Dearie me, it is being a difficult day.
We are still stuck, only we are stuck in a very troubling sort of way.
We were woken up at about five in the morning by some very squeaky mewing, and staggered out of bed to discover Guffy being a very contentedly purring mother to two very pretty kittens.
We told her how clever she was, and went back to bed.
When we emerged to make coffee at nine there were two more, all four the very image of their mother.
By the time we had finished our coffee there was a fifth. It was black, and it had not survived.
We sighed, and cleaned things up a bit. Guffy’s little problem had not improved with kitten-birth, and there was poo and blood everywhere.
I stroked Guffy and admired the noisy, suckling kittens, and then realised that she was still very round.
I prodded her a bit, and was discomfited to find that she was still rather lumpy.
I thought that there might still be some kittens left to come.
Mark examined her and said that it was difficult to be sure, but probably it would be all right, so we left her in peace to get on with it by herself.
She was very pleased with the kittens, and curled herself around them with proprietorial pride.
Mark buzzed off to build his engine, and I went away to do the week’s accounts and wage paying and cash juggling.
It was three in the afternoon before we came back to Guffy.
There were still no more kittens.
We massaged her gently and knew that there could be no doubt.
She had stopped giving birth and there were still kittens left inside her.
We thought about this anxiously.
We did not want to take her to the vet, not just because of the cost, but because she was doing so well with the kittens that she had. Guffy loathes the vet with every fibre of her being, and we knew that a trip there might well upset her so very much that she would decide that motherhood was just not for her, and dump the kittens into my care, like a desperate fallen woman on the doorstep of an unsympathetic nunnery.
I had a friend once whose life had been started like that. He had been left on the steps of a police station, and had been given the humorously appropriately appellant Nick by the duty sergeant. I don’t think he was there very long, but obviously it made a marked impression, because he rose through the ranks to become a very senior copper in adulthood, which gave what would otherwise have been a tragic little story a rather rosy ending.
In the end, of course, we had to take her to the vet. We wrapped her up with her kittens in a large cardboard box and carted her off.
She was every bit as displeased as we might have expected. The vet examined her, frowning, and said that he thought there were probably two last kittens still left inside. He gave her an oxytocin injection and told us to bring her back in a couple of hours if nothing happened, and when we got her home she fled as if being pursued by a hungry Ho Chi Minh villain with a fishing net.
Nothing happened.
We took her back to the vet.
He suggested an emergency Caesarian. Then he told us how much it would cost, and we blanched slightly and declined.
It would have been enough to have a week’s holiday in a five star London hotel with a trip to the theatre thrown in.
If we had that sort of money we would probably have spent it already.
The vet gave her another injection, and gave us a third one to give her later.
When we got her home she would no longer come anywhere near us or the surviving kittens. An hour later she gave birth to a dead kitten on my office chair.
At the time of writing the last is still to come out.
If she does not die we will shut her in a box with the kittens she has left until she loves them again, so that problem can probably be solved, but at this time there are no certainties.
I have lit a candle for her.
