Pardon My French

This morning a representative from Best Friends Animal Society: Los Angeles sent me an adoption follow-up email. She wanted to know how Xander was settling in.

She mostly asked a bunch of pretty standard sounding questions about whether or not he has litter box issues, bad habits (and how I deal with these habits), how he responds to being left home alone and how he does interacting with other people and animals.

Because it has been two weeks since we officially welcomed him into our family, I do appreciate that they’re being thorough in their follow up. They want to make sure it’s a good fit.

And well, I’m pleased to say that things seem to be going exceptionally well. He’s a really good kitty:
-He doesn’t have accidents outside of the litter box
-No fearful or aggressive tendencies
-He has only a few bad habits: he likes to eat from Kiwi’s dish instead of his own and he can be a bit of a play biter. It doesn’t hurt, but we’re still teaching him that it’s not OK to munch on people.
-No health issues
-We don’t feel the need to crate him at night anymore and we leave him to the open space of the apartment when we go out.
-Xander doesn’t seem upset when we leave. (He doesn’t cry or scratch at the door.) We’re never gone for long and he has Kiwi to play with/keep him company.
-He’s friendly and really seems to like the company of people and other animals. (Kiwi and he have become best friends!)

I’m sure it helped that we fostered Xander for several weeks prior to adopting him.

Best friends!

A man and his kitty

While I was picking up the little guy post neutering surgery, I was allowed to fill out his adoption papers. He’s officially ours!

Happy Halloween, everyone!

I say it often, but, only because it’s true. Kiwi is a pretty high maintenance, sometimes all-around difficult little animal.

Last year, when Phil and I came back to Michigan for a visit, my friend Jeanette looked after Kiwi. We thought that it might be good for her to stay at Jeanette’s so that she could keep a pretty constant eye on her. It also provided an opportunity for Kiwi to have a little play date with another cat, Jeanette’s very friendly cat B.B.

Understandably, Kiwi didn’t really care for this idea. Fair enough–I can understand how being in a new place would be stressful. But, did you need to pee all over her apartment, Kiwi? (And did you need to keep up this habit during the following months?) Yeah, that was embarrassing. I sent my friend a check to cover the cleaning fees, but I still to this day feel awful about it.

On top of the mess, Jeanette ended up resolving to take Kiwi back to our apartment so that she could be most comfortable. This, of course, required frequent drop-ins to feed Wiz, clean out her litter box, socialize and play with her. Kiwi likes to play and cuddle–both exclusively on her own terms, of course. Because of Kiwi’s need for attention, I think Jeanette ended up staying over at our place for a night or two.

It’s strange because she wasn’t always like this. Back in 2009, while Kiwi was living with me at my parents’ house, she loved interacting with new visitors and while she did play a little rough with my parents’ elderly cat and dog, she still got along and interacted with them.

At some point in the last year or so, though, she’s become pretty anti-social. Phil’s theory is that the cleaning crews with vacuum’s have traumatized her. She hides when people come over (even if she has met them before) and she seems to get very flustered when she’s introduced to a new animal. While I think a little brother or sister would be good for her, all of the above has made it difficult for me to even consider getting another pet.

But recently, I’ve been feeling a strong need to do some good. I volunteer from time to time, but, I find that I often get handed a clipboard or a sign and end up collecting signatures, selling T-shirts, directing people where to go during events or doing administrative-like work. Not that these things aren’t important, but I actually want to interact with and be a part of the team that physically cares for people or animals. I’ve never fostered a pet before and I thought that this might be a good time for that.

That’s why the other day when I saw that Best Friends LA desperately needed foster families for a bunch of kittens who were recently born, I got excited. Phil was a little nervous about caring for another animal at first, especially with Kiwi having so many of her own little issues, but he eventually signed off on it. Phil likes to act like he doesn’t care either way when it comes to small, adorable animals, but I know he’s got a big place in his heart for all of them.

It only took a day after I filled out the application before BFLA contacted me and asked if I wanted to look after a four-month old kitten for a few months, until it’s time for him to be neutered. So yesterday, after work, I went and picked him up.

Xander

He had only been at the Best Friends LA headquarters for one day and it was immediately clear to me that this little guy was going to need a lot of TLC. He is the tiniest kitty I had ever seen, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. He has a little issue with his eye in which goop will collect in his tear duct and make it hard for him to keep his eye open.

Apparently, this was the “reason” a man living in South L.A. decided to take the tiny kitten from his son and “throw him over a fence.” Luckily, the kid who was caring for the kitten kept a close watch on the little guy and did what he could to contact someone who could help. Because the shelter was going to put him down he was brought to Best Friends. (I was told that shelters euthanize all small animals with any kind of infection.)

The tiny kitten also had had fleas probably since he was born, causing him to show symptoms of Anemia.

