It started out as fairly normal Thursday morning in December. I got up at our usual time around 4:30 a.m. and went to the living room to check the fire in the wood stove and turn on the XM radio for our morning classical music. That morning I did not bother to turn on the lights as I normally would as I did not need to add firewood to the stove.
Our new 12-week old kitten Nina had been up for about 30 minutes and we had been playing fetch the mouse, and other kitten games earlier. She was rambunctious and full of energy, running around the house at top speed.
In the dark, I opened the smoked glass stereo stand door, in preparation of turning on the radio. You guessed it….Wham! Nina hit that door face first at full speed. The force of the impact stopped her completely. She appeared to sit down briefly and then she staggered a few feet away. Roxie the wonder dog, her best friend, was immediately on the scene to administer first aid and love.
I examined Nina (who was very quiet at this point) carefully for bleeding, swelling, breathing troubles and broken teeth. She appeared not to have any of these. I gave her a dose of arnica and put some arnica in her water, and we went on with our day. That morning I called our vet Dr. Abby Moos, and she assured me that there was really nothing that could be done for Nina at this point.
That night Nina appeared fine but in my opinion she as really slowed down and to calm. I did a little ear work on her as that was about all she could handle. We continued to monitor her carefully for the next few days.
On Saturday I noticed that Nina had facial swelling. By noon, she was starting to look like a Neanderthal Puma.. So we told her to load up into the crate and we went to emergency vet for a thorough exam and a Dexamethazone shot to help with the swelling.
Saturday night Nina was extremely quiet and wanted to be on Scot or my lap. At this point I decided to try some Ttouch Raccoon circle on her tiny face, but my fingers were too large. So I tried using a q-tip to do the circles. This worked somewhat but the q-tip was slippery when it was dry. So I wetted the q-tip and proceeded to do tiny circles all over her little face from the base of her ears to the bottom of her lips. She could handle this for only a few minutes at a time and then she would leave.
When she returned to my lap, I would start again. She really appeared to enjoy the ear work much more than the circles to begin with. I let her decide when she wanted the ttouch and I let her decide when she was done. We also tried some acupressure for head trauma and this lasted under a minute.
As she started to improve it was much more challenging to use the q-tip as it became a toy to try and grab to chew on or bat. The last couple of days, I ended up only doing about 45 seconds of ear work on her at a time.
The swelling continued to diminish over the next four days and the following Thursday she looked and acted normal, and received a clean bill of health from her regular vet.