to share their experience and expertise via it, and the makers of off-the-counter medicines. Sure, if they survive, the kittens might develop a taste for raspberry flavoured concoctions, but that in my view is a small price to pay.

St Gertrude of Nivelles, I have discovered, is the patroness of cats and cat lovers and therefore has been added to the Pester List. She must be well sick of me by now - let's hope the old girl pulls her finger out and gives these kittens a helping hand. She could, whilst she's at it, give Scumbag at the Surgery a dose of something unpleasant - as penance for his arrogance, of course ;-) ...