On Thursday night, I found myself in an emergency room exam room at 2 am, waiting anxiously and staring up at a picture of a baby cocker spaniel posing cutely in a watering can.

No, don't worry. Charlie is fine. I'm fine too. Whole family is fine. This was an emergency room for pets. But wait, I don't even own a pet.  I'm not even a pet person. I had to get up for work in a few hours. What was I doing?

While putting the lawnmower away earlier that night, I discovered four newborn kittens squirming around and wrestling with each other in the darkness under the front porch. I nearly ran them over before I heard the little cries. At first, I couldn't tell what they were. It was dark. They were intertwined in an orgy of grey and black fur. I first thought I counted six. Then five. Just a week earlier, I found a big, sleeping possum curled up in the bottom of my garbage can when I went to take it to the curb. Were they possum babies? Skunks? Alligators? I ran for Susanne, telling her, as I do so often, "we have a situation!"

With the help of neighbors, we determined they were in fact very, very tiny kittens.  When I got the "all clear," I emerged from the bushes where I was hiding in fetal position.

We decided it was best to leave them alone, hoping that the mother would return to them soon. I checked back every hour or so, but there was no sign of the mother. Midnight rolled around and I couldn't go to sleep. I went back outside with the flashlight. Still no sign of the mother. Just the squirming pile of fuzz. Dammit! Could they survive the night if the mother never came back? I doubted it.  Dammit!

Not knowing who to call at such a late hour, I called a Petco in San Diego (I'm in PA) to get some guidance.  The Petco woman assured me they wouldn't last the night if left alone.  Dammit! Dammit!

"You will have to use an eye dropper or buy syringes at the pharmacy to feed them kitten formula," she said." Just remember to remove the needle part."

"Yeah. I have syringes."

And that's what brought me and a box full of newborn kittens (still attached to the placenta) to the animal ER in the middle of the night.  I got home at 3 am.

By 6:30 am the next morning they already had names - Skywalker, Night, Georgie and Bug (the runt of the litter). And the passageway to my lungs began to close due to my severe cat allergy.

We all fell madly in love with the babies.

We bottle-fed them every two to three hours and had to stroke their little kitty junk with a warm, moist gauze pad to relieve their bladders for them. This was sort of exhausting at midnight, then 2 am, then 5 am.

Some of the dialogue over the weekend went like this:

"Carey, can you warm the bottle and then check Charlie's sugar? I'll start getting the kitties to pee."

Or

"No! I can't get you juice right now, Charlie. I'm feeding the babies."

Susanne's motherly instinct kicked in bigtime.

There's not a whole lot of diabetes relevance to this story, but somehow it always finds its way into the conversation.

We dealt with some hardcore cat people when trying to find a good home for the kitties. We learned right away that there wasn't going to be a pat on the back from these people. We weren't going to receive a 'caught being good' certificate like my kids do at school. They couldn't comprehend why we wouldn't raise the cats and keep them as our own. There was no possible excuse.

"My husband is really allergic," Susanne told one woman.

"Yeah, so is my husband. He takes medication."

Susanne then played the diabetes card.

"We sort of have our hands full already," Susanne continued. "We have three young children and our son has diabetes."

"Oh, so you can understand what it's like to have special needs."

Our efforts seemed futile.

But, in the end, the cat lady made some calls and arranged for a surrogate mother of sorts to take the kittens in. It also turns out the cat lady was doing something pretty remarkable. She cared for many, many abandoned kittens, purchasing formula and medicine out of her own pocket, nursing them back to health and then finding good homes for them.

We dropped off the box of kittens on Sunday afternoon.

And everyone cried.