Anthony Van Dyck (June 01, 2009 – July 02, 2009)

I think that I may have promised to no longer blog about kittens. Unfortunately, today I will break that promise.

As you may or may not know, our second batch of kittens consisted of three males that were abandoned by their mother, Piper. From day one my wonderful and amazing wife took it upon herself to become a surrogate mother to these babies. She bottle fed them every four hours (supplemented by the sister-in-law while we were at work), she bathed them, she medicated them, she played with them, she taught them how to use a litter box and she loved them. Not having any biological children of her own, she has taken to these baby kittens almost like they were her actual kids. This process has been ongoing since the first of June.

Fast forwarding to yesterday, my wife only had to work half of a day. It was her intentions to bring these kittens to the veterinarian in order to get them a check up and make sure that all was right with the world as far as being a kitty goes. After waiting an inordinate amount of time and spending $80.00, the kittens were pronounced healthy and sent home with a bottle of antibiotic. The vet said that there was a chance that they may have a slight bacterial infection and we should give them this medication as a precaution.

My initial plan for the evening last night was to mess on the internet for a few minutes then head off to bed quite early as I have been exceptionally tired for the last few weeks. Around 6 o’clock pm we gave the kittens their dosage of antibiotics. Shortly thereafter, they went to sleep, I began surfing the web and my wife was fiddling with her scrapbooking gear. The two black kittens had climbed up to the sofa to nap while the black/white mixed kitten, known as Anthony Van Dyck, crawled away to their make-shift bed inside of a clothes basket.

Around 7:45 pm, little Anthony woke with a start and began to cry lightly. I figured that he may just be prematurely hungry. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he had begun to walk drunkenly and stumbled across the floor. He stopped and began to hack and managed to vomit on the carpet. I lifted him slowly to the tiny baking tin that was being used as a temporary baby litter box in case he needed to continue vomiting. At this point I noticed that he was shaking a little bit. I placed him back safely on the floor and watched him for a minute as he kept walking then falling, walking then falling, all the while crying lightly. I called for my wife.

She immediately began to hold and stroke and love on poor little Anthony. As she spoke sweetly to this adorable mass of fur, she decided that maybe he was shaky due to dehydration so she attempted to feed him a bottle of water. He barely drank. He cried and shook. He did this for anywhere between 15 to 20 minutes. As his cries became more intense and his pupils became dilated we decided he must go to the emergency veterinary clinic. Unfortunately, this was approximately 40 miles away in Columbia.

We jumped in the car and sped towards Columbia at as accelerated a rate of speed as I could justify. After about 2 minutes into our car ride, little Anthony’s breathing became more and more shallow and overall he became less responsive. He was dying and fast. Five minutes later, an attempt at feline mouth-to-mouth was actually attempted. At this point the tears flowed. They welled up in my own eyes as well and my wife knew that it was over. His eyes were completely dilated, his nose and tongue were blue and there were no more breathing movements.

The ride home was brutally sad as we both cruised down the road rubbing this poor kitten. I hated to think how odd his short life was: abandoned by his mother, drinking from a bottle, the only mother he knew was human; he went from feeling great to deathly sick in the matter of hours only to die one short month later in a car in rural Tennessee. Hopefully, the little guy had some contentment in the fact, as I do, that the true mother who loved him held and petted him and emitted her love in his last moments in this cruel world.

We were blessed to have had even a short time to share our home and lives with this little guy. Hopefully, all kitties go to heaven, too.