Xander staying warm in a “sweater” that Saralyn and I “made” for him with a sock

It took awhile for Destiny, the person in charge of the kitten foster program, to go over all of the instructions I would need to follow in order to ensure that he was properly cared for. I was happy that my friend Saralyn came along to help me keep it all straight.

-Keep his eye clean of goop with a warm wash cloth
-He doesn’t have his immunizations and he hasn’t been dewormed, yet. Keep him away from Kiwi.
-Give him liquid vitamins with a syringe
-Keep an eye on his stool. If it’s liquidy, mix the special powder she gave me with his food.
-Make sure he always has food nearby and that he’s eating often. If he’s not eating, feed him a couple of drops of corn syrup.
-He’s anemic so make sure he stays warm. A heating pad in his crate will help him to stay comfortable and healthy.
-He’s really fluffy and recovering from fleas so he needs to be brushed often.
-He’s too little to wander around by himself.

BFLA had been calling him Moe, but I decided before I left the headquarters that I was going to call him Xander after my favorite “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” character. I thought this was quite fitting–he’s a scruffy little guy who struggles, but he’s got an incredible story arc ahead of him. He doesn’t have any kind of magical abilities and so he has to fight harder than the rest of the Scooby gang to slay demons. There’s also that whole eyepatch storyline/eye issue thing to take into consideration. What’s funny is that after I made this decision, I saw a little of four kittens who were named Buffy, Angel, Spike and Oz. Destiny said that because he’s a loner, when Xander comes back to be neutered, he can be kept with the other Scoobies.

Kiwi didn’t even get close to Xander, but it’s clear that she’s afraid of him. She’s been hiding accordingly. This is probably a good thing, seeing that we need to keep them apart until after the little guy gets all of his shots.

This morning when I woke up to check on him, Kiwi kind of lurked in the shadows and watched me handle him, feed him and play with him. She cried out to me when I picked up one of her toys and rattled it in front of him. I may have imagined it, but I think that her eye twitched when he tried to make a dive in her water bowl. I think somebody’s just a bit jealous.

I plan to pay a little extra special attention to her so that she doesn’t feel so left out.

Phil and I have been cuddling him lots. Because he does like to be warm, I like to hold him at my chest and kind of wrap him in my shirt. He curls up and goes right to sleep.

Phil’s caption: “Tiny Animal perches on my shoulder like a sidekick pet.”

Because Phil works from home, he’s keeping an eye on Xander. Phil has to make a living, so he can’t give the little guy his undivided attention, but it does mean that Xander won’t be by himself very often. If all of his Facebook photos and Twitter updates are any indicator, I’d say that Phil is already in love.

Last week the vet put my cat Kiwi on Fluoxetine, or a generic form of Prozac.

They don’t make tiny versions of the drugs for animals. This is the same stuff that people take, only it’s in a much smaller dosage: the vet broke up her pills into smaller pieces.

A few days ago, a Facebook friend from high school joked: “just couldn’t take all the pressure of laying around, eating out of a bowl, and shitting in a box?”

She is a pretty high maintenance little cat, but it is a bit more complicated than that.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that Kiwi had an accident on our love seat. Fearing a urinary tract infection, I took her to the vet right away.

Other than a pretty nasty case of fleas (which she picked up from my friend Jeannette’s cat) the vet found that Kiwi had cat crystals, which are essentially kidney stones in cats. These crystals block her up and hurt her when she tries to pee so she goes where she’s most comfortable: on our furniture.

Believed to be caused by her food–which has high levels of protein in it–I was recommended a more appropriate and rather expensive brand of food. Because she had a negative association with her box, I also had to buy her a new litter box and a new type of litter.

(Also expensive was the 9 months of Frontline, flea powder for carpet and the urine removal cleaner.)

Because I don’t want my little baby to be uncomfortable, I don’t want her to ruin our furniture and I don’t want to stress Phil, I knew I had to do all I could to make this stop immediately.

After two weeks, the accidents started happening again. I took her back in and the lab techs found that she had a whole lot of bacteria in her urine: she was prone to making these crystals.

Two visits later, for a total of three vet visits, the doctor ruled out a whole lot of conditions, leaving Feline Idiopathic Cystitis as the remaining cause for her problem. Kiwi gets stressed out, it irritates her bladder and she makes these crystals.

She’s already pretty skiddish and has been that way since she’s been little–she was taken from her mom too early. It took some process of elimination, but we were able to determine exactly what was causing her so much unrest: the cat who lives across from us, a huge, male tuxedo cat named Achilles is making her anxious. He sits outside atop his carpet covered cat tree, howling, sometimes for hours at a time.

She hasn’t had any accidents since she went on the medication, but the vet said it will take a few weeks to fully have an effect on her.

In the meantime, we’re doing our best to reduce her stress –we got rid of her fleas and we’re keeping the blinds closed when Achilles is outside– and just hoping that that Prozac helps. Keep your fingers crossed, all.