Cat Care - Giving Eye Drops and Eye Ointments

Hi, I am Dr. Candy Olson from Greenbriar Animal Hospital. Were shooting a video on tips on how to take care of your cat at home. This particular section is on how to do eye medication and clean your cats eyes. This is Punkin, she is going to be helping us out here. One of the important things about doing eyedrops for your cat, and drops are a lot easier than anything else, so if you have a choice, you want to ask for drops rather than an ointment. One of the important things about it is you dont want to come at your cats from the front, thats kind of scary for them, instead come out from behind. What you want to do with this, and you have to be careful that you dont touch the tip of the bottle to anything, so what you want to do is actually rest the hand holding the bottle on her head. You can use your hand if you need too, to open the eye a little bit. You dont even have to get all that close, there are lots of drops in here. For cats, the less you hold them the better, so notice, Im not really trying to hold on to her or anything, but you can if you need to, and she is fussing just a little bit here, being very polite. But you can do is just gently hold her scruff, and do the same kind of thing here. Again, you want to come at her from behind, so she barely sees the bottle.

Eyedrops for cats are usually very soothing, and so they dont mind the actual medication. Its the whole idea of your putting weird stuff in my eye thats a little strange. If you need to clean your cats eye, the best kind of thing to use are these little disposable one use eyewash drops that they have for people. You just pull the tip off, you do the same kind of thing that you do with the drops, except this one is a whole bunch, so you squeeze the whole thing in, you can see, it just runs right down her face. Then you just want to take a plain dry tissue and just wipe across the eye. You dont ever want to rub on the eye just because you can injure the eye itself. Now, sometimes your veterinarian may prescribe an ointment. Ointment is trickier for the eye. First of all, its sticky and you have to get closer to the eye to apply it. I recommend if youre doing ointment and you havent done it before that you practice with it a couple of times. What youre going to want to do is squeeze out a little bit, thats about a little half inch piece, about like that, and then let it drop off. You can see theres some still coming out here, but it tends to stick. Same thing here though, what you want to do is come at her from behind. Theres always extra in the tube, you noticed she gets a little bit in her eye, and then Im just going to wait. Then it helps if you massage her face a little bit afterwards, because that spreads the ointment around. Also, if she shakes her head or flips at it little quick, the ointment is not going to go flying off. But, the ointment is a little trickier, it does help to have your tissue there so that you can set this down without touching the tip to anything, so you dont have to stop and put the cap on right away. The next thing were going to talk about is microchips for cats and why you should get one, and what they are?