Triage 101

Nature – AKA the goddess of all felines – has been historically kind to me. She has mostly thrown one urgent matter at a time in my direction, so that I never felt like there was something I couldn’t handle. I’d get a litter of kittens adopted out and THEN stumble on a terribly injured cat needing urgent care. And the emails and texts from strangers needing help would dribble in, in a manageable way.

But something has shifted since Maggie died (see previous) and Mother Nature has all but buried me in urgent to-do’s. Learning the delicate art of triage has been foisted upon me, and it’s sink or swim time. I’m mostly swimming – navigating the rough waters of rescue – with the occasional major fail included to keep me humble.

The current list is long:
– a new, possibly abandoned cat at the farm needing to be scooped up and brought to a vet as she looks unwell.
– finding a forever home for Biscuit, the LAST cat dumped at the farm, who’s been brightening my home the last several weeks… or settling for another foster situation.
– catching the remaining intact cats at the senior center – finishing the job that Maggie started.
– working on helping Figgy, one of the cats Maggie fed for years, who is failing from probable kidney disease.
– creating shelters for the cats under the bridge, in hopes they’ll actually use them and not succumb to the bitter cold we’re experiencing right now.

There’s more but you get the general idea. So the plate is full. And even so, more was added earlier this week – the kind of need that pushed everything else aside in the urgent care unit of my life.

A maintenance worker discovered a litter of seven (!) kittens born in a city-owned shed down by the open space. He kindly scooped them up, put them in a box with a blanket in the same location, and reached out to me.

The question was: should we move them into foster care where they would be safe? But seeing that they were only a week or so old, with their eyes just beginning to open, I knew it would require bottle feeders, and since I have zero talent in that area, and our volunteers are already stretched thin, I opted to leave them there another night and put food out for mama to keep her coming back.

That was probably a mistake.

We were dismayed on our next check to find three of the kittens missing along with mama, who had undoubtedly moved them. And then it was crisis time. Every other concern went out the window, in the interest of scrambling to keep these babies alive. I raced from store to store for newborn bottles, formula, heating pads. And for 24 hours I was their fumbling nursemaid, attempting to jam the nipples into their unhappy mouths every 3-4 hours, including during the night. And then the cavalry arrived in the form of a rescue angel who specialized in orphaned kittens. I packed them up and drove them half an hour to her, where they are thriving three days later. Cute little stinkers!!

But their missing siblings? I’d say the odds they’ll survive in the wild open space are slim to none. And it crushes me. (A perfectionist will second-guess themselves into a tizzy, and I’m no exception.)

This week, I made another decision based on anxiousness about a lack of forever homes – and again it proved to be the wrong one. (The lesson from the universe seems to be that I need to trust and relax – neither of which comes easy to me.) An elderly woman in our circle said she was interested in my foster kitty, Biscuit. I knew she was 85, but thought it’s okay – she can handle Biscuit, a sweet live-wire of a cat, since she has experience.

She couldn’t.

That became clear for reasons I won’t go into, but I foresaw disaster – either they’d leave the door open and Biscuit would escape, or kitty would do her acrobatic shelf-climbing thing and send books and picture frames hailing down on the head of a senior citizen.

Smarting from my too-hasty decision on the kittens – one I couldn’t roll back – I decided I would change course here while I still could and ask for Biscuit back. It turns out I didn’t need to! Before I could rehearse that awkward conversation, the caretaker reached out and said she didn’t think it was going to work out – that her cat didn’t like Biscuit! (Thank you, Mother Nature, for having my back this time.) So I went and picked her up today and she is enjoying life again chez moi – even keeping me company as I write this.

I can’t handle a third cat – not with my two seniors needing so much TLC. So it’s back to square one finding Biscuit a home. But that task will get shuffled a bit further back on the triage list. As long as she’s okay and happy, I can push something else to the top of the list. Tomorrow I’ll take a carrier to the farm to get the frail new kitty (granddaughter’s suggested name is Malia) used to the idea of being spirited away to the vet.

One thing – one urgent thing – at a time, and it will work out.