Nort Report

I'm happy to announce that Nort is growing fat and sassy! Since her brush with death she has continued to have a little bit of a problem with her hind legs but it really doesn't slow her down at all. It's only when she takes her first couple of steps that you can even tell that anything is wrong. She's a little wobbly and if she isn't paying 100% attention to what she's doing then her rear end doesn't exactly coordinate with her front end and it kind of goes in the opposite direction. This has not stopped her from jumping on to the kitchen counter or on to the back of the couch. Her favorite place to play is inside the bath tub. It takes her a couple of jumps in order to get out of the tub but she's never been stuck in there

As you can tell by this picture she hasn't missed a meal since the day she was born. Her cleft lip hasn't caused her any problems at all. She can eat and meow with the best of then. She looks especially fat in this picture because she is actually sitting on top of a plastic Christmas bulb. I have spent countless dollars on actual cat toys for her and her brethren but they hold no interest for any of them. They spend weeks and weeks playing with the carton that once held 12 Diet Cokes and they all love to play with the plastic lid to the inside spout of a carton of Mocha Mix. I've learned my lesson and will henceforth do all of my cat toy shopping at the Christmas store and at the grocery store.

Of the 5 of my kitties Nort is the sweetest. She is the only one who will let me hold her and I'm sure that is because of how much we held her when she was sick. The instant I pick her up she starts to purr and blink her eyes but she is still a very busy teen aged cat and doesn't like to be held for long. She lives to bite my feet as they hang over the edge of the love seat or to attack my socks as I walk past her. She loves to eat Feline Greenies and can play with the cord to the front door blinds for hours. She plays hard and she sleeps hard. (She also snores.) She loves to be combed but she is certain that I'm trying to murder her when I try to clip her nails.

That's all for this issue of the Nort Report. Next time I will try to post a picture of Matilda.

Nort!

Miss Nort is doing so well that she is now a cover girl. You can almost see her clef lip. She'll have to wear more lipstick for her next cover!

(The first time I published this post I had this picture in a program that made it look like she was on the cover of a magazine but apparently after an amount of time the link doesn't work, so I've replaced it with the regular picture.)

Nort Report

Last night we were able to bring Nort home. When we picked her up at the Westminster hospital she seemed a little sedate. By the time we had finished learning how to give her all of her medications she had fallen asleep and was resting peacefully.

When we got in to the car she snoozed and stretched on my lap. I figured that after all she had been through that she was exhausted and I did what I could to let her sleep. (Andrew's KORN retrospective playing on the cd player didn't really help, but she managed to sleep anyway.)

I stayed in the car with her for about 45 minutes so that she could get as much rest as possible before everyone else started coming around sniffing at her and trying to figure out where she had been and what she had been up to. I stroked her belly and she purred. She looked at me with winky eyes and went back to sleep.

I gently brought her in to the house and layed her and her towel down on the couch. I turned to put my purse down and when I got back to the couch...Nort was not on her towel. She wasn't even on the couch. She was running for the food bowl. The vet said that he wanted her to eat a little bit several times a day so I knew that it was ok for her to dine. She ate like a ferocious tiger until I took the plate away from her. I thought she would relax and digest but what do I know? Before I had straightened up from taking the plate away Nort had found a jingle ball and was playing soccer with it down the hallway.

Throughout the rest of the evening I had to take her off of high places approximately 100 times. I had to fish her out of the refrigerator and also remind her that litter boxes are not hiding places. This kitty spent the evening playing with everything she could find and when she couldn't find anything to play with I swear she dreamt things up! All of the adult kitties took turns licking her and trying to clean her. I truly think they were trying to get her to settle down but they were all as successful as I was in this department.

I took her to bed with me hoping that being in a warm dark bed would cause her to relax and sleep. However my head had barely hit the pillow before she was off and running.

She got two doses of medicine this morning and if I come home and don't find both doses on the carpet when I get home I will be amazed.

