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I don't want to be a cynic. It is a protective mechanism, a recoil/reflex learned through pain and disappointment. It is self-propagating if left to its own devices. It only begets more of what it cannot live with or without.

I want to believe that anything is possible if you allow for it. I snatched two kittens from death this summer--one in a coma from uremic poisoning, the other whose heart stopped on one occasion and who spent the entire night of July 4, dying. I refused to allow it. She had survived so much in her tiny life. Dying was out of the question. If these things had happened in a hospital, one could shrug it off and say "fine. so?"

So...they happened in my apartment. I have at best a rudimentary treatment area set up when the feline nursery is going at full swing with neonates aplenty. I have a daughter with no formal veterinary training, just what I have taught her. Ditto for my son. Hell, for that matter, I learned what I know "on the job". The hospital was my classroom. My point is, I had no real diagnostic equipment save for my Littmann pediatric stethoscope (thank you so much Sean, the best Christmas present you could have given me--many little hearts have played their music for me through those earpieces)....

But I think the strongest tool in my arsenal of surrogate mothering/nursing/medicine woman tricks is my intuitiveness. I will not dismiss my understanding of anatomy and physiology and how to triage and stabilize a critically ill animal. But I cannot ignore that "sense" I get when something needs my help, because it desperately wants to live. (Does this mean I have never lost a little sick one? Of course not. I didn't say I was a goddess.)

The sun was coming up on the morning of July 5 when Blackberry seemingly arose from the ashes and blatantly emerged from her coma and graced me by nursing again. I had pulled out all the stops that night, so I won't say it was without assistance. I was almost delirious with fatigue. But between the rays of sun breaking through the kitchen window and little Blackberry humbling me by turning that miraculous corner, I found myself weeping. Amanda was too. It was the closest thing to magic I have ever been a part of.