The Kola Report: Improvement

Kola is feeling better at last. He is not back to normal, but he is getting there. I had to put food into him by syringe for a couple of days, which neither of us liked. He would eventually curl up on the bathroom floor and refuse to move at all while I struggled to fit the syringe tip through clenched teeth. He would not take any kind of food voluntarily, from my finger or a bowl, so I had to resort to the syringe.

But now he is eating on his own again. He still has little appetite for hard-food but, because I started giving him soft-food whenever I thought he would want it, he has eaten more of that in the last day than he would under normal circumstances. This will, I hope, provide enough nourishment to push his recovery still further.

I love seeing signs of recovery in sick cats. (It would be better if they were never ill in the first place, but that’s like a desire to have been born rich instead of working to get there. Which I haven’t, by the way.) First, Kola started wanting water. He asked for it from the tap, which was fine by me. He seemed lacking in the confidence to jump up onto the counter by himself (that has since improved, too), due perhaps to weakness from his ill health, so I would lift him up.

Then he started eating solid, albeit soft, food on his own. Small amounts at first, too small to warrant a cessation of the syringe method. But yesterday I realised that he was eating more on his own than I would be able to give him otherwise, and since the syringe caused him so much distressed, I decide to push more food at him instead. As aforementioned, I gave him food outside the regular mealtimes, which he seemed to appreciate.

He has also begun talking more than was the case in the past week, and when I come into the parlour, he wants attention, about which he has been apathetic. Even that came back in stages. He first accepted pets without much reaction, then he lie down for them, next he purred, and finally, last night, he started flexing his front paws, kneading the air.

As I wrote above, Kola is not his old self yet, but a few more days should take care of that. I want to thank all those who expressed sympathy for the floofy one's plight and good wishes for its betterment. It helps knowing that others care. I wish I knew if he had what Renn had had (and if so, why it hit him so much more severely than it did my big boy) or whether it was something independent, or perhaps caught because Renn’s cold weakened him. In any case, it’s on its way out, and Kola is on his way back.