Since I had to take Snowball into the vet clinic yesterday, I decided to take little Creighton with me so our vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, could look at his eyes. I had planned to take him to see Brenda on Thursday, but she was kind enough to fit us in between her other appointments. Having a bouncy, happy puppy on my hands helped me cope with losing Snowball yesterday … trying to keep a blind 4-month old under control kind of keeps you focused on something besides heartache, if you know what I mean.
Brenda was as amazed at Creighton’s eyes as we were. Because of the bulging appearance, she first measured his intraocular pressures, or IOP, to test for glaucoma. That’s what she’s doing in the photo above, and vet tech Heather A. is holding our boy. Yet she got low to normal readings, similar to what I had seen when I measured his eye pressures Friday evening. That, of course, seems contradictory, given how his eyes look and how painful they are.
Brenda surmised that the drainage angles in his eyes may have been closed off from birth because of a genetic defect, so he was born with glaucoma. The fluid in the eye would have continued to build up and up and up, causing the pressures to skyrocket. Brenda said she could only imagine how much pain he had been in. She thinks that we’re seeing low pressures now because the resulting damage throughout his eyes may have finally caused the fluid production to shut down altogether. So even though the pressures are low, the eyes remain buphthlamic (fancy medical term for "bulging") because they have been stretched out from the elevated pressures, and it takes time for the eyes to start shrinking back down.
In this next photo, Brenda is using the slit lamp to look inside his eyes:
What she found is that the iris has adhered to the cornea in both of his eyes. This is a problem because we had hoped to "save" his eyes by putting the prosthetics in, like we had with Briggs the blind Beagle. To do that, Brenda needs to take the contents of the inner eye out, then put the prosthesis (a silicone ball) inside the globe, and leave the cornea in place to hold the prosthesis in. But if the cornea is attached to the iris and thus perhaps to other structures, she may not be able to do that. Brenda was going to ultrasound his eyes today to see if she could get a better read on this, and I haven’t heard yet what else she found.
If we can’t do the prosthetic implants, then we’ll have to remove his eyes. But either way, we will finally be able to give him relief from the pain … and that’s the only thing that will matter to him. His surgery is scheduled for Thursday, so I left Creighton at the clinic yesterday.
Here’s another photo I took of him in the exam room … what a cutie, huh?
And finally, Brenda thought we should have a close-up of the Tono-Pen:
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