Brotherly Love

Two days and it feels like a lot has happened, though really not much has happened at all. Phoenix continues to grow, and meow, and eat, and pee on me. He continues to be insanely cute and is still super curious about the world around him.

Chatting with the Vet

On Tuesday, I had called the vet asking whether or not I should bring Phoenix in. I hadn't received a call back that day, but did get one on Wednesday evening. I had a few questions, and she kindly answered all of them over the phone. Here's a summary:

He still bleeds with his poops. Should we be concerned? No, it sounds like things are getting better. No signs of any serious illness, so no reason to bring him in.
He's due for deworming on Thursday, should he come in? We can just prep you a dose. You can pick it up and give it to him at home.
Are we able to start introducing our kitten to our senior cat? The biggest concern is panleukopenia. Asher is already vaccinated for this, so he should not be at risk. There's no reason to worry that the kitten will get sick from him.

All three of these questions relate to themes that's worth diving into a bit more. So here we go!

Poop

My favorite topic 💩! Phoenix's poops have been continually getting better! In fact, I think they are actually good right now. Alongside keeping track of the time and amount of each feeding as well as his weight, we also keep track of whether or not he pooped and whether or not there was blood. So on Tuesday, 2:30pm, Phoenix had some poop with some blood. 24 hours later, no poop. So we started getting a bit worried that either something was wrong or he was constipated. I was hoping we wouldn't hit the 48 hour mark, in which case I would have needed to take him into the vet for some help.

So that evening, I went ahead and added a bit of water to his formula feeding to help! I also made sure he walked around a bit, and bicycled his legs a bit. The 10:30pm and 2:30am feedings came and went with no poop, and we had now hit 36 hours. At 6:30am, I went ahead and gave him a bath to clean him up and potentially make it easier for him to go if he was struggling (post bath photo shown above). So before his feeding, we tried to poop again and had success! A very impressive 💩 for a such a little guy! There was also a minimal amount of blood, which makes me hopeful that we're on the path to a full recovery here!

Moving forward, I've removed the pumpkin from his diet. This will hopefully help a bit. If he continues to stay constipated, then we'll also look into adding some of the prunes if it seems necessary to help.

Deworming

I gave Phoenix his dewormer tonight. Just 0.43cc - how hard could it be? Phoenix had just eaten a stomach-full, and had decided he wanted to be a rolly-poly. Turns out I can't upload the 47s video of this. So here's the video split in two:

So once he decided he was able to stay upright for more than 2 seconds, I went ahead and tried to give him his deworming dose. Those syringes are sometimes hard to get moving, which makes it really difficult to control the initial dose. So I got the little guy and in went in the first half! But since I was wary of pushing it out way too fast, I didn't get all of it in, and was worried I had missed (remember the coccidia treatment disaster?). So I took the syringe out and checked to make sure most of it went in, and it did. But when I tried to come back and put more in, he had definitely wizened up. He was pulling away and moving a bit more as I tried to put more in... and then it happened. The syringe hit his eye 😨. I think 😕. We "battled" for about 2 seconds longer, and I was able to get him the remainder of his dose. Then I panicked over his eye. It definitely looked a little red around the rim, though his eye wasn't closed and was wide opened per usual. So maybe I was just overreacting? He wasn't crying, he didn't seem to mind. Just in case, I wiped it with some warm water, and also went back in to check with him 15 minutes afterwards just to check. And he seemed just fine!

Scraggly pic - I had been wiping him down pre- and post- deworming and he got away.

Most exciting of all of this is the go ahead to let Asher and Phoenix interact a bit more. Of course, I had to double check that he did in fact have a recent vaccine for panleukopenia. Since we had only recently transferred to this vet, I wanted to make sure that his previous records showed that he had had the vaccination. Long story short, after going through our Asher files, I found a 3 year vaccine that didn't specifically mention panleukopenia. That made me nervous, but I knew that if the vet was fairly certain he had it, I had to be missing something. Turns out, panleukopenia is the same as feline distemper, and Asher is indeed vaccinated.

And so we had our go ahead to let the two meet without me feeling like I needed to hover in case Asher licked him or something. So here we go! This next series of 3 videos was the first interaction where we let Asher get as close as he wanted.

Then again later this evening, I took Phoenix over to Asher while he was in bed. I wanted to see how he would do if I approached him with Phoenix as opposed to him approaching Phoenix. All in all, this went very well! Though Asher did take off towards the tail end, it seemed less of fear and more out of irritation.

All in all, we'll continue to encourage interaction. While I don't expect Asher to find a new found love in his little brother, I do want him to get to a point where he moves out of curious/cautious into indifference. I will still hold onto this secret hope that Asher will suddenly develop a paternal instinct and fall in love with Phoenix. Well, I suppose it's not a secret. But it definitely is unlikely.