A most unfortunate incident

Today the three year old had a little accident with our new kitten. I’m not sure what she was trying to do…perhaps put the kitten up on her shoulder. According to the other children, however, it looked as though she flung the kitten over her shoulder rather roughly, landing it onto the floor behind her. Regardless, the kitten did not react well…unable to straighten out her hind leg and meowing frantically. Within a minute or so practically everyone in the house was clustered around the kitten…and the three year old was standing there with huge eyes and a bewildered look on her face. It just so happened that Jessica had the day off work and was over here doing her laundry and Ana was also home from work. Both Jessica & Ana are animal lovers and were able to quickly assess the situation. When they realized the cat’s leg was stuck in a weird position and was unable to move it, they began calling the vet offices in the yellow pages. We found that the nearest clinic that does emergency care for small animals was over 25 miles away, and that it would cost at least $50.00 for the initial exam. Oh, what to do, what to do? The younger children all had tears in their eyes and were very worried about their new kitten, (and the kitten was still meowing frantically), and all of the other kids were simultaneously telling me, “I’ll chip in some money to pay for the vet, mom”…and so the decision was made to bring the kitten to the vet immediately rather than wait to see if the leg would get better on its own.

And so, three hours later…and the cat having to be sedated and then x-rayed and then a bill of $250.00 quoted to us (and hyperventilating a bit about the dollar amount)…we learned that the cat had a dislocated back leg. The vet manipulated its back leg somewhat but couldn’t tell for sure if it was “back in place” until the kitten came out of sedation. The cat is being kept at the vet office overnight so they could further monitor it coming out of sedation and also give it some pain medication, if needed. We’ll make another trip into town to pick the kitten up tomorrow morning.

(We’ve been teasing all evening that our free kitten hasn’t been so free after all.)

We’ve had the kitten for less than a week, but the kids have already become firmly attached to it. It curls up at the end of Colter’s bed every evening and sleeps there for much of the night. The girls can be seen carrying it around during the day, so sweetly curled up in the crook of their arm. We all laugh, too, when the kitten sits on the fireplace hearth and paws at its reflection in the fireplace glass or whenever it stalks somebody's wiggling foot and so bravely pounces on it. And of course it also acts like a true cat and has more than once clawed its way up onto our sofa and living room chairs, and jumped and pounced its way all over various pieces of furniture, making me more than a little upset. But, gosh, it’s so sweet and cute and cuddly…

Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson