Don’t Bury Me…Just Yet

My cat, Coco recently gave birth to three beautiful orange and white kittens. It was just too good to be true, as I found out today. I checked on the kittens, only to find that two of them looked…well, dead. I panicked and picked them up. They were barely holding on at the moment, and it appeared that Coco had just rejected them. She wasn’t nursing them or keeping them warm anymore. This is the first time I’ve had a cat who’s given birth and I had no idea what to do.

I tried everything:

I tried putting the kittens closer to Coco so they could feed, but she would just move away. The healthy kitten was feeding on its own and it was the only one she was paying attention to at all. This was very alarming. The two sick kittens felt cold to me despite the blankets they had been sleeping on, so I warmed up a heating pad and placed them all wrapped up on it. Soon one of them started to breathe more normally and even stretched and yawned. The other one just kept opening and closing its mouth very feebly and gave up.

I took all the kittens and Coco to the vet who examined the sickest one and said there was no hope for it. It would die sometime during the next hour…

Right, imagine what you’d feel when someone tells you a little helpless kitten who’s still breathing is going to die in your arms, literally. It was so tiny, vulnerable and adorable, but what the vet said did come true. It died. My sister Minz and I didn’t want to give up hope just yet so we brought it home and laid it out on the heating pad, but it was really and truly dead. Minz wouldn’t believe it and insisted it was still alive. However, she had to go and bury it in a shallow grave near the flower bed in our garden. When she came back, she said she felt like she had buried it alive…

I wish we hadn’t buried it just yet. What if it was alive? What if?

The vet had told me to feed the surviving kitten every two hours with a dropper and baby formula. Its still alive, and Coco keeps rejecting it. Still, I’m hoping a miracle happens and it survives. I don’t want to bury it feeling like I could’ve done something more, or earlier.