02 February 2013

Ruby's eyes like cloudy skies.


It's hard to take a picture of Ruby where she opens both her eyes, because her eyes stay dilated and she doesn't wear shades. The list of things wrong with her eyes is long and confusing. The progressive retinal atrophy doesn't hurt her but causes the dilating and is why she's slowly going blind. The immune keratitis scleritis is controlled. The cholesterol corneal degeneration might hurt, even though it looks like fluffy clouds moving over her eyes like they're sky.

Ruby goes to a special dog ophthomologist. She's one of my most favorite vets. She has the ability to poke around in eyes and pop dog cookies in Ruby's mouth at the same. Ruby just sits on my lap and endures. The cookie popping helps immensely. She did a surgery yesterday, on the worse eye, Ruby sat on my lap the whole time and I held on and didn't watch. Needles and knifes in the eye.

The doc popped cookies in there and told me dog eye stories the whole time. Ruby seemed fine. She got sent home with some new eye drugs, and is wearing a dog contact lens til it falls out. It's ok if it does. She had to have the clouds scraped off the cornea because they wanted to  pop an ulcer. I don't know which one of the diseases caused that, I've sort of given up trying to keep track.

I asked her, should she stay off the beach, or out of the sun? She sure does like to go, even though it makes her squint and I worry about her. She just trots by my leg the whole time, I try to cast her a shadow, and we keep track of each other. It doesn't seem like it's hurting her? That's all I really care about. I don't much care if she goes all the way blind, we know about that already and she still gets around real good, I just don't want her to hurt.

She answered, "Let her be a dog. She'll tell you if she doesn't want to go."

So that's what we do. Ruby's a best dog.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

would she wear some tinted goggles?

Jenn said...

I love that vet. Let her be a dog!

team small dog said...

I could ask the vet about the goggles. But I don't know if goggles fall under the category of Let Her Be a Dog. According to Portlandia, in the magic kingdom of Portland they sell dog sunglasses, although it's always cloudy there. Maybe Ruby would like to live in Portland.

Elf said...

A former housemate had a small black dog that used to ride in the basket of her bicycle. She rode very fast. The dog wore goggles. He didn't seem to mind them after the first time or so.