Aid for Runt and Abel's Medical Expenses

Runt’s mom was a stray and very feral cat that I had been feeding for about three years.I had trapped her along with her previous litter a few months prior. Right as I finally found a home for her last kitten, she gave birth again. I believe that she must have gone into heat while she was still nursing her kittens before I had trapped her.Runt was born on October 16th, 2023 in the cabinet under my sink(which is her safe spot that she chose herself) and he was the first of five kittens born to her final litter. When I checked on her to make sure she was comfortable, she had just pushed Runt out and began pushing out her other kittens.

I checked on her about an hour later and immediately knew that something was wrong. Two more babies had been born, she had eaten their placentas and licked them clean, but Runt was still laying in the spot where he was born, his placenta still attached, getting no attention from his mama and had not been cleaned like the two born after him. I cut his umbilical cord from the placenta myself, cleaned him up with a damp rag, dried him off a bit, and put him up against his mama’s belly with his two(soon to be four) siblings.

After that point, I thought he was doing well. Runt and his siblings opened their eyes at about a week and a half old. It was at this point that I started to notice that when I checked to make sure all the kittens were nursing, that about 75% of the time, the other four were nursing as normal, but Runt would be laying all by himself. At two weeks old, just from picking them up individually, I could tell that Runt weighed roughly half of what his siblings weighed. He also was the only kitten that started to develop urine scalding on his butt and hind legs, which meant that even though his mama was stimulating him to make him pee and poop, she was not cleaning him afterwards the way she did the rest of the kittens. Due to this, I scheduled the first of what would end up being very many vet appointments for him. I took one of his siblings with him to get a weight comparison. Runt’s sibling weighed 10 ounces. Runt only weighed 4.

The vet recommended supplementary bottle feeding, along with being very proactive in making sure that he got to nurse, even if it meant pulling each of other kittens away from their mom one at a time and giving Runt the teat they were on. It also fell on me to rub his butt with a wet wipe each time that I fed him so that he could pee and poop regularly, and then put ointment on the scalded areas to help him heal. I spent a few hours reading and watching youtube videos( shoutout to Kitten Lady) and off we went. For the next several months, I hovered over them like a hawk. I was constantly checking to see if the kittens were nursing, and if they were, making sure that Runt wasn’t getting pushed aside. Every 3 hours I would warm some formula, pick him up, wrap him in a towel(he never started latching) and bottle feed him, rub his little butt to make sure he peed and pooped, wipe him down with some baby wipes and put some ointment on his scalding, then return him to his pack.

Around the time that he could start using the litter box on his own, the hair on his legs started to grow back as the scalding went away. Unfortunately, as the other kittens grew, Runt was still around half the size of his siblings. He was still getting pushed aside most of the times that he tried to nurse, so I had to continue constantly monitoring them and continued bottle feeding him until he was about 3 months old. By this time, he was finally weaned off of formula and milk, but was still very underweight despite having a voracious appetite. To try to get a little more weight on each of them to prepare for their spay/neuter and eventual placement for adoption, I fed the five of them 4 cans of fancy feast kitten wet food blended with about 1/3 of a can of kitten formula every night.

I think from eating so much liquid food for so often, the kittens developed diarrhea. Most of them got over it within a few weeks with appropriate medicine and without losing much weight, but Runt was struggling to get over it and found it hard to keep his weight on. At four months old, Runt finally hit 3 pounds, his brothers weighed 5 and his one sister weighed 6. The day finally came where I handed them over to the rescue. They were due to get spayed a few days later, and then be placed for adoption. Runt already had an application in for a potential adopter, and they were all set to go off to their new lives!

