Complete Care for Your Aging Cat - Amy Shojai [76]
A blind cat is still a very happy cat. She can enjoy and remain engaged in life and the world around her. “People are told by a neighbor that when they’re blind, you have to put them to sleep,” says Dr. Gerding. is further from the truth.
Comfort Zone
Sound is much more important to blind cats. Try attaching a bell to the collar of other pets in the home, so the blind cat can more easily find them. It may also be helpful for you to wear a bell, or speak to announce your presence to avoid startling the cat.
Offer toys that have a sound, such as balls with bells inside, a noisy paper sack, or scrunch up wads of paper she can hear and “dribble” across the room.
Golden Moments: Blind Stubbornness
Rudy is a 10-year-old fawn Abyssinian, but she doesn’t act the least bit old. “Abys are kittens forever!” says Linda Weber, and shares a picture of Rudy as a baby. The children’s book author from Reno, Nevada shares her home with seven cats, aged 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 17, and 19, but Rudy rules the roost—even though she is mostly blind. “She still runs through the house at 90 miles an hour,” says Linda.
Rudy began having problems with her eyes at age 4, as a result of an earlier upper respiratory infection. “We had to fight to keep her alive. She didn’t seem to have any immunity to herpes,” says Linda. The illness started with congested lungs and stuffy nose, and got progressively worse. “We thought we were going to lose her then, because she couldn’t eat or drink.”
Rudy managed to fight her way back from this near-death experience. But then the infection got into her eyes. “She was healthy except for her eyes, and these things kept growing and growing through the corneas.” In many such cases, owners finally decide to put the cat to sleep. “That wasn’t an option with her because she was just fighting too hard to survive,” says Linda. “That seems to be a quality in fawn Abyssinians. They seem to be extra stubborn.”
The infection caused chronic inflammation of the cornea, which resulted in a corneal sequestrum—a growth of dead tissue on the cornea. This dark plaque interferes with the cat’s ability to see, and treatment involves removing the bad spot and patching with tissue. “She ended up having three surgeries on her left eye and two on her right eye to remove them,” says Linda.
Each time the surgeon would remove the sequestrum from each cornea, and pull up the inner eyelids and stitch them shut to give the corneas a chance to heal. “Rudy would be completely blind for a week,” says Linda. “We’d put her in the funnel collar, and she’d use that as a white cane, stomp around the house and run into furniture with it to figure out where the furniture was. She’d walk along the back of the couch, scraping it against the wall, but I think she was doing that just to annoy us.” At the end of the week the stitches were removed, the eyelids opened and she could see again.
But two years later, after she’d had two surgeries on the left eye and one on the right, Rudy’s left eye was so thin that it ruptured. “Fortunately, it coagulated right away and didn’t completely drain, but it was scary,” says Linda. “We lived in Fresno at the time, and the ophthalmologist was two hours away in Stockton.” The surgery to fix the damage left her blind. The left eye had too little remaining cornea, and that eye developed cataracts. “The right eye has a skin patch across the middle of it,” says Linda.
The last surgery didn’t seem to bother Rudy any more than the previous ones, until the stitches were cut. “She