This is Shimmer, she is seven weeks old. She arrived today and is a complete love. She is upstairs with Snugglekittie, and Fur Momma keeping her warm and comfy.

Well Prowler started peeing again! Normally, I would be thrilled that her body is working but she is spraying bloody pee all over the house. 🙁 I called my vet who now has her on yet another round of medications: Ceta drops and Diazapan. I hope this works for her. She is so miserable, she is constantly licking her rear and crying as she lays around the house. I suspect this is pet food contamination issues but have no proof, since she initially became ill long before the first recall. 🙁 I don’t want to lose her.

My vet bill is the highest it has been since Tazzy’s surgery. 🙁 $800.00 is owed now) If this doesn’t work for Prowler, I can’t take it any further and it will be up to God to determine what happens next.

When I go to clip my cat’s claws, I do it when they are sitting up not lying down. They are not on my lap, they do not have their bellies exposed, they are simply relaxed and in a sitting position.

It seems to be a bit easier than when they are on my lap. First of all, some of my strays and ferals are not lap kitties. So I have evolved this process over time. I clip while they eat.

Lying on the floor near them while they eat, I take the claw scissors and gently using it as a probe, I expose their claws. One by one, I begin to trim off just the tip being careful to not expose their quick (the pink part of the claw where the blood supply is located). Because they are eating, they don’t mind their feet being messed with and the trimming goes quick and easy. I make sure to leave some meaty treats in their food bowls on claw trimming days, which keeps them occupied and chewing on something besides me. I don’t make a big deal about clipping their claws, and have just found this system to work best for me.

Last night, Prowler presented me with the vilest offering of vomit I have ever seen. 🙁 This came about 2:00 a.m. We had both fallen asleep in my recliner, she was on my chest and Mike just covered us both with a blanket before he went to bed. Thankfully, I had my terry cloth bathrobe on and it is thick, so it got the brunt of the “offering.” Prowler looked like abject misery afterward, and I ran her into the bathroom for a bit of clean-up. I wrapped her in a warm towel, ditched my bathrobe and we went back to sleep.

This morning, she actually peed! Actual pee not just drips and she pooped too! I’m so strange to get so elated about peeing and pooping, but that is the name of the game of my life. A few minutes ago, I caught her catching some sun in the enclosure. She was at the top of one of the condos and when I approached she rolled over exposing her furry belly and got a gentle belly rub. This is the first time I have been able to touch her belly without either getting growled at or bitten.

I am hopeful this is the turning point, and she won’t have anymore set-backs. God knows my vet bill could use some relief at this point, and I still have six kittens to neuter. I’m taking Babycakes in tomorrow for her spay. I believe she is still with kittens and suspect the kittens are being absorbed. There is no way after such a bad case of acute septic mastitis that the little ones can be born without complications or being still-born. It is imperative that I get her in to be spayed quickly now that she has healed. The vet clinic had a cancellation for tomorrow, so off she will go.

While she is there, I am going to have her scanned for a chip. She was to sick last time she was with Ben and he was to busy saving her life to bother about a chip. But, she is a definite puzzle, with her feral colony tipped ear, still being intact, and declawed! Someone, once upon a time must have cared for her enough to bring her inside, why else declaw her? I don’t know though, if I do find she has an owner, do I give her up and send her back to them? Maybe she just got out during mating season or something.

Even with being declawed, I see no problems in her behavior. She is very loving with me, and though at times she is hissy and strikes out at the other cats, she isn’t openly aggressive. She pees and poops in the litter pan, climbs on the furniture and the condos, and I don’t see any of the issues sometimes voiced about declawed cats. She is my first declawed rescue, except for Cole who managed to declaw himself on two counts, just by pulling his claws out with his teeth. Ben said if he could figure out how Cole did it, he could make a lot of money, because as of yet, the claws haven’t grown back. Ben suspects an old injury traumatized the paw.

Took urine samples into the vet yesterday but they weren’t much help. The reason, Prowler isn’t voiding enough in a 24 hour period to even get enough to analyze! Taking a look at the small amount of urine provided, Ben has prescribed Amoxycillian 100 mg. once a day. The urine presented was bloody (bright red blood). Color me confused though. He had put her on Baytril (didn’t work) Then Clavamox (again no results) now he has her on Amoxy pills. I am not a vet but aren’t we working backyards here in regards to the effectiveness of antibiotics? Isn’t amoxy weaker than clavamox?

I don’t know. What I do know is she is still not pooping (though she is eating) she isn’t voiding more than just a few drops of bloody urine a day and confining her is adding to her stress. I have released her into general population, and will hope for the best, but brace for the worse. I don’t have a good feeling about this at all.

