I just found a shivering little stray kitten on the inside of air conditioned building and thought it must be feeling cold so I took out in the sun and then ended up just bringing it home.
Its eyes are weird and seem to be covered up with something. Please take a look at the image below.
Is it blind, or infected? I don't have easy access to a vet's place for now! So any cat-expert opinions? If it's an infection, is there any way to help it cure at its own pace, using honey maybe? (The way that honey helps cure cough/cold-type infections with humans too).
What should I do with this kitten? And it's really dirty but I'm afraid to give it a bath because it was shivering back in the building and if it has a cold I don't want it to die of it.
Update
I wasn't able to get to any vet immediately so I tried to heal her at home. And then she started improving. It turned out it really was a lot of dirt and a bad infection. I carefully patted it with a wet cloth and gently rubbed it off. But her eyes kept forming strands of pus and kept filling up quickly with it.
I searched online and found the following to be very effective:
- Warm compress. Hold a warm washcloth against the eyes for 2-3 minutes.
- Honey-water saline solution. Mix a teaspoon of honey with a tablespoon of water. Then add a pinch of salt. Apparently if honey isn't available, milk can be used as a substitute, although not nearly as good. Anyway I used honey and the kitten's eyes got much better, she had longer periods of time without pus forming in her eyes. Then we found antibacterial eye drops and her eyes really cleaned up after that. Here's a close-up of her eyes after 5-6 days:
Sorry for the bad picture, it was clearer in real life but I'm not much good at taking photos.
So as you can see, she seemed fine! With her eyes alright, and her general physical health seeming to be improved (because she had started eating more and was taking calculated leaps around the house), I was planning to drop her back around the area where I found her, basically a few blocks down from my house.
But then tragedy struck... I don't know what went wrong. She didn't eat much one day, and when we checked on her the next morning, she was so exhausted and panting she couldn't hold her head up straight. We tried to get emergency contacts to the nearest vet. There was one, but office hours hadn't started yet. And she died before we could get there.
It was really sad. I don't know what went wrong. Someone in my family (not knowing that kittens are sensitive) put her in the shower for a couple of minutes the day before she died. But we dried her immediately after that and she seemed alright too, all fluffy and fine and sitting around with us.
Maybe she was already ill and suffering from something... Or can a kitten really die from a shower?