When I found her, Olivia had little life left in her and I decided to see if I could change that and give her a life.
A Tiny, Broken Kitty on the Street
I found Olivia by the curb in a puddle with little life left in her.
A few weeks old only, Olivia must have been alone for some time without food or shelter. Starvation and hypothermia had weakened her to a degree that sitting in a puddle, all she was able to do was to lift her head out of the water for a few seconds before it dropped down again.
As we were cleaning her up, we found that she had suffered severe head trauma with a broken or dislocated jaw and massively bruised head, swollen eye sockets and facial features. That she was still alive was surprising – the flies had already laid eggs on her, marking her for a carcass to feed the maggots already squirming on her.
After a few days of hourly syringe-feeding with high-calorie recovery food, all whilst being carried around in a sarong around our necks to keep her warm, she was slowly getting strong enough to move again. First twitches turned into crawling in a tight circle, a sign that something wasn’t right. We put our hopes into a first guess that the head trauma had caused a swelling of the brain, which in turn caused the motor malfunction. This might be relieved with time, as the swelling went down – all assuming she would survive long enough.
Epilepsy
After a few days, we found that the seizures had lessened in intensity, but did persist. With increasing moments of clarity. The trauma had apparently caused some form of epilepsy; and so began the years of Olivia’s drug regime.
A schedule of drugs to be applied four times a day – at 07:00, 15:00, 19:00 and 23:00 – has been established to see if her seizures can be reduced from 2-4 a day down to around 1 per year, at which point the dosage can probably be reduced in the hope of leaving the seizures behind.
Olivia’s regular medication adding a tightly regimented structure to our days hasn’t made things easier. And she has enriched our lives.
A Life
Olivia has been with us since 2014, over two years at the time of this update. After various changes, we have increased her drug dosage once and seizures are now down, closer to our original target at about a seizure per month, with no major seizures recorded in weeks. Things are looking good.
Oli not only has enriched our lives, but she has a life of her own.
Support Oli’s Medication
In order to help us support Olivia’s medication, which comes at just over 3000 THB per month, we have revived the Character Captures project to help others have good pictures of their pets, see more on this here and on facebook.
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