Prowler’s recovery was short-lived. She is once again fighting the bladder problems. She is peeing just drops at a time, and her meds are over. Ben is out of town till Tuesday, and he has done everything I think he can do for her and then some.

When we went through this with Prowler in December, the feline specialist gave us several options of what this might be: hair in the mouth and rectum-constipation-reflux esophaguitis-virus-contaminated food-pancreatis- FB Lymphoma-

I don’t know what to do or where to turn at this point. She gets so stressed going to the vet anymore that by the time she arrives, she has dribbled all her urine inside the carrier. I have tried taking her without putting her in the carrier in the car and she still pees all over the truck. I am so afraid we are going to lose her, but she has been through so many tests and visits now. She is not the same loving cat I knew, and has routinely been jumping on the others due to the stress (and I am sure, due to the pain). She had two good days where she could empty her bladder, but now this set-back.

I started her on Belladonna yesterday. I talked with a holistic vet friend who recommended a few treatments. Treatments consisting of giving her two pills every 30 minutes twice a day for four days. It can’t hurt, it is done at home and if it helps her, I will kiss Patt’s feet!

I just don’t want to lose her, and I have a sinking sensation we just might.

Sullivan is such a daredevil. His latest trick is to leap from the floor to the top of the drape bar in the living room. That is quite a leap for a little kitty~
He launches himself straight up, when he reaches the bar, he snags it with his kitty paws and lands on top then cat walks the bar over to the bookshelf and leaps down. Such a silly clown!

Prowler is finally peeing! The last round of meds were given this morning and she has been peeing up a storm. I am so relieved to see her passing large pools of urine that I have forgiven her for missing the litter pans. I knew this would happen, but I didn’t want to go out and buy all new pans until I was certain her UTI was cured.

Off to WalMart I went and I found on sale, these large containers called Latchables. They are great for litter pans in the house, and so all the old pans were thrown away and the new ones put in their place. The first kitty to baptize the new pans was Prowler!

I haven’t replaced the litter pans outside (the kiddy Kitty pools) If she misses those, it is okay because she just hits the dirt. It was the inside of the house I was worried about. She hissed at the old litter pans that were stacked up by the door before I carted them off. I know she holds them responsible for her pain-so I guess she was saying “goodby and good riddance!”

It isn’t only that the house is bursting at the seams with cats at the moment, but I am also fighting the fact that I serve up food for their use in a kitchen that is older than dirt! Forty years ago “spacious” kitchens were not the norm. As I scoop out their wet food onto plates, I fast run out of counter space. This morning, even after taking off all the stuff that is on the countertops, I still didn’t have room. If I don’t put the food down all at once, some of the shyer kitties don’t get a chance to eat. I finally devised the “tower plan.” I open up the can of food, scoop it on the plate and spread the food around to line the outside edge of the plate. Then, I take the can, set it in the middle of the plate so I can stack the next plate on top! At the end, I have a towering plate of food, that I can quickly take off and place on the floor for the hungry kitties.

Looks like my crew has expanded this year, as the recent arrivals have not been placed into the right homes. Even with all the ads out, there is still such a shortage of homes for these mites. 🙁 My sister, who also rescues on a much smaller scale (she fosters in Florida) recently received a litter of kittens who were dumped in the middle of the woods near her home. They are such gorgeous kitties, and they made their way into the thickets for protection. This was good for them, but bad for the trappers because they couldn’t trap them all and are still trying. So far three kittens have been saved, but the rescuers can hear the others crying their plight to the world in the middle of the thorny bushes.

Ticks me off so bad when some people decide that life, no matter what type of life is a throw-away life. If you don’t have the time, patience, funds and love to take care of kittens YOU brought into the world by NOT spaying or neutering your animal, than Spay and Neuter! Don’t assume that just because they are cats, they can survive outside, because they can’t! Not unless they have a loving caretaker to see to their needs. Kittens that young, taken away from mom so early can’t hunt because they haven’t learned. Oh, they may go ahead and play with a mouse, but unless they have watched a skilled hunter, they don’t have the capacity to be a skillful hunter. Also a cat on the edge of hunger can’t hunt. Hunting takes patience and time, and a starving cat will make mistakes in his desire for food and the prey will be lost.

This morning when I went outside, I saw something that simply took my breath away. A garden spider had spun a web from a low lying pine tree limb up to the cable wire that runs along the roof of our home. The web was massive and captured within its silkiness was a praying mantis. The mantis was framed with drops of dew. I would have walked right into the middle of it, had it not been illustrated with dewdrops. Last I looked, the web was still there and more insects had been captured by this busy spider.