The Little Kitten That Could....Kinney's Story

Every once in a while, we work with a patient that reignites our passion for doing what we do.  On June 7, 2011, we met a patient that has done just that...

The story began when Kathy, one of our good clients, noticed something moving on the side of the road at one of Hinesburg's busiest intersections.  As another good Samaritan stopped traffic, Kathy gathered the little one month old kitten in her hands and brought him over to us.  As Dr. Foster assessed him, she found the 13 ounce little skinny ball of fluff to be alert at first.  He then suddenly contorted his tiny body into twisted circle.  She determined that the kitten had a broken jaw, a bloody nose, and was severely dehydrated.  He had likely suffered severe head trauma and had a brain injury.  He had either been hit by a car, thrown from a moving car, or even worse, both.   Kathy agreed to let us try to stabilize the kitten in hopes that she could adopt him if he survived.  Although his chances were not good, the decision was made to try to help him.

Over the next couple of days, "Flyboy" - as we came to call him - showed little sign of improvement.  Despite medications to help the swelling in his brain and his seizures, his level of alertness and lack of weight gain remained a concern.  Flyboy spent not one night alone, with our technicians and doctors taking him home to bottle feed him, give him medication, and observe him around the clock.  Although our concern was increasing, something about Flyboy compelled us to keep going.

As the next 2 weeks passed, we started to see subtle glimmers of improvement.  One day one of our technicians caught him standing right in the middle of his food bowl, covered in the gruel-like food that he had not been interested in previously.  He was eating on his own!  Soon after, while we were doing our daily assessment of his mobility, Flyboy began batting at a toy cat ball.  Although he had the coordination of a bull in a china shop, this was the first time we had seen him wanting to play!  Flyboy's seizures began to fade away and although he was far from being a normal kitten, he seemed to telling us all he needed was a chance to get better.

At the beginning of July, we decided to give Flyboy a try in the real world.  Kathy took him home on July 5^th.  He was still very small for his age, but his jaw had healed and we had started to wean him off of his medications. We crossed our fingers and hoped that he would be able to live the life of a relatively normal cat.

On July 20^th, Kathy presented us with a happy boy now named "Kinney" (for the pharmacy he was found in front of).  He had finally started to gain weight normally and had become a playing machine!  Kathy told us about how he would plop himself down on her chest and fall asleep when she lay down on the sofa.  Kinney's only remnants of his trauma were blindness in one eye and his small stature.

Kinney visited us again on August 17^th for a wellness exam.  He has turned out to be great addition to Kathy's family and has befriended all of her other pets.  His story seems that it will end happily.  We're all so happy and thankful that Kathy joined us in giving a little ball of fur on the side of the road a chance.  That's all that Kinney needed!