Over the weekend little Gul took a bit of a turn for the worse; he stopped latching on to mama Lucy and stopped nursing. Luckily I had already been supplementing him with formula and weighing him regularly or else I might not have caught his weight loss. He dropped below the weight he was when I first picked him up! Poor little guy has been hovering between 75g and 80g, which is severely underweight even for a newborn kitten. I also noticed that he was constipated and that mama Lucy had not been able to get him to have a bowel movement. I stimulated him with a warm wet paper towl and after about 15 minutes of trying to get him to go to the bathroom, he finally strained out a tiny white piece of feces. He was also bleeding from his poor little bottom. I called the clinic and we rushed him in to see the vet. They decided that he was going to need tube feeding, and gave him an enema to try and ease his constipation. Little Gul will be staying with another foster who is more experienced with tube feeding until he stabilizes enough to try and come back with mama Lucy.
Lucy is pretty upset that one of her babies is missing (even an adopted baby) and has started trying to move the rest of the kittens to new hiding places (e.g. the corner of my closet.)
The rest of the babies are quite fat and healthy, including Gul's little sister Gaile. Lucy's babies are a week old today and are all close to 200g already! Baby Figg is the biggest, at 210g!!
In order to try and calm mama down I'll be weighing the rest of the babies less frequently and checking on them only a few times a day; mama needs her safety and privacy with the rest of her babies in order to help relieve her stress.
My foster mentor has said that she'll keep me up to date on how little Gul is doing, and we're all hoping for the best!
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