This is a little kitten I just rescued in Iowa, and you can see that she's got a pretty bad eye infection. So today, I'm going to show you how I'm going to treat her for her eye infection Even though I'm in a hotel room right now, I can still treat her for her infection. The first thing that I'm going to do is get a warm compress going with some nice warm water on a washcloth to help break up the mucus on her face, gently wash it away, and get her nice and clean. So with some warm water, I'm just going to gently hold it against her eye. Make sure you're really careful not to hold it against their nose or their mouth. You need to make sure they can breathe while you're doing this. But if their eyes are really crusty like hers is, you may have to hold the compress down for a number of seconds. And now I'm just going to gently wipe the crust away. Now in her case, she has one eye that looks a lot worse than the other eye, but I'm still going to treat both eyes. Once the crustiness is saturated, you can start to gently rub it off. Just be careful because they're probably pretty sore. You can see all that crust is going away and now we can get a look at what her eye looks like. I know, baby. There are lots of different ophthalmic antibiotics that you can use for eyes. What I'm going to use right now is Terramycin. Terramycin is an antibiotic that goes right into the eye. This can help give them a lot of relief and help them heal pretty quickly. So with both eyes. I'm going to open the eye. If you have Q-tips I recommend putting it on a Q-tip and putting it in the eye that way. Because I'm in a hotel room and I don't have Q-tips, I'm just going to administer it straight into her eyes. And you might want to help them blink their eye. Make sure that you're repeating this treatment as frequently as you can. You can't overdose a kitten on ophthalmic antibiotics, so make sure that there's always an antibiotic in the eye, and hopefully within a couple days, you'll see recovery. If the kitten has severe inflammation, if you can see the conjunctiva, or if the eye looks like it might be permanently damaged, you of course want to take that more seriously and talk to a vet. You also want to make sure that if the kitten has other respiratory concerns, such as a snotty nose or sneezing, you're also getting them on an oral antibiotic as quickly as possible Hopefully pretty soon, they'll be feeling all better.
