19 July, 1998

Kittens

After another sleepless night, I slept soundly through the morning and woke up to the feeling of Sabs gently kissing my cheek and whispering "The cat is giving birth" in my ear sometime just before noon. While I'd been vaguely conscious of him shaving and showering an hour earlier, these sounds were not enough to induce me to leave the comfort of the warm nest of blankets on the bed. But the kittens coming had me leaping and bounding up and at 'em before you can say "supercalifragilisticexpialadocious". With barely a pause to yawn and slap my glasses onto my face, I stumbled out of bed and down the hall to peek into the box in the linen closet.

Two tiny fuzzballs were already lying next to mama-cat, one only recently expelled from the womb. Shara was still licking his wee little ears and biting off the afterbirth. I hunkered down right next to the box to watch. I have never seen anything, human or animal, give birth, at least not in person. Plenty on T.V., but lemme tell ya it's not the same thing as witnessing the miracle first hand, of watching these tiny, precious lives coming twisting into the world gasping for air and warmth and comfort.

All told, Shara delivered nine kittens, which explains why she carried them longer than we expected her too and why she looked as big as a house. Nine is getting towards "large" in litter sizes. Four to eight is considered average and there are rare instances of there being more than ten. Of those nine, one was stillborn, apparently having died a few weeks go, as its spinal column and limbs were not fully developed. I saw it come out and it dropped to the bottom of thebox and lay there in an oddly limp heap. Shara started to lick it, but as it did not move, she sniffed it few times then turned her back and went back to pushing. Thinking perhaps it needed a bit of human rescue I picked up the tiny creature and cradled it in the palm of my hand wrapped in a paper towel.

The birth sac had not peeled way from its face so I took that off first, thinking it was suffocating. But as I looked closer I saw how strange it looked and how still. I poked gently at its body to see if it had a heartbeat and then realized that the body had the totally wrong consistency. There was no hardness to it, and I knew that this one simply hadn't made it. I checked for a heartbeat again just to make sure, then wrapped it up carefully and sat holding it for a little while before slipping it into a shoebox to be buried later. Nature is sometimes a harsh mistress, but she is rarely wrong, and attempting to fight with her over this clear-cut case would have been a mistake. So I set the box aside and went back to watching the living and keeping an eye on Shara to make sure she was okay.

Six kittens were delivered without incident and Sabs and I were glowing with excitement. By this time though, most of the afternoon had elapsed and Shara had been in labor since abou 10am and was growing tired. She delivered the seventh kitten with much effort, pushing it almost all of the way out, then stopped pushing, licked it a few times and put her head down to rest. The kitten in the meantime was still wet and crying for food but could not walk any farther because his afterbirth was still attached to him and had not been fully expelled from Shara's body. I waited for a few minutes, but though Shara licked him again, she did not attempt to push him further out of her body. Gently I curled my fingers around te little fellow and pulled him away from his mother and laid him against her side. As soon as e started butting his head into her side, she took interest again, bit off the umbilical cord and started licking him more vigorously so that eventually he was able to wade in among his siblings to fight for a teat.

I sat petting Shara's head while she lay there, and closed her eyes. Her sides were heaving with effort and she panted off and on for a half hour before the last kitten started to emerge. It took a while for her to push it out even halfway and again, she lay there tiredly once the kitten was within sight. Several minutes passed and she neither pushed, nor made any move to assist the kitten other than licking its head from time to time. After about a quarter of an hour I was getting worried for te kitten, when Shara finally lifted her head and heaved the kitten out. She bent over and detached the kitten, licked it a few more times then left it to fend for itself. However, there was no sign of the afterbirth.

For about an hour she lay there, her sides still rippling with strain and I started to get scared that there was nother kitten and that it had gotten caught up in the undelivered placenta and that Shara was in big trouble. We called our animal hospital and theyhad the vet on call give us a ring back and e told us that if she didn't deliver and didn't stop straining within 15 minutes to take her to the emergency clinic with all of the kittens. Fifteen minutes went by and she was still in pretty bad shape and her eyes looked like they were glazing over.

Now I was really scared, but I called the clinic told them I was coming and grabbed the box. Sabs tried to drive gently and I sat there talking quietly to Shara the whole way, though of course she still panicked at being in a moving vehicle. Once at the clinic, I walked right in with the big box and the receptionist just kind of looked at me and went on dealing with the previous customers. I set the box down and looked at her meaningfully trying not to cry. Finally she asked me if I'd signed in and I just blurted out the whole story wile my knees started shaking. She handed me the sign-in board and I managed to write my name but then my hands started shaking and I could barely write out Shara's name in the next small space, much less her ailment. The vet's assistant came out and took the box and the receptionist handed me another clipboard to fill out. I turned to Sabs who had just walked in and handed it to him "Can you write for me please, my hands are shaking so badly I can't write."

We'd only filled in four spaces when the assistant came back, to tell us that Shara was fine, that the vet felt no more kittens inside her and that he wasn't concerned about the placenta and that we should take her home but leave te box open in the car because she was over heated. Trembling with relief I spouted some nonsense and thank you I think and took the box back. She told us not to fill out the rest of the form and we packed the car bck up and went home. A half hour after we got bck, Shara delivered the placenta and promptly went to sleep. I gave her a bowl of milk as a reward for mking it through a trying afternoon and sat with her until 8pm when the new Babylon5 movie came on.

As I sit here I can here the chorus of kittens mewing in the box every now and then and the thought of their cute, fuzzy little squirmy bodies makes me smile.

I'm feeling antsy about my sites again. Not this one -- I've finally got an interface which I'm perfectly happy with. But Owl's Nest is a mess and I'm extremely unhappy with it. So ... the redesign bug has bit and I expect the fever will be showing up within a day or two, so keep an eye out for changes on that front soon.