I woke up two days later to a text that Runt was being rushed to VCA. He was found in his room very limp, unable to stand on his own, and had lost half a pound(1/7th of his total weight) overnight. We initially thought he had fallen from his cat tree, but for reasons I will soon explain, I no longer believe that to be the case. His blood work showed that he was extremely close to kidney failure and he was very dehydrated, despite him constantly drinking water. His diarrhea that he just could not get rid of was slowly killing him. After an overnight stay at VCA where he showed mild improvements, and knowing that if he made it through his hospitalization he would require constant monitoring and medicine for an unknown amount of time, we made the decision that I would be taking over his care and adopting him. He was transferred to my personal vet, Angel Animal Hospital in Pasadena, for another 3 days of hospice. Weighing in at 3.5 pounds the night before being rushed to VCA, Runt was discharged from VCA at a meager 2 pounds and 10 ounces. In a span of a few days, all of our hard work to get him up to a healthy weight was gone.

Runt greatly improved during those 3 days, even managing to re hydrate to the point that his kidney levels were no longer critical, but no matter what treatment we went with we could not slow his diarrhea. When I picked him up to take him home, it was literally pouring out of him. They cleaned him up 3 different times in the back before placing him in the carrier, and each time he was already covered in it again by the time they made it back to the waiting room. He had tested negative for every diarrhea related disease that he had been tested for, so at this point, we were just treating symptoms instead of causes, trying to see any sort of meaningful improvement. Runt was confined to a kennel so that his poop could be constantly monitored and was on a slew of medications given multiple times a day as well as a special diet, all with the sole purpose of giving his poop more solidity so that he could both keep some weight on and slow his gradual dehydration from diarrhea.

For the next three weeks, Runt took two steps back each time he took a step forward. He was active, lively and very social, and while he was no longer constantly leaking liquid poop, he still had very bad diarrhea each time he used the litter box. He did not put on any weight in those three weeks, but thankfully he didn’t lose any more either. His weight was holding because of how much he ate, but we were still seeing no effectiveness in treating his symptoms. Every time I gave him his meds, Runt would jump on top of his kennel to wait for me to draw them up, and then jump back down and go play for a bit before I put him back into his kennel.

The night of March 10th was no different. Runt was very energetic and was jumping all over chairs, his kennel, and running around my living room. March 11th ended up being one of the scariest days of my life. I woke up and greeted Runt, and he didn’t move or even acknowledge me. I picked him up from his bed and sat him up on my lap and he collapsed. He could barely even lift his head up on his own. I called my vet and rushed him in. Runt had again lost a lot of weight overnight and could not even stand up.He now weighed under two pounds. His body temperature was 97, 3 below the minimum “normal” for cats. He also began struggling to breathe on his own. He was put both in a body temperature machine and an oxygen machine. His kidneys were again in critical condition due to the dehydraton from his chronic diarrhea. His blood sugar was also through the floor. The vet informed me that he was too critical to leave in hospice and needed to be transferred to an emergency clinic for overnight care or he wasn’t going to make it.

I needed to charge my phone to figure out where I was going to take him, so I left him in their care to go home and grab my work phone and my phone charger. I made arrangements to take him to the closest emergency vet, which was VCA Edgebrook. As I was about 10 minutes away from the vet, I got a phone call from the vet. “Anytime we try to remove his oxygen to make sure he’s able to breathe on his own, he starts stretching out and going stiff like he’s getting ready to pass away. He could go at any minute.” They agreed to leave him on oxygen until 5:45 so that I could take him straight from the oxygen machine to VCA.

I fully expected Runt to die in my arms as I rushed through 5 o’clock traffic to make our 10 minute drive as short as possible. I had one hand on the wheel and the other was clutching Runt to my chest. He was fading fast and was fully limp in my arms, his mouth hanging open and unable to even support his own head. I kept pleading with him in between looks at traffic to hang in there and stay with me, and the only sign I had that he was still in there was feeling his chest move against my hand from his shallow breaths. But we made it. I don’t know how close he was to dying in my arms that day, but we made it.

