Thursday, June 4, 2015

An Eye Oops

Last week, we took Henry on our nightly walk. (Every weekday starts with a drive to City Center and a short walk and every night ends with a drive to one of our many parks for another walk---but never the same park 2x in a row.) Anyway, since this was a "weekend day" (technically it was Memorial Day but it was a non work day) we did not begin the day with a trip to City Center but we did end the day there. City Center is a park that has many different paths and the paths are generally wide and Henry tends to navigate them very well. Well, the fact that he is getting more confident means we can be a little more relaxed with his abilities. However, it was our recent relaxing from over protection to just moderate protection that brought us to where we are now. Henry plowed into a tree. Now he has a significant abrasion to his cornea. Since he is blind he obviously runs into stuff (and it is our duty to try to prevent this and on this occasion we did not do such a hot job). We usually do an adequate job of helping him avoid crashing and bumping, though and he has been doing a good job on his own of navigating and approaching with caution.

Well, on this day, the OBP peeps simultaneously spied a beautiful young fluffy black chow mix pup. He had the breed classic black tongue and was simply gorgeous. Of course, at that very moment, boom! Smack into a tree went Henry. (Was it Kamikaze style because we were admiring the youth and health of another?! Yikes!) In any event, immediately after he was unable to open his eye and appeared disoriented. We worked with him to walk off what could be walked off and then texted our vet in the mean time to see what could be done about the eye until we could get him to be seen (first thing the next day).

Cut to the following day, after the vet and finally home: Henry is on 5 different meds for his eye (and it is really not good and will be slow healing---not like when Benjamin and Luna have had this same thing when they each had a little scratch at one point or another--this time, with Henry, there is like a little chunk of eye missing). So, we are doing our best to nurse it back to health and he seems a bit more comfortable except when we are actively nursing it (i.e. applying meds).

We had to go back to the vet 48 hours later to see if was healing and did show some minor improvement be we knew it would be slow to heal. We have to go back again early next week and if he is not improving as we need, then we will take Henry to the big dogs an hour away (the eye specialist---where we are debating if we should have gone there first---but the first day from a holiday weekend....we were not sure if they would have been able to squeeze him in, etc). So, we will see what next week holds. In the mean time, he doesn't seem in much discomfort (until we dose him) and he's only a little more clumsy in his navigation, so we are just trying to hang on to hope that this does not turn out bigger than it is already. We will keep you posted but Henry is kind of straddling the side line for now.