A story from another foster mom.

One of the most rewarding fostering experiences I've had happened two or three years
ago.  I'd agreed to take a mother and her litter of week-old kittens, but at the last
minute Abbey Cats asked if I could take a 4-5 month old kitten with a broken leg to
the vet (I live near the vet we use).  Of course I agreed.
 
When the volunteer driver arrived with my rescues, it was obvious that the kitten was
much younger than we'd been told; in fact, the vet put her at 5-6 weeks!  She had been
tossed out of a moving car and left to die. Someone had taken her to a shelter where, of
course, she ended up on death row.  The vet found a break on one of her front legs, and
said that it had been twisted or wrenched.  She was too small to survive any anaesthetic for
treatment, so he told me to keep her as still as I could until it healed by herself.
 
Try keeping a 6-week-old kitten still!  Galicia tried desperately to hop around on her three
good legs whenever she saw something moving (and there were other kittens in the house,
so there was always something moving)!  We kept an eye on her to keep her movement
to a minimum, and put her in our largest carrier with food, water, and a litter plate when
we weren't home.
 
After a couple of weeks, as her leg started to heal and the pain and stress eased, her own
lovely, affectionate character started to appear.  She was a beautiful calico with the whitest
undercarriage and the sweetest face!  Before long, she was playing with kitten toys and
scampering around happily.  There was one more mishap, though.  Our house is under
renovation, and there was a hole in a landing of the stairs.  Other kittens managed to
climb into the hole and swing around so that they could crawl below the stair treads, and
Galicia couldn't resist following.
 
One night we heard frantic mews coming from somewhere
in the staircase, but couldn't locate the source.  After checking everywhere obvious, we
thought about the structure of the beams and suddenly realized that she
must have missed her footing with her weakened leg and had tumbled down between
the joists inside the staircase wall!  My husband measured some distances, and then
carefully broke a small hole in the wall beside the basement stairs, and a relieved and
grateful Galicia scrambled out into his arms; she had fallen two metres inside the wall!
 
My part of Galicia's story ended very happily not long after this. A lovely young couple
decided to make her and another foster kitten a part of their family, and they adopted
the pair. Although I found it very hard to put her in their carrier, I knew that she was
going off to a life full of love, and felt grateful that I'd been allowed to give her a second
chance for that life.