Growing Strong and Failing Fast - Days 3 and 4

Our little kitten continues to eat, and as much as I try to avoid developing an attachment, it's pretty inevitable.  This little guy has consumed almost all my time (even overnight hours) for days, and it's hard not to have him lodge in your heart somehow.  Especially as he continued to grow so promisingly, the hope continues to rise.

Growing Strong and Getting Cuter By the Day

When I first showed people a photo of the little kitten on day one, we got a lot of comments on his size.  Some even ventured to call him cute.  And he was cute.  Kind of.  But not really.  Are we sure he isn't a rat?  But none the less, he has a cute factor in an endearing (but still not very endearing kind of way).

In reality, it's very likely our little kitten was premature.  Most kittens have significantly more hair than this little kitten did.  He was also vastly underweight at 64g when he should have been at least 90g.  And if he truly was premature, add another strike against this little guy making it for the long term.  Nevertheless, he continued to grow and we saw an increase in weight on days 3 and 4.  By the evening of the 3rd day, he was up 10g from his original weight to reach a whopping 74g.  By evening of the 4th day, he had jumped up to 81g.

Despite that, I still occasionally came across the "not so cute" photos.  Here's one that caused my sister to begin calling him a little alien:

Our little kitten (or alien, you choose), was eating well, too!  But one thing we hadn't considered was the fact that our syringes weren't meant for long term usage.  The only 3mL syringe we had that we had gotten from the woman from day one was now much harder to work with.  This made it increasingly dangerous to feed because it made it much harder to generate a steady flow.  Press to hard, and suddenly you push a lot of milk into the kitten which can lead to milk in the lungs.  That could either kill the kitten pretty quickly or lead to other infections that would give the same end result.  So we ordered more syringes!  It was 30 cents per syringe, so we got 9 of them (cuz why not!).  But here's the best part... I paid $20 to overnight my $2.70 syringes to our place.  In the mean time, we switched to using the 1mL syringes we had, and we had to become masters at feeding, refilling, and feeding again.  We managed... but our 1mL syringes were on their last leg by the 4th night.  Expected delivery was at 9pm, and of course, they showed up on our doorstep somewhere between 8:53 and 8:57pm (yes, I couldn't stop checking).

  

All in all, he seemed to be doing well, and hopes were rising.  We had our routine down, and I finally felt like I was starting to relax and be comfortable with this new transition.  I even started taking videos (don't judge me for my kitten voice):

Failing Fast

Needless to say, as much as we tried to stay emotionally distant, we didn't quite succeed (at least I didn't anyway).  One of my favorite photos so far of our little kitten is one I showed earlier, and I'm putting it here again.  You wouldn't necessarily know by looking, but I took this photo while crying expecting it to capture the last couple of hours (if not minutes) we had with this little guy.

I'm still not sure what happened.  There were a few things different about this feeding, so maybe that's where we went wrong... but here's the two things that stood out.

• We had received our new syringes!  But the syringe tip was bigger than expected and didn't fit nicely into the miracle nipple.  With some force, we made it work, but it definitely wasn't quite how it was meant to be used.  If you didn't do it right, the nipple would just pop off.
• He had been sleeping extra well and we decided to let him go for 3 hours instead of the regular 2 hours.  We figured it would help us if we could go longer between feedings and with his hearty appetite, he could eat more!

And honestly, it was going great.  He downed a full three mLs of formula, and the new syringe dispensed beautifully.  I took the syringe out of his mouth, and he looked a little sleepy.  It was when I went to pick him up to burp him that it became clear he went completely limp.  His back legs were barely moving, and he had gone pretty quiet.

It was a slap in the face, and the change was so drastic it caught me by surprise.  The woman who helped me out the first day had given me a sheet of paper to read about fading kitten syndrome, and when you had to act fast to respond to sudden changes in your kitten.  It boils down to two things:

• Keep the kitten warm - make them a purrito (yes, that's a term), and make sure they are completely warm.
• Give the kitten sugar - they may be hypoglycemic

So we warmed him up and immediately began giving him some of the karo syrup we had on hand.  The sheet is pretty clear.  Give him the syrup every 3 minutes.  There wasn't a chance we could dispense it with the 1mL syringes that were now not dispensing well - and even harder to figure out how to measure 0.1mL of a thick syrup. Instead we just stuck the miracle nipple into the karo syrup and stuck it into his mouth.  We did this for 20 minutes, every 3 minutes.  By this point, I was crying - internally blaming myself for somehow doing something to cause this while simultaneously focusing on trying to get this kitten back.  After some texts, I eventually transitioned to one drop every 20 minutes and keeping the kitten extra warm.  And one of the last texts of advice I received was, "if he starts breathing from his mouth, just pick him up and hold him until he passes".

So there I was, in bed, kitten all wrapped up.  Waiting for the right times to give him another bit of sugar, and watching his breathing and hoping I didn't have to say goodbye.  That's when I snapped the photo that still remains one of my favorites despite the circumstances.  Our kitten was seemingly sleeping soundly, and I eventually put him into his basket and scheduled the alarm for the next feeding.  Needless to say, I didn't sleep well that night, despite the disjointed sleep the last few days.  But he kept breathing, and every time we woke up to feed him, he was still there.  His hind legs hadn't seemed to have recovered their full strength from before, but he had an appetite, was still feeding well, and at least was still with us.

We had officially made it to day five, and I had undeniably become very attached to the little kitten who may not make it the next few days.