The camera came up on the elevated enclosure first, on the layered plush bedding and the small shape folded into it, and rswfire apologized immediately for the waking. I'm sorry little one, go back to sleep. He said he only wanted to show everybody how cute she was, and then read her posture against the bedding and noted she was still in the kind of position that made him think she wasn't totally comfortable yet. The RV held all of it inside one frame — the nest, the caretaker, and Bailey moving through, nosing at the edges of the new arrangement. You got to let her rest.
He said he hadn't explained her situation yet, and warned that he might not get through it, that he'd been highly emotional taking her to the vet, that his internal state had been quite a mess. He described knowing before anything was said — reading it off the vet and the nurse, the way they moved. Then the account: the vet coming into the room already talking about worms, talking to the nurse and not to him, no greeting, no introduction, no name given. Hands on her belly. The expression that followed the hands. The gums pulled back and white. rswfire states he learned later from AI what white gums mean, that the parasites were taking the oxygen out of her body. And the sentence the vet kept returning to without ever saying the thing underneath it — do you understand me — which rswfire says he did not understand in the room, and only assembled afterward, back at the RV, into: he thinks she's going to die.
They gave her a deworming treatment. They would not give her a flea treatment because she was too fragile, so they sprayed her with something instead. He has seen one flea since. He drove back and treated Bailey immediately, bagged every piece of bedding she had used the night before for the laundromat, and started talking to AI, because that is what he does. What came back was a protocol he could execute: check her every couple of hours, expect her to sleep a great deal, let her sleep, and watch for the one thing that would mean everything — unresponsiveness. So he set alarms. He got up all night long. Each time, she woke, she was attentive, she took a little food when he offered it. The only line still open was water. He noted she was getting some from the wet food. He said he didn't know what to do about the rest.
The wet food was its own thread, running back a week. He had known about this kitten for a week and had been trying to bring her in with dry food, because Bailey only eats dry food — Bailey, abandoned by his mother at a day old, syringe-fed by rswfire himself, who he believes decided against wet food out of those earliest memories, and who is the reason rswfire understands the shape of this kind of connection at all. It hadn't occurred to him that a kitten might not know what dry food was. When he finally asked AI, the answer was tuna, wet food, anything like it. He drove straight to the nearest gas station, bought canned food, and she came to him. He named the week as a mistake and did not linger there. She's here now, and she's doing well.
Then the parts that could not be known yet: parasite load severe enough that something in her digestive system might require surgery down the line, growth that might be stunted. He said these aren't things we can know yet, that we shouldn't worry about them yet, one day at a time. Against that, he built what could be built. He leaves next week — another campground for two weeks, a different one for two weeks after that — so she will have multiple vets, and so he keeps a log of when she eats and when she uses the bathroom, and will collect the records at every site and carry them forward, and will hold the schedule for her shots and her surgery. He also has to kitten-proof the RV, because there are spaces a kitten can get into that a full-grown cat cannot — under the slide mechanism, the gaps Bailey's body has never been small enough to find.
Bailey, meanwhile, was recalibrating in the open. rswfire described him loving on him like crazy, more than usual, more than he had known was possible from this cat. Bailey sat on the bed and stared across at the enclosure — not angry, curious, and a little trepidatious, unwilling to walk past the kitten to reach his own litter box, a full-sized animal declining a passage guarded by something that small. rswfire found it funny. He found it cute.
The one thing he could not do was the thing he most wanted to. When Bailey got sick — a rare condition, arthritis-like, triggered by his first vaccination, and rswfire says he believes Bailey came close to dying — rswfire sat on the bed with him and gave him all the attention in the world, and he believes that is what got him through. With her, the fleas and the worms stand between them; both he and Bailey can be infected. So the attention continues and the closeness does not. He said it bothers him. He said he's doing the best he can. He said she needs the rest anyway, that she is far more frail than Bailey ever was, that the first time he petted her all he felt were bones. And then he closed it, not with a resolution but with a stated belief, twice, the way you say a thing to make it load-bearing: I know she'll be all right. I truly believe this. She's doing good. She's doing good.