Day #261 – Worries About Pat

Gatlinburg TN

Kelly and I are a bit worried about her mother, Pat.  If you’ve read earlier blog entries, you’ll remember that she has bi-polar disorder.  And, about 15 years ago, she had a brain aneurysm.  As a result, she has some difficulty in solving problems, making decisions, and analyzing situations.

Pat has been complaining of bilateral shoulder pain since early May.  We’ve encouraged her to see a doctor, and, over time, she has done so.  A rheumatologist ruled out arthritis.  An acupuncturist was unable to reduce her pain.  Recently, she saw an orthopedic specialist who immediately told her she needed surgery to repair rotator cuff tears in both shoulders.  He sent her to physical therapy, which she attended sporadically.  A second orthopedic guy told her she did not need surgery, but needed to stick with physical therapy.

As a result of seeing all these different doctors, she is amassing quite a stock pile of drugs.  We weren’t sure what all she was taking, but she was definitely making her own choices about amount, combinations, and frequency.

After talking this over for quite a while, and talking with Kelly’s brother Chris, we all agreed that I would go to Sarasota for a while to help Pat make some decisions about her medical care.

Kelly has stopped taking calls from her mother.  I am handling all conversations with Pat.  This has been pretty stressful for all involved, but I’m really happy that Kelly can detach herself in this way.

The kittens continue to give us joy.  We really want to keep one….or two…. But, we know we cannot.

Day #257 – Kittens Start to Play

Gatlinburg TN

I swear every time I turn around, the fur balls have grown.  At this morning’s 6 AM feeding, I noticed that Stripey’s ears are now at the top of her head and her head is looking more like a cat’s head.

A few days ago, a woman who owns a dog-sitting service loaned us a new crate for the kittens.  It fits perfectly on a back bunk and has doors on both one end and one side.  It is so easy to use and it’s plenty big enough for the gang.

Last night, Kelly noticed that the kittens leave their nest area and go to another corner of the crate to move their bowels.  They still don’t have the pee thing down yet, but this is real progress.  I think it’s time for a litter box!

Today we discovered that they’re playing with each other.  This is brand new.  They try to crouch and pounce, but their fat bellies and shaky legs get in their way.  Still, they’re rolling around and biting any body part that moves.

On Thursday, the vet recommended that we start weaning them.  He suggested starting with milk on a finger until they can lap from a saucer, then mixing canned food with the milk.  Since the kittens are chewing on the bottle nipples, and ignoring my milky fingers, I decided to skip a couple steps.  I got a can of Newman’s organic cat food (who knew?!?) for them.  Stripey loved it.  Fran and Buffy tried it.  Gray was very confused.  All finished up with a bottle.  I’m calling this a success and will try again tomorrow.

Day #249 – Cat Update

Gatlinburg TN

Every day the kittens live is a triumph. 

Despite ourselves, we’ve become attached to them.  We tried to call them by their colors or markings, but Spot quickly became Fran.  Even after determining that Fran was male, his personality was just too much like our neighbor Fran to be called anything else.  Kelly calls him Francis O’Malley Brucklacher.  Wonder why.

So far, they seem to be doing really well.  Here’s a chart showing their weights, in ounces:

	19-Jul	22-Jul	29-Jul	31-Jul
Buffy	4	4.7	7.2	8.8
Fran	5.3	5.7	7.5	9.1
Stripe	4.8	5.6	7.8	9.3
Little Gray	3.8	5	6.6	7.9

They’ll be three weeks old on Wednesday August 4.  Sometime that week, we’ll take them to the vet for worming.  We’ll probably keep them until they are weaned and starting to use a litter box.  We have two options at that point:

1. The local humane society would take them and place them in a local pet shop, but there is no “no kill” guarantee.
2. Alicia, who tried to get her MomCat to accept them, might be willing to take them back and find homes for them.

Kelly and I prefer the second option because it would put the kittens with other cats for socialization.  Also, her home was so clean and she was clearly such a cat lover that I wouldn’t worry about the final homes she found for them.

