This is my baby girl. Here's what happened to her about 5 weeks ago, pasted from my livejournal for the sake of convenience -
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She saw a baby bird in the neighbor's yard, floundering in their tall grass. Naturally, she assumes it to be a free lunch and who am I to stop her? Well, a few minutes before, I had head this noise, a clucking sound that I assumed to be a woodpecker. When I looked, it was instead a rather large squirrel perched up on a low branch of a tree in the same neighbor's yard. He looked like he was aggitated about something, but why would it have concerned me at all? So Blondie sneaks over and grabs this baby bird in her mouth. As soon as the squab starts screaching, down comes that squirrel from the tree and tears after my precious baby! He chased her in a circle and she came darting out from the yard. Immediately I saw her blinking her right eye, but she ran under the porch of our house and stayed there pretty much all day. When at last she came in the house, her eye was draining badly and she was blinking it or keeping it shut. She hid most of the night. The next day it really looked bad. It resembled a cataract across the surface, how they get that milky-blue color and it was still draining badly.
What the vet later did was take the "third eyelid" that is the pink, inside part of her eye -same as we have- and pull it up over her eyeball, and suture it into place at her eyebrow. This is so it can act like a band-aid over the cornea.
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Now the sutures are out, and she is for the most part acting just fine since mom is no longer capturing her for the salve treatment! The only thing is, when she looks up, say into the light and I can see into her eye, it looks.... sometimes like you know, fish-eye I guess, and sometimes it looks like glass. It doesn't reflect right I guess. The pupil of that eye looks a little smaller than her unaffected eye, or different somehow, and I noticed that it doesn't react the same way to sunlight. It doesn't get that narrow slit thing going on. Today, the stray that none of them like or trust was sitting in the kitchen doorway on the side of her damaged eye, and aside from really disliking him, she kept looking back at him to that side, and I wondered if it was because she couldn't see him and it kind of bothered her more.
As I've said, if she loses sight in one eye, it's definitely not the worst thing that could befall a cat and I'll of course still love her. I was wondering aside from the vet which I cannot afford at all, would there be some way to test whether she can see out of that eye, or is there some play/therapy method to strengthen her vision in that eye?
Thanks for all the advice, and hi by the way, I'm new here!!
I have 4 and 1/2 cats: 2 huge males, one is orange and cream, his name is Cinnamon but I call him The Tyrant, since he owns the yard. The other is named Gus, and he just knows he's handsome. He is a tiger with very distinctive patterning, like a bullseye on his side. My girls, one is the lovey pictured here and her name is Blondie for obvious reasons, and a younger tiger kitten that I saved named Gustina, since she looks almost indistinguishable from Gus.
The other is a stray who's adopted me, his name is Blackberry, since he's uh.. black. We're trying to find a home for him since none of my cats like him at all, particularly The Tyrant.
