We were walking through our town the other night and we saw this feral kitten sitting on a step near the center of town. We’ve seen her before and always wondered what her story was, as she was clearly different in some way from the other feral cats. We couldn’t quite figure out what was different though. When we ran across her again on Wednesday night we knew something was wrong because half her face was covered in dried blood. We decided we’d better try to catch her and see what was going on.

After several attempts we did manage to catch her and we brought her home, with the intention of bringing her to our vet the next day. We isolated her from our other animals and started cleaning her up. The blood came off easily and seemed to just be from some scratches on her head. She wouldn’t open her eyes though — and so we assumed she had some sort of eye infection as well. Once she figured out that we were trying to help her, she was very sweet and docile.

The next day I took her to the vet and explained what we had found. After thoroughly examining her, Dr. Hansen told me that it wasn’t an eye infection. This little kitten didn’t have any eyes at all — she was completely blind and always would be. She is either missing the eyeballs completely or they are so atrophied that it will never be usable. Despite that, she is basically healthy and seems to be around 10-12 weeks old. She has some parasites that we’re dealing with, but no other major health problems were detected, which is a blessing.

We’ve named this little one Helen, as in Helen Keller. We’re not sure if she will be a permanent resident with us or not. We need to see how she adapts to our house and our other animals. We may see about giving her to a family that has a single level house and maybe a few less animals….but we’ll see. In the meantime, we’ll give her lots of love while we get rid of her parasite problem and acclimate her to our home. I’m sure I’ll be taking lots of photos of her too.

Tags: kitten Helen cat