Feeding & Nutrition

The call came at half past one. A litter of four had been found in a storm drain, the mother nowhere, and by the time the rescue texted me two were already gone. The other two were barely the size of my thumb, eyes shut, mewling in a way that sounds more like a creaky hinge than a creature.

I'd fostered before, but never this young, and the packet of milk replacer I'd kept "just in case" for two years was suddenly the only thing between those two and morning. I boiled the kettle, let it drop to warm, mixed the powder with a fork the way the back of the box said, and the smell of it, sweet and faintly chalky, filled the kitchen at a hour when nothing should smell of anything.

The bottle they'd sent was too fast for them. Milk bubbled out the side of their mouths and one started to go limp, the way newborns do when they inhale instead of swallow, and I panicked in the quiet way you panic when there's no one to call. So I fished a syringe from the first-aid drawer, the kind for giving cats tablets, and dripped it slow onto the tip of a tongue, and her little jaw found the rhythm like she'd been waiting for it.

That was the shape of the next three weeks. Every two hours, through the night, the kettle, the fork, the syringe, the weighing on the kitchen scale to make sure she wasn't losing grams she couldn't spare. People think kittens are soft and sleepy. At this age they are work with fur, and the fur is the only soft part.

The vet had warned me about the milk itself. Cow's milk is wrong for them, too much lactose, and the cheap stuff from the corner shop will give a tiny gut the runs it can't afford, so the replacer powder, ugly as it is, is the only honest option, and I learned to mix it exactly, no more, no less, because a too-thick feed sits like cement and a too-thin one starves them slowly.

One of the two didn't make it. I won't pretend the syringe fixed everything; some arrive too far gone and the warm kitchen and the careful drops aren't enough, and you sit with that, at three in the morning, holding something that's stopped being heavy. The survivor, the one I'd named after the drain she came from, grew into it. By week two her eyes opened, two blue slits, and by week three she was climbing my sleeve to demand the next meal herself.

What stayed with me was the syringe. A stupid bit of plastic, the kind you'd bin without a thought, and it was the difference between a creature and a memory. I kept it on the windowsill long after she moved to a bottle, then to mush, then to real food, as a small reminder that the unglamorous tools are usually the ones that matter.

She went to a home with a garden in spring. I packed the half-used packet of powder back into the cupboard, "just in case" again, and this time I knew what the case looked like, and what the kettle at 2am could buy you, which is sometimes everything and sometimes only a little, and both are worth the waking.

The second survivor taught me the syringe trick properly. Her sister had taken to the bottle by week three, but this one never trusted the rubber teat, and the syringe stayed her only route to a full belly, so I learned to angle it along the tongue rather than at the throat, to let her suck the drop rather than have it pushed, a small technique that turned feeding from a fight into a partnership she leaned into.

Weaning was its own education. At four weeks the replacer alone stopped being enough, and I mashed a little wet food into the warm mix until it was a slurry she could lap, then thickened it week by week, and watching a creature learn the mechanics of eating, the lap, the chew, the pause, was a quieter miracle than any of the 2am heroics, because by then she was just a kitten, not a verdict.

People ask if it was worth the broken nights. I show them the photo from week six, a fat grey blob asleep on my shoulder with her claws in my jumper, and the question answers itself, though I'd say the same even if she'd been the difficult one, because the kettle at 2am buys a specific kind of life you can't get any other way, and the syringe, that stupid plastic thing, was only ever the means.