This is EXACTLY how I do not like to spend my Tuesday nights

Yesterday Andrew called me here at work and said that the grey baby, “Nort”, had been crying and was throwing up and then had a fit of diarrhea right in the middle of the living room. He said that she was obviously ill. I told him to race her to the vet and have them call me for payment information. So he got a neighbor to take him to the closest vet and they took her right in. They did a fecal test for parasites and it came back negative. They gave her subcutaneous fluids and gave Andrew some liquid antibiotics and sent them home. About an hour later Andrew called me and said that Nort was acting even sicker than before, so I told him to race her back to the vet and I’d meet them there. So after driving like a maniac…(I hit ever freakin red light between here and HB.) I got to the vets office to find that they are open until 6:00 but the doctor leaves at 5:00. HOW STUPID IS THAT?? So they referred us to an emergency pet hospital in Westminster. Have you ever tried to get anywhere in a hurry on Beach Blvd at 6:00? There was traffic, red lights AND construction. Nort was laying in my lap, pitifully crying, breathing short shallow breaths, eyes rolling back in her head. The hospital knew we were coming so they were waiting for us when we got there. (Of course we missed the drive way and had to make a 5 minute trip around the block!) They whisked Nort away as soon as we got there and then the wait began. (Incidentally we named Nort “Nort” because she has a clef lip and we decided that if she were to snort like the other kittens she would say “nort” instead of “snort”. This fact comes in to play later.)

They asked us over and over if we had any idea what she could have possibly gotten in to. I told them that she had never been outside in her life and that the only things she could have gotten in to were in the bottom of my kitchen cupboard and everything in there was sealed. They told us to go home and investigate and see if there was any moldy food lying around or any spilled cleaning fluids. Well, I knew full well that there was no moldy food lying around but the possibility of something spilled that she could have gotten in to was feasible. So we left Westminster and went home and tore the house apart looking for something/anything that she might have gotten in to. We think we found what it was…but there is no way to be sure. One of them had knocked over a box of Borax soap in Andrew's laundry pile. I would have thought that anything that would have hurt the kittens would have been under the kitchen sink. They have learned how to open the cupboard and there is now way for me to keep the cupboard closed so they had free reign to go in and walk through the soap. So we packed up the soap box and headed back to Westminster. On the ride over I called the 800 # on the box for advice on ingestion of their product and they were closed. Sure glad it wasn’t my human child who had eaten their soap!

When we got back to the hospital they took the soap box from us and then came out and asked us about any possibility of physical trauma. Unfortunately last week Andrew was trying to pick up Nort and another kitty. The other kitty didn’t want to be picked up and scrambled which caused Andrew to trip over a litter box and lose his balance. Nort wound up getting hit on a dresser. She cried for a minute and limped around that night but by morning time she was fine and hasn’t limped since.

They took x-rays and said that there were no broken bones, her heart and lungs looked good but her tummy was inflamed. She wouldn’t hold her head up and it didn’t look good. They had given her pain meds, a sedative, antibiotics and something to try to calm her tummy. Now here’s the kicker….this hospital doesn’t have 24 hour care so we would have to transfer Nort to a hospital that does. So we took her to her 3rd facility of the day…this one in Garden Grove. There was one doctor in this entire facility and thus it took us over 2 hours to get her checked in. As I was filling out paperwork and answering the same questions over and over…the nurse asked me why we named a cute little girl kitty “Nort”. I told her that we didn’t know she was a girl until about an hour previous but we named her Nort because of her clef lip and I reiterated the story about her name that I told you a few paragraphs ago. Imagine my horror when after I told my funny story I realized that this nurse also had a clef lip that had been repaired so well that it was hardly noticeable.

We got home after midnight and I went straight to bed knowing that we had to be back at the Garden Grove hospital before 8:00 AM to pick Nort up and bring her back to the other hospital in Westminster. Why there isn’t a 24 hour pet hospital in the area is beyond me.

Andrew picked her up this morning and took her back to the Westminster hospital and said that she looked really good. The Garden Grove doctor called me and told me that Nort had made a miraculous recovery but was not out of the woods. He said that she was sitting up and occasionally batting at her IV tubing.

At this point I’ve spent around $1,500.00. I’m about ready to hold a car wash and a bake sale.