SICK is a Four Letter Word

What does every feral foster mom fear the most?  Getting bitten?  Nope.  Having a socialization set-back?  Nope.  Getting too attached to a foster?  Nope, that happens all the time.  What I (and most feral foster moms) fear more than anything is their feral fosters getting sick.  And I am sad to say that we have been struck by illness here in the Animal House.

Twyla, my dilute tortie girl is not feeling well.  She was doing well right after I released the litter from their crate.  All three of them were very happy and acting as expected for their individual personalities (a topic I will cover at a later date).

But then on Sunday I noticed that Twyla was not playing as much.  And as the week progressed, she got more and more lethargic, lost interest in playing and in her food.  She was dehydrated and had lost weight.  I tried different foods and offered her more baby food.  By Wednesday she was weak and no longer even showed interest in baby food, which she LOVES.

So yesterday she had a vet check.  She did not really have any obvious easy to read symptoms.  Her eyes were a little watery, but not full blown upper respiratory infection discharge.  Her stool was a little loose and smelly but that is common of a kitten eating a lot of baby food.  She just did not want to eat and was dehydrated.  Because of this, the vet check did not find anything really concrete.  But it did rule out some pretty serious issues like distemper or pneumonia and such.  She falls into the nebulous category of failure to thrive.

What is failure to thrive?  Failure to thrive (also known as fading kitten syndrome in very young kittens) is not disease.  It is a name given to a group of symptoms that don't seem to have an easily found cause.  It is usually a combination of lethargy (reduced energy), lack of appetite and not eating, dehydration, and diarrhea.  Since these symptoms can be caused by infection, parasites, birth defects and a whole host of other diseases, it is often hard to narrow down exactly what the problem is with a kitten showing signs of failure to thrive.  It is a serious matter because many kittens can and do die from failure to thrive.  It is usually treated with a combination of medications in case of infection or parasites and supportive care such as force feeding, fluids under the skin (Sub-Q fluids) and making sure the kitten stays warm.

Thankfully, I have a lot of experience with failure to thrive kittens.  It is actually my other specialty.  Kittens in my home are usually feral, failure to thrive, or both.

So Twyla is now on an antibiotic twice a day, a dewormer once a day for three days and SubQ fluids once a day (or more if needed).  Treating any kitten for an illness like an upper respiratory infection (URI) or failure to thrive can be hard.  But treating a feral kitten brings with it its own set of challenges.  The most obvious being that it is hard to treat a feral kitten.  They just barely trust you.  Now you start shoving syringes with yucky tasting medications in their mouth, jabbing them with needles and putting fluids under their skin and sometimes even forcing food into their mouth when they don't feel like eating.

They do not like it.  At all.  They will probably try to bite you.  And I don't blame them.  When your feral gets as sick as Twyla is right now, you can pretty much kiss any of your socialization progress goodbye.  And that goes for any siblings too.  If you think that Frankie and Hyde do not understand that Twyla does not like me pinning her down and sticking her with a needle, you are kidding yourself.  Frankie and Hyde want nothing to do with me right now.  At all.

So for the time being, everyone is back in a crate.  Twyla is in her own to give her space and hopefully to keep her siblings from getting sick.  Frankie and Hyde are crated so they can get some preventative dewormer and so I can try and get them to trust me again.  But the reality is that just giving Twyla the care she needs to pull through this will probably take most of my time for the next week and none of the litter is likely to make any progress while I am medicating.

The other major factor in treating a feral kitten is stress.  A stressed kitten does not recover as well or as quickly as a calm one.  That is part of the reason sick kittens are sent into foster rather than staying in a stressful shelter environment.  So when treating ferals you have to maintain a balancing act.  ANY medical treatment is extremely stressful for a feral kitten.  Always work with your vet (or foster coordinator) to be sure that whatever treatment is being done is worth the stress it is going to cause in an unsocial animal.  It can be a hard balancing act.  Twyla is at the point that she needs the treatment to survive.  And she is social enough that she will likely be able to handle the stress.  I have unfortunately in the past, have had two ferals that were so sick that any treatment was a long shot.  One kitten named Pluto was still dangerously feral and had lost the will to live.  I realized Pluto was unlikely to be able to tolerate intensive supportive care he needed to have a chance at survival and with the help of the staff/vets made the hard decision to euthanize him so he would not suffer.  His brother Neptune was actually even sicker, but much more social and after a long hard road, he did pull through.

Neptune staying warm in my arms.

This is why I say SICK is a four letter word and am annoyed that illness has once again visited our foster home.  But while this is a discouraging set back, I will just have to grin and bear it.  I am putting all my thoughts and hopes into helping Twyla recover from whatever has caused her to go failure to thrive.  When she is better (knock on wood), we will likely be back to square one on socialization.  I will take a minute to rage at fate or the gods or whatever force sent this illness to my babies and then take a deep breath, grab the baby food and convince these little ones once again that they can trust me.