Help I have 3x 11 day old kittens with diarrhea

Question
hello , Thank you for reading this. I am hand raising 3 orphaned kittens that are now 11 days old. I got them at 2 days old. When I found them their poo was orange-ish and the consistency of loose toothpaste. Since then it has turned yellow and wet. Super bad diarrhea. Mucus sometimes , but really squirty and wet. Occasionally one will have firm pale yellowish poo. Sometimes it looks like clotted milk , but yellow. So I took them to my vet 3 days ago [an emergency night visit to the tune of 200$] they ran a fecal and .....nothing. So I subd. the water I mix with their kmr powder with pediolite. Still it persisted. So yesterday I gathered their poo in some saran wrap and took it to be tested again. This time the vet said that there was a high load of bacteria present but no parasites as they are too young. She sent me home with instructions to give them .02  , yes .02 [like half of a half of one drop that I cant even see] of  metronidazole once every 24 hrs. She ground up 1 250mg. tab and mixed it with 10 cc's of water. So I started that last night and again at their feeding today. Still no improvement. One is even worse. All of them weigh around 8 ounces I can give you the exact wight if that will help. So , can anyone help?

Answer
Hi Alana.  The poor little ones!  Unfortunately, the metronidazole will take 48-72 hours of treatments before you begin seeing much improvement.  Something you might ask the vet about is a very small amount of sub-q fluids during this time, perhaps mixed with dextrose, to keep their blood sugar from plummeting.  When I was in a similar situation, my vet gave me a 30 ml feeding syringe and some 25 gauge needles to attach to the tip.  She showed me how to give the kittens each 10-15 mls of lactated ringer's solution under the skin and sent me home with a bag of the fluid.  Because the kittens were so tiny, they couldn't be given the solution in the traditional way with larger needles, allowing fluid to flow straight from the bag of solution.  If your vet feels the kittens are in danger of dehydration or hypoglycemia, this might be something to think about.

Also, since you're working with the vet, you can ask her about adding some live cultures to their formula to try to balance their gut.  It sounds as though the bad bacteria have gotten out of hand, and adding in some "good" bacteria, like lactobacillus acidophilus, may help knock the bad bacteria levels down.  This can be found in commercial probiotics like Probiocin or Benebac, available through your vet or online, or in plain yogurt.  This is fine to give to cats and kittens of weaning age, but I cannot stress this enough - I'm not sure if it's okay to give to newborns.   So it's definitely something you'll want to ask your vet about first.