I have a cat! I’ve had her for a while. She kind of imposed herself on me when I saw her on the street one day when she was a one-month-old stray kitten (we have a lot of those here), and her eyes were closed, so I figured I’d take her home for a few minutes, wipe her eyes open and release her again, sight restored and able to fend for herself.

When I wiped the gunk away, it turned out she had no eyes! She had tricked me, and I couldn’t leave her on the street to die, so now I’m responsible for a damn cat. Apparently, cats can get chlamydia (did you know that? I didn’t), which can cause macular degeneration (did you know that means the eye literally melts? I didn’t), which she had.

She also had epilepsy, because of course no good deed goes unpunished. This is her:

She doesn’t photograph well, due to the fact that she’s pitch black and no detail stands out at all. Also because she has no eyes and has two disgusting fleshy holes where the eyes should be. Actually, it’s mostly because of the second thing.

Anyway, the other cats in the playground made fun of her condition, and the doctor said her eyes were unlikely to grow back (I’m not joking, he really did say that. I wonder what else people ask him about), so I decided to do something about it. If she wouldn’t grow her own eyes, I’d grow her a pair.

The first step was to locate a pair of suitable eyes:

After finding a genetic match, there are the logistics of how to actually implant the ocular tissue on the feline. As you know, cats are very self-conscious, and hate it when you give them mismatched accessories, immediately taking them off and possibly pooping on them. My cat is no slouch in that department either, despite her slight total blindness, so I would have to figure out a way to actually keep the eyes on her.

Obviously, before designing anything, we need to measure twice, so I took her for a quick fitting. Apparently doctors’ coats have changed significantly since the last vet visit:

After coming up with a way to keep the eyes on the cat which involved a stapler, dismissing the plan as too cruel and then briefly entertaining the thought again, dismissing it once more as requiring more stapler than I own, I decided to fire up my CAD software and design some stuff. I usually use Fusion 360, but Autodesk sucks and don’t make it for Linux, so OnShape was a very good second choice.

What cat wouldn’t want to wear a pair of stylish, hipster glasses? All of them, because cats are assholes, but we didn’t create a global communications network to let cats use us as a conduit for sharing their photos with other cats, effectively using us as their social network, so this cat was going to wear these glasses.

Since I have spent more than four hours designing things with CAD software, getting the glasses done was a breeze. A quick print later, and voila:

My latest creation, glasses-with-embedded-eyes-for-blind-cats. I call them… eyeglasses. I will probably be creating and selling more than three pairs to many lucky people. If you want a pair, like and share this post wherever things are shared so more people will see them and you will automatically enter the contest where you can win the pair you see above, which comes with a free blind cat.

Since there’s not really much material in these glasses, they printed quite quickly. Two minutes later, the cat was wearing them, and three hours later she was wearing them for long enough that I could sneak a photo:

There. The cat no longer looks like it’s blind, I no longer have to gaze deep into its black eyeholes, and everyone is happy. Of course, this only lasted three seconds before the cat took the glasses off again, but nobody can take that bespectacled memory away from me now.

If you liked this post, please share it with your friends. If you want to order a pair of these glasses, or would like me to put them on Thingiverse or something so you can attempt your own misguided foolishness, or if you want to tell me how I’m cruel for making glasses for my cat, please leave a comment below or tweet to me.

Since you read so far, here’s a bonus photo of the cat wearing the unfinished prototype glasses. They may look menacing, but they’re armless:

P.S. No animals were hurt or severely inconvenienced in the making of this post. Except maybe my cat.