One week!

Well, the kittens are officially one week old. Hooray! No signs that they have picked up Zelda's cold, and she is getting better every day. I haven't even heard her sneeze this morning.

Jazz hands!

 Exciting things to look forward to: at around 9-14 days old their little eyes will open. All kittens (like most mammal babies) will have blue eyes at first. It doesn't look like they are mixed with Siamese so its a good bet that their eyes will not stay that way. For now they kind of just bumble around blind, but its not like they have far to go. Most of their life right now is still devoted to eating and sleeping.

Zelda is doing her job keeping everyone warm and happy. She eats well and will be finished with all of her medicine on Tuesday. I'm glad it was just a little cold and not a full blown upper respiratory infection. The babies are getting some of the benefit of her medication through the milk, so they should be pretty well protected. Since they were born in my house and not at the shelter we won't have to worry about some of the more serious illnesses that kittens are susceptible to, such as panleukopenia.

Panleukopenia (or Panleuk, as we call it) is a very serious illness that we see a lot in shelters. It spreads easily and can kill young kittens in less than a day. Most shelters will just "eliminate the problem" by euthanizing any infected animals, but mine is a no-kill shelter and we do our very best to combat the disease even though the odds are against us. Panleukopenia has a 70% mortality rate in kittens. Thats not to say that we let the animal suffer though. The vets that I work with are very dedicated and treatment is aggressive. If an animal is not responding well to treatment and appears to be suffering, the vets may have to make the call to put it down. That is because the vets take a  Hippocratic Oath not to let an animal suffer, and it is something taken very seriously. Panleuk is something that all cats and kittens should be vaccinated for when they are young and vaccinations should be updated regularly. Here is a little more information on panleuk, just a little Wiki article but it gives the main points.

Finally, Snurfle's eye/nose flush went well and she is back in our home. I took her home from work with me Tuesday evening, boy was she excited! Her and Godzilla played all evening and then woke me up at 4am on Wednesday morning playing some more. The vets said that she may have immunity problems all her life though, so she might be hard to adopt out. Plus the ulcer in her eye could possibly get worse and need to be removed. We have a potential adopter for her, so I made sure to give her this information and I'm waiting to hear back. But as far as we know she is healthy now! Just have to get through this week of meds and go back for a check-up on Tuesday. She hasn't been the little snot machine that she was the last couple weeks, so it looks like the nose flush really helped. One of my co-workers and I took advantage of Snurfle's drugged up state after her surgery and put her in a chicken outfit. It was awesome.