an absence

I haven't written in a while. For the last 2 weeks, I have been foster cat free. Piglet, Chai and Adeline all went to a store while I was on vacation, and much to my surprise and heartache, both Piglet and Chai were adopted very quickly. Adeline and Chico are my only unadopted cats, but they're both not with me anymore.

The last two months...really sucked. A lot. I didn't know what to say or how to say it...I joked to Heather about two months ago, that my kitten mortality rate was ubsurdly high - something like 40%, and I wanted to just have a nice time for once where no bad things happened. My cats are always insane for some reason it seems...even Chai ended up having a blocked nipple at one point that required a vet trip. I always say that I have terrible luck, and if anything, the last two months...kind of show it even more.

First there was Bart and Emmett...and then Chai, she had five little kittens, and only Mist survived. She nursed another five orphaned kittens, and I lost one of those ones too. Then there was Cloud & Chico, and Flip and Chloe and Samba, and they were all healthy...although I couldn't make Chloe and Samba come around to me (they were feral), luckily Heather coaxed Chloe out of her shell, but Samba had to be adopted to a farm.

I took Destiny from Heather at this point, and she was SO tiny and weak, but Heather said that after all she'd fought through, she wasn't worried about her dying. 12hours later with me, of course, she was dead.

So, after the whole Chai ordeal, Heather brought me a nice FAT grey girl named Adeline who was pregnant. She had been at the shelter forever, she had no URI, everything was supposed to be great.

She ended up amazing us with only three kittens, one was healthy, one was born with no anus, and the third was born with some of his organs outside of his body - he of course died almost right away. The second was euthanised by a vet, and the first suddenly died a day or two later.

So, that didn't go as planned.

Barrett and Piglet were my last kittens at that time, and that group of orphaned kittens had had terrible luck - an eye infection that kept going around etc etc. Every time they were supposed to go to the store, someone would get sick, they'd be quarantined, it would be passed around...it really happened at least twice. Then of course, the night Piglet was supposed to go to the store the third time...Barrett suddenly died. Quarantine again. After what happened later, I really suspect Barrett died of distemper. He went from fine to dead in a course of about 24hours. He declined so rapidly; lethary, loss of apetite and what I thought was diarrhea, but was actually the vomitting of some thick, orange liquid. I have no idea how he would have gotten distemper, though. He and Piglet were both about 2.5 months old, and other than Adeline who was quarantined the whole time, I hadn't brought any new cats in. Piglet never got sick, either...just Barrett.

I decided to get back on the horse, and fostered this gorgeous calico DMH named Deirdre, with 6 beautiful newborn kittens. I also knew Piglet was going back to the store after his quarantine period ended, and I brought home another 4 adorable DLH kittens.

I still think about that group sometimes, and I want to burst into tears. They were all so adorable and sweet, and I feel like what happened was my fault.

About two or three days later, the kittens started getting sick. Within 2 days, they were desperately ill. That morning I walked in and saw that Deirdre hadn't eaten her food, and I saw her vomiting the orange fluid. One of the kittens died in my arms the night before they went to the vet. The next morning, before I could get to my appointment, another one died.

Deirdre peed and vomited all of her kittens in the crate on the way to the vet. A third kitten was euthanized, and the vet elected to keep Deirdre and the 4th kitten under supervision there.

I wandered home with 6 very hungry kittens. I fed them every two hours for two days. The vet called the next day and told me that Deirdre and the 4th kitten, who I was in love with and had named Winston, were euthanized. Over the next 2days, the kittens all slowly started to get sick and died one after the other. &these were terrible deaths; they all followed the same course, progressing levels of weakness...I would walk into the room and see them all at X stage, and know "this one will die tomorrow, this one in an hour, this one by this evening".

In 3 days, I lost 11 cats. 3 gorgeous cats that had days before been energetic and seemingly healthy. &I can't help but feel like it's my fault. Maybe Barrett had died from distemper, and then I brought all these little angels into a nightmare. Maybe if not, had I changed my clothes, been more careful, I could have stopped the spread from the four kittnes to Deirdre and her babies at least.

Out of 30 cats I have fostered, I have lost 18. Honestly, I'm a little paranod people think I have Munchhausen by proxy, and I'm killing them on purpose.