Blinkin (Domestic Shorthair)

Blinkin; named for the "family's loyal blind servant" from Robin Hood, Men in Tights. She is a Domestic short-haired kitten and is +/-12 weeks old. On May 30, 2010, she found us. She likes to do regular kitten things like pouncing and biting toes and feet; ambushing our adult cats (whether they want to play or not); finding invisible/imaginary objects on the floor and chasing them around; cuddling and purring.

The night she found us, my husband and I were about to go to bed when we stepped outside to check on something. We could hear a kitten crying but assumed it was coming from our next-door neighbor's yard, until we saw a tiny creature walking around our deck. I encouraged my husband to pick her up and play with her. He picked her up and dashed into the kitchen with her, urging me to follow. The poor baby had such bad eye infections, and the pus was so bad, that she was blind.

I called the emergency vet office, and they advised me to clean out her eyes with a sterile saline solution. Right before I squirted her eyes, I warned my husband that she looked so bad that she may not have eyes on the other side of the pus. Luckily, she did have eyes and got her sight back after the saline flush. We got her on some antibiotics and only had to flush out her eyes one other time, the following night.

She lived the first month with us on our back porch in a large dog kennel with her own litter box and food as we didn't want her to spread the infection to our other two adult cats. The vet told us she was less than a month old and surely would have died without our intervention. I love Blinkin, even though she is a little terrorist.

By JSRP