Popeye, the cat who came from Lebanon a few months ago, has ruptured the cornea in his left eye. Not just a nice little treatable corneal ulcer, but a hole that goes right through the cornea and into the anterior chamber. The internal fluid in the eye, called the aqueous humor, was leaking out and forming a bubble on the surface of his eye. His eye was filled with goop, and once I wiped it away, I could see immediately what had happened.
So Alayne drove him to our vet clinic in Helena this morning, and took the photo above of Dr. Brenda Culver examining Popeye’s eyes with her slit lamp, an ophthalmic microscope. Vet tech Rick is holding Popeye for her. Brenda will have to remove his left eye as a result of the rupture. She’s concerned that she also sees further changes in his right eye, through which he still has a bit of vision left.
Here’s what his left eye looked like:
If you click on the photo for a larger image, you can clearly see the brown-ish bubble … the hole is to the left of the bubble, in the dark spot.
When I saw this, I was momentarily confused … because I thought I had seen it before. But where? I went back and looked at the earlier photos of Popeye that the Lebanese rescue group had sent us, and there it was … as a scrawny, tiny kitten, you can see a similar rupture in the same eye … in the same spot!
That rupture was what cost him vision in the left eye as a kitten. It’s odd that the same thing would happen several months later … and while we think the initial rupture when he was a baby was caused by a runaway virus of some sort, we don’t know for sure what caused the corneal blow-out this time. He hasn’t been sick, his eyes looked fine, and then all of a sudden, the cornea ruptures.
It may already have been very weakened by the earlier episode; a cat’s cornea is only about half-a-millimeter thick to begin with. Brenda wonders if Popeye didn’t run into something … he zooms around the cat house like a whirling dervish, and doesn’t always pay close attention to where he’s going!
So Brenda will do surgery tomorrow and remove that eye … and Popeye will be a much happier boy afterwards.
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We finally got the pathologist’s report on Wobbles’ necropsy, and he died from a sudden onset of acute pneumonia. He was prone to pneumonia — typically, aspiratory pneumonia from getting bits of food in his lungs, because of how he wobbled while he ate — and we battled many scary episodes … he would be fine in the evening and at death’s door the next morning. In just a matter of hours, pneumonia would consume him. But equally, he responded to treatment in just a few hours, too. Yet each subsequent case would be worse than the previous one; it would strike faster and the symptoms would be more severe. Somehow, the timing of this episode was such that we didn’t catch it before it was too late. And that haunts me.
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