hola, isabel

I called my parents house from the Seattle airport last Wednesday.  I wanted to remind them to pick me up from the SLC airport.  Nobody picked up the phone at their house.  Totally out of character, it went to voice mail.

“Hey guys…don’t forget that my flight is coming in tonight.  You better be there to pick me up outside baggage claim!”

Thankfully both my mom and dad were there to get me from the airport.  (Holy crap, it would have made for a super crappy birthday if they forget to get me!)

My mom immediately told me how sorry she was that she missed my earlier phone call.  And then she began to tell me where she and my dad had been all afternoon.

The story starts with my parents deciding they needed some new barn cats.  The knew of someone who had some kitties to give away and so they stopped at their house to pick up a couple cats.

(You must remember that my parents live in farm country in the middle of small-town-Utah.  Their life is 100% different then my life in the city.)

They looked around the field for the kitties and couldn’t find them.  And so they drove to another house where they knew some kitties had been born and were ready to take home to their barn.

The owners of this second set of kittens told my mom and dad to just head to the back wood pile and pick out whatever kittens they wanted.  As they walked in the back field and got closer and closer to the wood pile they could already smell it.

Death.

Sure enough they found that one of the five kittens had recently died.  They mommy cat was nowhere to be seen.  Just four crying kittens and one dead one.

My dad put one his gloves and went to pick up the dead one, to bury it.  He quickly found that he couldn’t pick up the dead kitten.  It was tangled in some sort of netting.  Upon closer inspection they found that all of the kittens were tangled in this netting.

My dad figured the mommy cat had recently given up trying to save her babies and had abandoned them.  They looked around for her, but she was long gone.

My dad kept his work gloves on and pulled his leatherman tool off his belt and began trying to rescue the four kittens.  They soon discovered that the kittens skin had actually grown around the netting and was embedded in their little bodies.  My mom and dad spent the next tour hours gently cutting the netting out of the kittens skin.  My mom tried to best clean the effected areas and applied medicine to the wounds.

By this time the cat owners had joined the rescue efforts and the four adults were able to free the four kittens.  My parents decided that instead of only taking two of them home, like originally planned, they would take all four cats.  Hey, if you’re nursing two kittens back to health, you might as well nurse all four of them.

They got all the kittens out of the netting, put them in a box and headed home.  On their way they stopped at the hospital, where my mom is a nurse, and picked up some baby formula for the kittens.

When they got to their house my parents placed the scared kittens inside a huge pet porter box with some newspapers and clean towels.  My mom put out a little bowl of baby formula and three of the kittens quickly started drinking the milk.  The smallest gray one just stayed in the corner and wouldn’t drink.

My parents hooked up a heat light on the pet porter and  then left the kittens to head to the airport to pick me up.  By the time we got home and peeked in on the kittens they were all cuddled close to the heat light and sleeping.

By the next morning the three biggest kittens looked okay.  It was the small gray one that we were all worried about.  My mom and I both didn’t think the little gray one was going to live through the day.  Their little wounds didn’t look very good.  Some of the kittens were bleeding.  They had poop on their legs. My mom and I discussed whether or not we should bathe the kittens.  We decided against it.  They were pretty cut up and scared and we thought dunking them in a tub of soapy water would be too traumatic.  We decided to give them one more day until we washed them.

By that afternoon the gray kitten looked even worse.  If we didn’t do something, it was going to die soon.  It still wasn’t eating and didn’t seem interested in the small bowl of baby formula.  My dad suggested that my mom get a syringe and we try to “bottle feed” the gray kitten.

My dad had to practically force the kitty’s mouth open.  He was afraid of hurting her.  But, eventually, the gray kitten started to licking and sucking on the syringe’s end.  Once she got the hang of it she drank and drank.  Almost immediately we saw a change in her.

The next day we were still bottle feeing the gray kitten (who we named Bella).  My mom was still trying to keep their wounds from the netting clean and medicated, but their legs were covered in poop.  It was time to give them a bath.  My dad hand washed all of the kittens with baby wipes as best he could while my mom prepared a warm bath with special cat soap we had bought earlier in the day.

We cleaned out the pet porter and put in fresh newspapers, towels and a new cat littler box.  Believe it or not, the little kittens immediately began using the litter box.  They also were eating the soft cat food my mom put out for them.  In just two days all four of the kittens seemed to be improving.  We were now pretty sure that all of them would live.

Most of the kittens were still having trouble walking.  The netting had been wrapped around their little necks and legs and had left them all with open wounds, some of which were still bleeding.

We gently played with them and kept them out in the sun, which they loved.  My mom kept medicine on their wounds and we kept bottle feeding the little gray one.

By time time I left on Sunday afternoon all of the kittens were drinking milk out of their bowl.  The gray one was even joining the others in eating soft kitten food.  They had (mostly) figured out how to use the litter box.

While nursing four kittens back to health wasn’t what I had in mind for my mini vacation to Utah, it ended up being the perfect way to spend my time there.

I’m anxious to see how well they are doing when we got back for the 4th of July.  Maybe they’ll even remember me.