My little bobcat.
I touched on this previously, but this little girl has had a pretty hard and traumatic life for only being nine weeks old. Honestly, both Daisy and I sort of arch our eyebrows at the "nine weeks" number. She's so tiny and the math doesn't add up -- she seems more like she's about seven weeks old, not nine.
The scant amount of information we have about her says that she was part of a litter of kittens brought in as strays all at once. They were playing in and around busy streets and in a neighborhood where they were in danger of being attacked by loose dogs or hit by cars, so they were gathered up and brought to the shelter around the middle of December. From there she was fostered for a short time, spayed, and put up for adoption. We have no further info on her than that. We don't even know what streets or what part of town. She was in a kennel with what is assumed to be one of her brothers (who looks nothing like her, but cats can have different fathers, even in the same litter):
And that little boy was also adopted later in the day after Daisy adopted Empress.
She is at least partially, if not completely litter trained (I'll get to this), knows how to eat dry food and drink water normally, and for all intents and purposes seems to be a perfectly fine, healthy little kitten. Her paperwork has a very short list of medications she was given -- likely part of her anti-parasite and spaying treatment -- as well as treatment for fleas/ticks etc. Her incision from where she was fixed is healing normally.
The joke I made above about "my little bobcat" is primarily because of her looks but also because this cat is a god damned nut. I've seen her leap 18 inches straight up into the air, and take a flying jump off the bed onto the second level of Hank's cat tree. I've heard her growl like a beast and hiss like a snake. She runs lightning fast, faster than Mr. Short Legs ever could (and I thought he was fast) and she is absolutely going to be the cat that climbs the curtains, gets on every counter, finds every possible hiding spot and gets into everything.
We never had to worry about most of that with Hank. He's built like a brick shithouse and he is thick. He's large, heavy, and with his short legs he doesn't really have the ability to jump/climb. Emmy is light as a feather and is already wildly active and playful. Her personality is so different than Hank's was in so many regards. She is going to be a handful. She already is a handful.
So, last night we made sure she had food, water, and litter, and closed her up in the bedroom while we went over to the parents' to spend time with Daisy's sister and her boys. Empress seemed fine -- she was playful and we made sure we gave her lots of love and cuddle time and she seemed happy. Our goal was to try to wear her out a bit before we went over there so that she'd mostly just sleep while we were gone. In the event that she vomited again, we put the mattress cover on the bed and spread out my big green fuzzy blanket over it (you can see this in the top photo).
When we returned home, we saw that she'd vomited on the floor next to the pan and it was not just water this time, but had some food in it, and that she had shit on the bed in three places -- small piles of diarrhea and then a giant turd that I have no idea how she was able to keep inside her little body. There was more poop on the puppy pad we'd put down too.
Physically she seemed fine, and was super happy and playful when we got home, but the continued vomiting and the poop outside the pan was a cause for concern for us. As we cleaned it up and put the blankets on to wash, Daisy and I decided that it would be best to clean out the upstairs bathroom and to put her in there, with food and water and a clean pan -- to see if she had any more issues. I held her and cuddled her in my office for close to an hour while Daisy, super-tired and already feeling nauseous, readied the bathroom to hold this little cat for the night.
We devised a plan -- she'd stay in there, with her food and water and clean litter, until she'd gone 24 hours without vomiting or eliminating outside the box. If she kept doing one or both we'd try to get her into the vet sooner than Thursday, her first scheduled appointment, and if it got bad we would have no choice but to take her to the same emergency vet we took Hank to when he was having his breathing troubles. Obviously with the New Year holiday a day away neither prospect was something we wanted to do, not only because of the inconvenience but the money involved -- but I will never neglect one of my babies when they're sick and especially not the one that I've wanted in my life for many years and finally had.
Daisy did some research -- as mentioned, it's not uncommon for cats to vomit a few times after their spay/neuter, especially if they're young and female, until all of the anesthesia wears off. This can take several days or even a week in some cases. She'd been spayed the day before we got her, so I wasn't wildly concerned. The eliminating outside the pan was more concerning to me -- was she too young to have really been litter trained? I mean, she pees in the pan, we've seen it, so she knows how to use it. Was she just sick and couldn't get to the pan in time?
Daisy's further research said that as long as there wasn't blood in the stool or vomit, then she was very likely fine and was just recovering from the surgery and the drugs' effects were finally wearing off. This is part of why we wanted to quarantine her in the bathroom -- if it wasn't just that, if she was sick with something else, we don't want her to give it to the other cats (though in his house, that would likely be nearly impossible not to). We also didn't want to keep washing and rewashing the blankets and sheets, or have her have diarrhea underneath our impossible-to-move new bed and adjustable frame. It was a hard decision to keep her in there -- in a much smaller room, in the dark, with the cabinets lashed shut and towels/blankets on the floor for her, but we really didn't have much of a choice and we don't have anywhere else to put her.
She did not like this. Her angry and somewhat panicked mews tugged at my heart with every cry. I felt so bad for her. She did, eventually, settle down and sleep, as did I later in the night with Pete on my chest. Hank continually sat sentinel outside the bathroom door, smelling at her and occasionally growling, but later just curled up in front of the door as if he were guarding her.
The golden girls downstairs are, I'm sure, well aware that there's another cat in the house. It's kind of hard to ignore the loud mews, and I know they hear her. Sadie at least has seen her, very briefly, hissed a little, and ran off -- but Maggie as always gives zero fucks, and does not give a single shit about our new family addition.
So that's what we did. We kept her in the bathroom and she's still in there now, with the hopes that she'll be okay and not present any further signs of illness or distress. As sleep-deprived and stressed as we both are at this point, we'll enter the new year with a kitten in our bathroom, a much larger and older kitten who growls and hisses any time he smells her or sees her, and (hopefully) a much more unified household in the coming days once everything settles.
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