You don't always get a happy ending.

Miss Vera had another health crash Saturday morning. Despite half an hour in a steamy bathroom, her lungs just wouldn't open up. She couldn't eat from a plate anymore. I switched to a syringe, filling it with canned cat food that had been diluted with water and filtered through a sieve, squirting tiny bits on to her tongue.

That afternoon we got a call from the woman who runs the shelter from which Miss Vera came, telling us that one of the cats in Miss Vera's house had also had trouble kicking a respiratory infection. When they took her to the vet for blood tests it turned out she had feline leukemia on top of the respiratory virus. It's extremely contagious and it's fatal, so the cat had to be put down for the sake of the others in the shelter.

She asked that we bring Miss Vera back, since the shelter's policy is that they don't give people sick cats and she's also aware that I have two other cats here. Zubby and Enid have been vaccinated against the feline respiratory viruses and feline leukemia, which is sometimes called cat AIDS, but even vaccinated, some cats still get the respiratory viruses. I couldn't bear to lose them, too.

The spousal unit took Miss Vera back by himself on Sunday because I knew that I would completely fall to pieces at the shelter. When he left, I stripped every surface upstairs of washable fabric and pitched it all in the washer. Everything else got washed down with a bleach water solution, including the floors. Our vet said feline respiratory virus can live for five days on a surface, so we decided not to let Zub and Enid upstairs for a week.

Before he left, the spousal unit agreed that we would not take another cat from the shelter because we don't know what's floating around in there right now, let alone what might be in our own home. We agreed to put adoption off until the summer.

So he brought a kitten home. A five-month-old kitten that hadn't had any shots. And I know why he did this�because I'd been getting ever sadder for the last two weeks and kittens are just about the most fun thing on the planet.

And I know why the woman at the shelter did it. She saw the weight I had coaxed back on to Miss Vera's skeletal frame and she was hoping I'd do the same for this kitten.

The kitten, which was way, way too thin, showed minimal interest in food her first night home. I knew something was very, very wrong. I took her to our vet Monday and the vet said she was running a very high fever, her lymph nodes were enlarged. She assured me that we hadn't given anything to the kitten, she'd probably been incubating her illness at the shelter.

More antibiotics.

I waited until I got out into the vet's parking lot to have my little cry. The kitten stopped eating Tuesday morning and I started feeding her by syringe every few hours. Tuesday night she started vomitting everything I fed her, no matter how tiny the amount. This morning when I picked her up and tried to feed her, her swallow reflex had failed.

The spousal unit took her back to the shelter today. At the shelter they told him Miss Vera's blood test shows she has feline leukemia on top of a respiratory virus. She'll be put down for the sake of the other cats in the shelter. I suspect this kitten does, too, but I don't think she'll live long enough to be tested.

I spent this morning again disinfecting every surface upstairs in the hope that I can contain this plague. I was okay until I came to the corner where we had set up the kitten's food. Seeing the box of kitten chow with the impossibly cute little kitten on the front was just too much.

It's easy to get lost in my own sadness, to cynically say that no good deed goes unpunished.

But the thing is, Abigail, the cat my mom-in-law adopted from the same shelter, is in wonderful health. She and her doggy buddy Shadow play a gleeful sort of tag together, chasing each other around in the house. The dog likes to hook her nose under the cat's tummy and toss her a few feet, a game the cat loves. They're inseparable. For these two abandoned pets, it's a happy ending.

Man, but I wish it had been that way here.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 150 miles. Duckage. My joy knows no bounds.