Day #237 – Kittens Come Home

Gatlinburg TN

Alicia emailed me a bit after midnight to let me know it wasn’t working.  Kelly started off in the truck to get the kittens and I stayed home to call Alicia.  She had tried so hard, but it just didn’t work.  When MomCat started growling and fighting Alicia off, she knew there was no use trying any more.  Everyone was disappointed.

It poured down rain the whole day, so Kelly was a long time coming home.  The kittens cried the whole way.  We wondered whether they were hungry.  We wondered whether they missed this MomCat.

Kelly and I agreed to not let the kittens go again until they’re quite a bit older.  We agreed that the process was pretty hard on them.  So, we’ll stay at this campground until the kittens are old enough to move to a better foster position, or permanent homes.  We’ll do everything we can to keep them safe.  We know the odds are against them.  We know we’ll be lucky if any survive.  We agree to not name them.  Right.

Day #236 – Possible MomCat

Gatlinburg TN

There’s a woman who goes to the same church as Fran who might be able to help our kittens.  Her name is Alicia and she lives across the mountains in Cherokee.  Alicia has a cat that has kittens a few weeks older than ours.  Since those kittens are in the process of being weaned, we’re hoping that the cat will take our kittens and nurse them.

It was a long drive over to Cherokee today.  We were filled with hope and concern.  We knew the kittens would be better off with a MomCat than they are with us, but we don’t know this woman.  We agreed that if either one of us got the willies, we’d leave with our kittens.

Alicia is a young woman who lives in a double-wide that is precariously perched on the side of a steep hill.  We had to put the truck in 4WD to get into her driveway.  There was a lot of garbage on her porch because she was cleaning out her kitchen.  But, the rest of her home was spotless.  Even though she had three adult cats and a litter of kittens, there was no “cat” smell.

We smeared canned cat food all over the kittens and held our breathes.  MomCat licked the cat food off them and let them try to nurse for a few minutes before she stalked off.  She was very young – a first-time mother.  Alicia admitted that the cat hadn’t been all that thrilled with motherhood the first time around and wasn’t sure how this would go.  She wanted to keep the kittens over night and work with them.

It was an even longer drive home.  I was impressed with her home and how healthy her cats looked.  Kelly was pessimistic that this would work and was worried about Alicia’s ability to feed the cats every two hours.  Since Alicia had bottle-raised kittens before, I kept a good thought.

Day #235 – The Good News

Gatlinburg TN

Yesterday, before we found the kittens, the campground owners packed up their car to return to Mississippi.  Prior to leaving, Jimmy asked to talk with us for a few minutes.  We sat at our picnic table to hear what he had to say.

Jimmy told us that we had committed sins in our lives.  We had most likely lied, stolen, or done other sinful acts at some point.  He told us that Jesus had died on the cross to save us from those sins and any others – that He had wiped those sins away with His sacrifice.  He told us that anyone who believed this and welcomed Jesus into their heart would be saved and go to Heaven.  He led us to believe that those who did not would go to Hell.

I asked him a question:  What happens to people who lived prior to Christ or who lived/live in such remote areas of the world that they never heard of Him?  What kind of loving God would send those folks to Hell?  What I heard Jimmy say was that those people, with enough introspection and reflection, could come to the Lord on their own.  That was a surprisingly Gnostic answer.  Jimmy prayed with us and for us.  He gave me a copy of a Bible, with “helps” – I was very happy to receive that Bible as I’ve been frustrated with every attempt to read the one my father gave me.

I was glad that Jimmy came by to talk with us about his beliefs.  I appreciated his openness and his honesty.  I was touched by the passion of his beliefs.  My father used to warn me about “Bible thumpers”.  He told me to be wary of people who brag about their beliefs.  He told me that the real Christians are the ones who don’t shout out their beliefs at every opportunity, but who quietly live their beliefs every day.  I suppose you could say that about any value, religious or otherwise.  The two weeks I’ve been working, playing, and sharing meals with Jimmy and his family, I’ve seen them live their beliefs openly, but I never felt uncomfortable.  I appreciated the time he took to talk with us, to share his beliefs, and to encourage me in my spiritual (he would probably prefer the word “religious”) growth.