I know that there is some contention over VCA’s prices that are set by some money-hungry lady in Los Angeles, but I want everyone to know that their doctors are all incredible. With the state he was in when I dropped him off, I would never have believed that Runt would be standing on his own, looking around and trying to jump out of his carrier the next morning when I picked him up to transfer him back to Angel. But there he was, the life back in his eyes, running around the vet office(where he’s become a bit of a celebrity) as I waited there to drop him off for another 3 days of hospice.

When I picked him up from Angel after his hospice stay, we began a month of round the clock observation and care. 6 AM, pre-breakfast medicine. 9 AM, a meal and medicine. 11 AM, a meal and medicine. 2 PM, a meal and medicine. 5 PM, a meal and medicine. 8 PM, a meal and medicine. I’m blessed to be able to work from home to provide him with the care that he needed, and if I still worked a 8 to 5, Runt may have never recovered. Over the course of this month, Runt’s diarrhea slowly started to improve, and I’m happy to say that it FINALLY eventually went away altogether. He has solid poops now and has been slowly putting on more and more weight, and was finally released from quarantine. He spends most of his time sitting with me or with his mama(who I managed to get spayed and kept) and is making the most of his second(third?) chance at life. Runt is now just an ounce or two shy of five pounds with very solid poops. All in all, he’s doing wonderful and has had an amazing recovery.

Unfortunately, due to Runt requiring so much of my attention and time, I missed some early signs that there was something wrong with my other cat, Abel. I saw him squatting over his litter box a few times, but was so focused on making sure Runt never missed any meals or medicines that I didn’t really put two and two together until I found very bloody urine all over his blanket. This is when I started to realize that every time Abel tried to urinate, he had to strain for 10-15 minutes to get more than a few drops out, and at this point there was blood in his urine. I took him to the vet and was told he had a partial urinary blockage, and despite us getting him on a urinary diet and some medicine, by the end of that week he had fully blocked and required emergency surgery to remove the blockage.

Once again I found myself at VCA. Due to a combination of genetics and bad luck, he had a bladder stone fully blocking his urethra. The surgery to save him was costly. The vet told me after unblocking him that there was a solid mass of crystals blocking about a half inch of his urethra. He never would have been able to pass that on his own, and he never once showed that he was in any pain. Once a urinary catheter is inserted, it needs to be in for about 3 days and then once removed, they needed to be sure that Abel could pee on his own. After one day and two nights at VCA, he spent one more day and night at Angel before being released to come home.

Abel knows that he’s on a special diet now. He has his own feeding spot and goes there on his own to eat his special food whenever it’s time to eat. He was also given some anti-inflammatories and pain meds, and for around 3 weeks it looked like all was well. I would monitor his urination and make sure the streams were steady and that he wasn’t struggling to pee, squeezing on his bladder each time I picked him up to make sure it was soft and not getting hard. I even had a followup appointment about a week ago that I canceled because of how well he was doing and how much urine he was able to get out whenever he went to pee.

Unfortunately, almost overnight, on Sunday Abel fully blocked again. He once again had to go to the vet and have his urethra unblocked and was originally scheduled to come home Wednesday evening. Unfortunately, his kidney levels remained high and he needed an extra day of hospitalization. On that Thursday when his catheter was removed, Abel was unable to urinate on his own and I immediately rushed him to Nederland for emergency surgery. He stayed there for 3 more days. This past Monday, I finally brought my boy home after 7 days between two vet offices.

I have been lucky enough to enjoy 25 years of pet ownership without any significant emergencies or sudden high-cost events until this year, so to say this is a massive blow would be an understatement.

On the gofundme I have listed the goal as the entire sum of their medical bills. While I definitely do not expect to fully recoup my costs, ANY help to give me some breathing room when paying so many different monthly payments for the carecredit/credit cards I had to use to cover their treatments is so appreciated. If you’ve made it through this entire article, thank you so much for reading, your compassion in this difficult time will never be forgotten or unappreciated.