I found this blog post in my draft folder from two years ago. I'm having a tough time finding time to write tonight because we have a third dog in the house on a trial run. It is rough going. He's a one year old puppy who is disrupting the stable and quiet lives of our two existing dogs, Clark and Nori.
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Har de har, har! I actually thought I could post every day in November. And then? HAHAHA! I thought, well, I'll do every day in December as penance. WRONG! And because I like to flog myself for any and every misdeed, I thought "Self, you should post to your blog every single day in 2009 as punishment for your neglect during the last few months."
We'll see.
Right when I fell off the NaBloPoMo wagon, I took Clark to the vet one fine Saturday morning because his eye was red and bulging. We're no strangers to eye problems with this dog. Three years ago, I noticed his left eye looked a little cloudy and during a routine visit I asked his doctor at the time to check it out. At the ripe old age of 3, Clark had developed a cataract. The doctor tested him for diabetes, and ruled that out as an underlying cause. He advised us to watch it, but since it was small it probably wasn't a big concern. One year later though, Clark woke up and it was clear something very bad had happened overnight. His eyes were red and rolling back in his head and he kept rubbing his paws over them in obvious pain. Steve actually burst into tears at the sight of him, I held it together until I got to the vet's office where I promptly broke down. Clark was diagnosed then with uveitis and we referred to a canine opthamologist. He determined that Clark was a good candidate for cataract removal, but his ocular health came with a $1,800 price tag.
We continued to medicate Clark, but put the surgery off until it made sense economically for the family. And as luck would have it, I'm so glad we didn't put Clark through the misery of that surgery. When I took him to the vet earlier this month, his doctor took one look at him and told me there was nothing she could do, I needed to get him to the University of Minnesota, STAT. I hauled the dog up to St. Paul, and he was diagnosed with glaucoma, unrelated to the cataract. Clark would need his eye removed.
The very ugly side of owning purebred dogs is that they are often rife with genetic defects. Clark and Nori are both afflicted with hip dysplasia. Nori's persistent ear problems are common among her ilk. Clark's remaining eye has a small cataract that has not been aggressive, but will demand vigilance and he has the same narrow canal in his right eye that caused the primary glaucoma in his left. Not only am I grateful that we didn't throw $1800 out the window for cataract surgery, but I'm glad that Clark didn't have to suffer through two painful operations. He's fine now, just perpetually winking since I opted not to have a prosthetic eye implanted. The risks were too large and outweighed any aesthetic benefit, and really-it's a dog. He has no self image, and our family doesn't love him any less as a result of his new handicap. In fact, he probably benefits from the sympathy affection.
So the last two weeks have seen me cooking endlessly, both for Thanksgiving and now my Christmas baking, and dodging a 115 pound black lab with a giant plastic cone velcroed around his neck. Other than the shaved area around his eye, he looks pretty handsome still.
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Postscript: Clark is still with us. He's a lot slower these days, and covered in fatty tumors. As my niece remarked, he looks like an old, grizzled war veteran. He is still well loved, and is now enduring the annoying behavior of the new kid on the block.
