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It’s been another absolutely horrible weekend! Precious, one of the feral kittens we brought inside to get healthy and adopt out, got sick on Saturday. She’s had diarrhea since Tuesday or Wednesday, but my mom or I didn’t think too much of it because she had just been moved inside and then taken to the vet and given a lot of medicines, so we figured it was just a bit of a shock to her system, and she would get better. On Friday night she threw up, and that kind of set alarms off in my head because I thought “Diarrhea and vomiting? There must be something going on.” My mom didn’t seem too concerned about it though, so I figured I was just being paranoid. I didn’t go to bed until about four in the morning that night, and at that time, she was fine. My mother got up at 12:00, and at that time she was near death. She was just lying crumpled up on the floor, like she was a rag doll that someone had just dropped and not moved from that position. We rushed her to the emergency animal hospital in the area. When we got there, one of the vet techs asked for our permission to do CPR because she was getting ready to die. We gave permission, of course, and told them to do what was necessary. She stayed in the hospital until Monday morning. Whoever my mother talked to from the hospital that morning said she could come home, so we went to pick her up. When we got there and they brought her out, she didn’t look very good. The vet tech told us she still wasn’t eating on her own, so we would have to syringe feed her every three hours, she wasn’t going to the bathroom on her own, so we might have to express her bladder, and that it still might be a good idea for her to be on IV fluids. We were like WTF?! They said she could come home, but she still needed 24 hour care. There’s no way we could give her the attention and care she needed at home, let alone IV fluids. We then took her to our regular vet to get their opinion. The vet there agreed she needed 24 hour care, so we readmitted her to the hospital. The problem she’s having is that she can’t regulate her blood sugar or body temperature. I guess the original problem (why she was lying on the ground) was that her blood sugar had dropped all the way down to 19. The persistent diarrhea dehydrated her, which caused it to plummet, even though she was eating and drinking. We still don’t know the cause of the diarrhea though, or why she can’t sustain her blood sugar or body temperature. We hope it’s just because she so little and underweight, and that there isn’t a more serious problem, like a birth defect or genetic defect or something like that. Because her blood sugar was that low (for who knows how long), there’s the possibility of permanent brain damage or neurological issues. It’s been another weekend of tragedy, and I haven’t even gotten over Balthazar yet. The thing that makes this worse though is that with Balthazar, even though I feel responsible, there is still some room for doubt whether there was anything I could have done to save him, but with Precious, no matter how you look at it, it’s our fault. We might not have been the cause of the original diarrhea, but we ignored it. If we would have taken her to the vet about it earlier, they could have hydrated her and probably prevented her from ever getting to this point. We also give her this dietary supplement called Nutri-Cal to give her vitamins and minerals and to help her put on weight. Well, we had stopped giving her some on Friday to see if that was causing the diarrhea. It’s high in corn syrup, so maybe that was the only thing keeping her blood sugar afloat those days, and the fact that we didn’t give it to her made her tank. There’s also the time factor. If one of us would have got up earlier, maybe even by an hour, we could have helped her quicker. Maybe we could have prevented any permanent damage, if she has any. All of this is just getting to be too much. As it is, I’ve already spent over $1,000 of my college money to pay for the vet bills, and I didn’t even have enough in my account to pay for one semester. But what else was I supposed to do? The only way we could afford even one night of hospitalization/monitoring/tests is if I paid for it. It’s not that I really mind, because I can’t just let her die (especially since it’s our fault), it’s just that there’s no guarantee that she’ll make it and recover. Plus, I worry she will have permanent damage. Then what kind of life is she going to have? There’s also the possibility that she’s positive for feline leukemia too, so she might not live a healthy, long life anyways. One bucket of s**t is being dumped on me after the other. My mom talked to the vet this morning around 8:00 am, and the vet said that she’s doing better. She’s eating solid food on her own, going to the bathroom on her own, and regulating her body temperature, so depending how she’s doing by tonight, we might be able to take her own. But then again, they said she could go home before, and we didn’t think she could. But there’s another bomb shell: she might be blind. Can you ******** believe it?! It’s hard to believe that having your blood sugar drop can cause you to go blind, but nothing surprises me anymore. I have a thousand thoughts on the blind subject, but I don’t want to talk about it because I’m holding out hope she’s not blind (or has any other permanent problems). Hopefully I’ll have good news to write about her soon.
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