I am just posting this so the posting beneath doesn't appear as the 'new' one but, as long as I am here I will inform you that we seem to be having the biggest snow storm of this season and, to put the icing on the cake of problems, I just 'stole' four kittens from a feral mother and there are three more in my basement from another mother -but those are too young to be 'stolen' yet as they are about two weeks old only and I only take the ones that are four weeks old so they can have an entire month of mother's milk [I still give them formula but, even though I buy the good one -no soy, colostrum. etc- it's never the same as their own mother's milk]. The four I stole are orange tabbies, two classic and two mackerels, and the two mackerels have eye infections but one is very mild [only one eye which, although infected, it's still open] while the other one might lose one of his eyes and is very sick with the 'cold' that they get from a bad herpes infection. The poor thing is so congested, it can't even suckle properly, I found him wandering about with both eyes closed shut from swelling and gunk, very labored breathing [hugely congested] and severely dehydrated [at least, 20 percent!] so I cleaned his eyes with chamomille tea and put ophthalmic antibiotic ointment in his eyes [I had to force them open and one eye is still there but the other one doesn't look good at all as it seems the third eyelid has grown over it], gave him subq fluiuds as well as two different kinds of antibiotics, lysine [it helps them get rid of the herpes naturally] and I have been forcing formula down his throat a little bit at a time every two hours [which made me into a cantankerous zombie from the lack of sleep so my husband is staying away from me as much as he can this morning
]. Thankfully, I always have medical supplies and formula at hand for situations like this one and a bit of experience handling things like this because I can't even take them to the vet as everywhere it's closed due to the snow storm - and I know because I started calling at 9 am and called three different places with no success! The other three are a black and white one, a black tuxedo and an all black one - I check on them twice a day to make sure they are doing OK.