Distichia (distichiasis)
Lizzie always squinted and her eyes were watery. An otherwise docile cat who let us handle her pretty much as we pleased, she would recoil if we got too near her eyes.
Fortunately our vet at the time, Dr. Nancy Curran, took our concerns seriously and looked hard for the problem. She thought she saw extremely fine hairs on the underside of Lizzie’s eyelids. That was odd, she said, because while she saw that fairly often in certain breeds of dogs, she had never seen it in a cat. She suggested we take Lizzie to see a veterinary opthamologist, Dr. Susan Kirschner.
Dr. Kirschner took one look and said those were indeed hairs. She gave me the name of the condition: distichia. She concurred that she rarely sees the condition in cats. First, she manually plucked the hairs from the eyelids as I held Lizzie.
Now understand that I have delivered subcutaneous fluids, nursed a cat who had a stroke, dosed cats with pills, syringes, eye droppers, and been with my cats for any number of unpleasant medical procedures over the years. Never before had my knees buckled like they did there in Dr. Kirschner’s office.
The procedure is so delicate, with sharp tweezers poised against the eye lids of a squirming cat, that I would suggest you have an opthamologist perform if at all possible. In addition, hairs are virtually invisible to the naked eye. You need a microscope to see them. I doubt anyone who doesn’t do this every day could balance a microscope in one hand and grab those tiny pesky hairs with a pair of tweezers as deftly as Dr. Kirschner did.
Eventually, I agreed to have Lizzie sedated so that the doctor could remove the hairs permanently. This can be done in several ways, including cryotherapy.
It’s been more than a year since we did that, an Lizzie now peers up at us with big, bright, wide-open little eyes. No more squinting, no more watering, no more pain.
Don’t be too critical of your vet if she can’t diagnose the problem. In my research, I’ve found several medical sources for vets that talk at length about distichia in dogs but either ignore or downplay the problem in cats. One such article, after pages about how bad the problem can be in dogs, the vet summed up feline distichia by saying it’s extremely rare and rarely causes any discomfort for cats.
I think Lizzie would like to set him straight on that last point.