Saturday morning arrived with bloody diarrhea. Very blood diarrhea. At 7am. I gave him a dose of fluids and penicillin G. Everything seemed fine when I fed again at 10 so I wasn’t too worried. At 11, I heard noise from their cage and I found the smallest kitten in distress.
The kitten was listless and gasping. This was shocking because he had been fine an hour earlier. He ate and had no diarrhea. I immediately gave him dextrose, but he died very rapidly (in less than 5 minutes).
Kittens can die suddenly without showing any signs of illness. This isn’t fading kitten syndrome, but more like SIDS in humans.
But in this case, the bloody diarrhea plus sudden death of a kitten means that we had to immediately consider panleukopenia.
Many people seem to think panleukopenia immediately when they see bloody diarrhea. However, I have learned to look for a rapid decline, fever or severe diarrhea as an indication of panleukopenia. I never consider diarrhea alone enough. In this case, I took the body of the kitten and a bloody stool sample from the other kitten to the shelter for testing.
The test was negative. But that doesn’t mean it is not paneuk. The tests are not 100%. So, I decided to wait a couple hours before doing anything more because, to be blunt, I felt that if it was panleuk, the kitten with bloody diarrhea would be in worse condition. He was still active and the diarrhea wasn’t severe. I wanted to give the Pen G time to work.
And by the end of the day, the kitten’s diarrhea had resolved and the other kittens were fine. It was not panelukopenia.
RIP Little One
As the death of Little One, I won’t know exactly what caused it. Something in him was not right. It’s always hard to lose a kitten, but in this case I don’t know of any way it could have been prevented. As anyone who has studied biology knows, animals that have litters of multiples do so because they don’t expect all of them to survive.