Rehab:The Good -The Bad - The Ugly

The caller was a volunteer at a humane society in a nearby county. She is dedicated and has loving heart for  the animals and is willing to drive over forty minutes to get the wildlife out of her animal shelter and to me. With so many puppies, kittens and abandoned pets in animal shelters they are not set up to care for high needs of orphaned baby animals. They simply don’t have the staff , volunteers, or supplies they need to handle everything. So when she said she had an infant squirrel that had been in the animal shelter for days, I instantly had a flashback to the horrid conditions many of them have arrived in when held there. 

When she arrived, my expectations were correct. In the box I found a  baby squirrel too young to eat on her own. Her fur in milk and dried banana that they had placed in her box. Her eyes were small slits from dehydration and her body was chilled. I knew she was in the fight for her very life. 

Her new box was warm from the heating pad I had placed under it while waiting for her to arrive. 

I had to get her body temperature to normalize  before I began hydration. But she just would not warm up. So I took a tube sock and filled it with rice, microwaved it until warm and snuggled her little body around the sock. Minutes later, she was warming up. A few more minutes with her belly on top of the warm sock we were ready to start the slow reversing the dehydration with Pedialyte. 

I wrapped her in the warm sock to retain her body heat and drop by drop got 3cc of fluid down her. I repeated this all afternoon until I went to bed that night. Her eyes seem brighter, she loved to drink the pedialyte. She clutched the syringe with her little paws when I took it away from her to refill it. I gave her as much as she wanted until she feel asleep and would take no more. 

I found her in the early morning far from her warm sock on the corner of her tub barely breathing. I took the sock to the microwave to warm it but when I got back she was dead. 

Despite all these years of doing rehab I don’t get used to it. It hurts.