Loving Raven: behind the scenes at CatzRus. A foster family's story

Written by one of our awesome foster dads. We honour all our volunteers who pour out their love on our most vulnerable kittens. And we honour our kittens - the reason why we do what we do!

I still remember the first night in May 2025.

Four tiny lives, fitting into the palm of my hand, arrived far too early into a world that had already been unkind to them. They were only babies—eyes barely open, bodies fragile, and all four suffering from badly infected eyes. They didn’t cry loudly. They didn’t have the strength to. They just clung to warmth and hoped someone would help.

That someone became us.

From that night on, sleep was no longer measured in hours, but in alarms. Every four hours—through the evenings, through the nights—we woke up to bottle-feed them. Warm milk, gentle hands, whispered encouragement. You don’t realise how quiet the world is at 2 a.m. until you’re sitting on the floor with kittens who depend entirely on you to survive until morning.

One of them was Raven.

She was the smallest. Just 190 grams. So light it felt like she might disappear if you didn’t hold her carefully enough. Raven had a severe case of feline eyelid agenesis—her eyelids never developed properly. Her eyes were always exposed, always at risk. Every single day, we applied lotion to keep them from drying out, from ulcerating, from causing her pain. She never complained. She just trusted.

Not all of them made it.

One of her brothers passed away due to birth defects. There’s no way to prepare yourself for that moment. No training, no experience, no amount of fostering makes loss easier. You question everything. Did I miss something? Could I have done more? The house feels heavier after that. Quieter. One less heartbeat where there should have been four.

The remaining two siblings survived, but the early infection left its mark. Both were cross-eyed, their vision altered by damage and underdevelopment. They grew slowly, awkwardly, but they grew. And somehow, between feeds, treatments, cleaning eyes, weighing grams, and worrying endlessly—time slipped by.

One day I looked up, and they were no longer babies.

They were ready for adoption.

Their siblings were adopted almost instantly. People smiled at them, held them, chose them. And then there was Raven. Sweet, gentle Raven, always last. People noticed her eyes. They hesitated. They moved on.

She stayed.

In January, I took Raven for her first treatment—burning away some of the hair follicles around her eyes to reduce constant irritation. It wasn’t cosmetic. It wasn’t optional. It was necessary for her comfort, for her quality of life. She was brave, as she always had been.

This is what being part of CatsRus is about.

It’s not just cute photos and happy adoption days. It’s exhaustion. It’s grief. It’s loving something with your whole heart while knowing you might lose it. It’s waking up every four hours when no one is watching. It’s caring for the ones no one else chooses.

It’s Raven.

And countless others like her, who only get a chance because someone decided they were worth it—even when it was hard, even when it hurt. Loving Raven - Wikus