Well, I had tried really hard not to get my hopes up over this, but after we saw blind Madison's pupils respond to light during her eye exam last week, it was impossible not to keep thinking about what it would mean to give Madison the gift of sight, too. So I was kind of a nervous wreck this morning when I drove her to Helena for her electroretinogram, or ERG, which would determine how much retinal function she had.
After getting Madison sedated, the probes inserted, and the ERG machine initialized, our vet Dr. Brenda Culver picked up the yellow device that shines the bright light into the eye. As I waited for the first pulse of light to flash in Madison's left eye, I held my breath and looked at the monitor screen. A graph would appear almost instantly, and I knew what to look for.
I am not too proud to admit that I fought back tears when I saw the line appear on left side of the graph and begin to move sideways. Madison was flat-lining. She had no retinal function in that eye.
Brenda said, "Wait, don't react yet. I want to repeat it."
But it was still the same result. It was the same for her right eye, too.
She would never see again.
While Madison recovered from the anesthesia, I went out to the truck and called Alayne with the news. Yes, by this time I was in tears. With Charlie's experience at regaining vision so fresh in our minds, we wanted so desperately to do the same thing for Madison. Intellectually I knew we only had a 50/50 chance, but emotionally we were 100% invested in a positive outcome.
I asked Brenda how we could have a pupillary light reflex — which indicates the retina is detecting some light — but have the ERG completely flat-lining. The answer is a complicated one, having to do with how the retina itself works, but it comes down to degree of retinal function. And Madison just didn't have enough to matter.
We had the opposite situation many years ago when we lived in Seattle. Our dog Goldie was having some eye issues, and we took her to a veterinary ophthalmologist there for an exam. Goldie flat-lined on her ERG, and yet she could still clearly see at that point. The ophthalmologist marveled at this result, and told us that it just showed how much we still don't understand about how the brain and body can "re-wire" itself to cope. She said at the time, "The ERG is telling us one thing, the dog is telling us something else." It took a couple of years for Goldie's vision to catch up to the ERG results.
But today, sadly, there was no denying what Madison's ERG meant.
Here's a close-up view of Madison after Brenda finished administering the ERG:
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