My father hoped that a person might one day come to understand another person, but that the most important thing a person could do was respect other people.  He believed that respect came from knowledge.  With that in mind, he   insisted we go to services at many different churches.  So, we learned about Judaism in the local synagogue, about Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians at the local churches, about Catholicism from going to Mass (He tried to get me into Catechism classes, but the priest wouldn’t allow it.), and about Mormonism from the local missionaries.  We went to Unitarian services whenever possible because he thought I’d get the best religious education from that fellowship.  He encouraged me to take high school and college classes in religious studies so I could learn more.

My father was an Existentialist, with some reservations.  He read the works of Existentialist philosophers and talked a lot about their theories.  He was delighted when Camus made it to my required reading list in high school.

Of all the religious services we attended, he liked Catholic mass the best.  As we’d enter the church, he’d usually whisper something in my ear about the church being a tomb for a dead God and the service being the funeral.  He stopped going after they switched from Latin to English.

My father liked to watch Christian TV shows on Sunday mornings.  We usually watched together, in the kitchen, while cooking dinner.  We watched evangelists from the time we got a TV in 1961 until his death in 1999.  He often told me that, as a teen, he’d been saved (“Washed in the blood of the lamb,” were his words.) by a famous revivalist whose name I cannot remember.  He wondered whether he would go to Heaven because he had been saved, or if his falling away from religion would send him off to Hell.

There is a huge jump between thinking about something on an intellectual level, such as religious education, and believing or having faith in something.  My father was never able to make that leap.  I’m probably going to jump one of these days, but have no idea where I’ll land.  Guess that’s the point.

I’m pretty sure, though, if there is a Heaven, cats go there.  Remember the “All Creatures Great and Small” episode where Dr. Herriot is called to the home of an ailing wealthy woman?  None of her dogs is sick, but she is near death.  In her religion, Heaven is just for two-leggers.  She told the vet that she didn’t want to go to Heaven if she wouldn’t be reunited with her dogs there.  He stammered about for a moment and then reassured her that surely there were dogs in Heaven.  Can’t imagine any place with dogs and no cats.

The kittens are still alive today.

Day #234 – Kittens

Gatlinburg TN

Today, Fran came by my rig to ask me whether I’d seen the kittens yet.  “What kittens?” I asked.  “The newborn kittens,” she replied.  Off we went, at a good clip, to see the little ones.

When I arrived at the campers’ site, two of the kittens were curled up together on the outdoor carpet and one was trying to crawl across gravel next to the carpet.  I gently picked up the kitten that was on gravel and put it back on the carpet.  The RV owners were trying (unsuccessfully) to feed the kittens from a bottle with a hard plastic tip.

It probably happened this way:  On Wednesday, July 14, MomCat climbed into the undercarriage of a big RV that was parked in South Carolina.  On Thursday, the owners of the rig drove it to our campground in Tennessee.  This morning, when they heard their rig “crying,” they took the front end apart to find three newborn kittens.

The RV owners made it plain they could not cope with the kittens and did not want them.  They were not interested in taking them back to South Carolina to be reunited with their mother.  Things got a bit confusing.  The manager called Animal Control and Kelly and I took the three kittens back to our rig.  Kelly searched the ‘Net for a vet and I started warming the kittens.  The one who had been on gravel was cold.  Kelly had no luck finding a vet, but we did find a website devoted to newborn feral cats.  Based on what we learned, Kelly went off to the pet store. 

After the kittens were warm, I bathed and dried them thoroughly.  By then, Kelly had returned with formula and bottles and the fun started.  We fed the kittens every two hours.  We told each other they would probably not survive.  We tried to not fall in love with them.  Later in the evening, the owner of the RV knocked on my door.  They had found a fourth kitten.  He was very cold and barely responsive.  I warmed him, bathed him, and tried to feed him.

These kittens have been without their mother for at least a day.  They will probably die.  If they do die, they will do so while being held and loved, in a warm and dry space.