Rolling Dog Farm Blog

My alternate headline for this post was "Why Are You Staring At Me?" That's Travis, our dog with a fused jaw, eating his dinner a few days ago. We were taking photos for the fall print newsletter, which will have Travis on the cover. Though not this photo! 

For those who may not know the history, Travis had a rare inflammatory disease called masticatory myositis, which affects the jaw muscles. If caught early enough, the disease can be treated with medications and the progression slowed and sometimes reversed. In Travis' case, his original owner never treated him for it, and eventually left him one night tied up to a vet clinic door in Spokane, Washington. The clinic called animal control, who then called us.

Kate W. in Missoula, who adopted blind Luke from us several years ago, just sent us this video of Luke picking strawberries. Kate wrote,

"For weeks now I've been trying to get a video of Luke picking strawberries. I don't know when he discovered this but one day I caught him mowing through my strawberry plants eating all the red or barely red berries. And I finally got a short video of it! 

At first I thought of all the ways I could keep him out of my strawberries, a little fence, putting them up high, scolding him, etc. Then I realized what joy he got out of finding these tasty little morsels all on his own (you can see his tail wag a bit in the video when he finds one)… and I decided… fine… I've had two strawberries all season and Luke has eaten the rest and that's the way it will be. 

Now I look forward to watching my boy muzzle around looking for ripe berries every time he goes outside." 

So keep your eye on that strawberry dangling there on the left. It will quickly disappear!

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That's blind and deaf Gabe, in a photo taken back in Montana in 2009. Gabe had just returned home from surgery to remove a nasal tumor that had blocked his ability to breathe through his nose and to smell. Several months later, Paul and Jenny M. from Napa, California, adopted Gabe and gave him an amazing new life (and later adopted three-legged Ella, too!).

I took Darla yesterday to see the ophthalmologist in Burlington, Dr. Vivian Jamieson, for her two-week post-surgery exam. I took the camera but left it in the van, so the photo above is from last week when Darla was under the lunch table, happily expecting another small treat after another round of eye drops.

In short, Darla's eyes are bright, comfortable, completely visual, and healing very nicely from the surgery. Dr. Jamieson is still not sure what was causing the reaction to the eye meds, but under her direction in recent days we had reduced the number of times Darla was getting the two glaucoma meds, and that seems to have helped. Most important, even with the reduced schedule for those medications, her eye pressures have returned to normal and stayed there. When we checked her pressures at the clinic yesterday, we got the same normal readings we've been getting here at home these past few days. We'll continue to monitor her eye pressures on a daily basis for a while just to make sure we have everything under control.

To address the discomfort from the drops, Dr. Jamieson is now having us add an artificial tears gel to her eyes about one minute before we administer the glaucoma meds.

Overall, Dr. Jamieson was very pleased with how Darla was doing and with how great her eyes looked. After the roller coaster we've been on, that was a real relief!

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After the eye check-up, I had a meeting with the clinic's client services coordinator, Alisha R., and Darla was napping under the chair I was sitting on. At one point during the conversation, Alisha said, "Do you realize she wags her tail every time you speak?" I'd heard the gentle thumping under the table but didn't realize it happened whenever I started talking.

Shortly after returning to the farm yesterday evening, I was sitting on the stairs in the mud room changing from outdoor boots to indoor footwear when Darla came looking for me. She walked right up to me, tail wagging, and then pressed her head into my chest. She leaned into me, nosed buried in my shirt, for what seemed like several minutes. I just wrapped my arms around her, hugged her tightly, and told her how much we loved her. I sensed this was her way of telling me, "Thank you for everything you've done for me." But I know she doesn't realize just how many other people are due those thanks. 

Although this looks like just another Dachshund sunning himself, there's a little more significance to this photo. That's blind Willy, who came to us last November after several twists and turns along the way. Willy is kind of an odd duck, a little fellow who keeps to himself and lives in his own world. He's formed an attachment with Alayne, but otherwise that's about the only connection he's made. We wonder if he doesn't have a canine version of autism, because he just doesn't interact like a typical dog. (And most disabled dogs, even blind-and-deaf ones, interact like non-disabled ones.) He's fine with the other dogs, but it's because he ignores them, as if they aren't even there.

When we put Willy out in the yard, he spends hours just zooming around, in constant motion, heading one way and then suddenly switching direction. What is driving his erratic navigation we're not sure, though presumably sometimes it must be smells. It took months before he finally ventured up the ramp and onto the front porch, though he rarely stays there. He's much more likely to be on "cruise control" in the yard, going back and forth across the grass.

Thus it's a rare moment when he finally just stops to lie down and enjoy the warm sunshine. I was putting other dogs out the other morning and noticed him lying there next to the gate. He had one ear back, in that Dachshund way, and was clearly enjoying the moment. But once he heard me out there, after I had taken a couple of photos, he was up and going again. 

"To each his own," as the saying goes. Willy seems to be in his groove here, and though his social universe is much more limited than the one the other dogs enjoy, it's of his own choosing. So all we can do is provide a supportive, loving environment and see if, over time, he's willing or able to engage more. 

Well, that didn't take long. Just six months after arriving here from Louisiana, Scamp was adopted on Saturday by a wonderful family from Nashua, New Hampshire. Holding Scamp in the photo is Charlotte S., with her husband Len on the right and her daughter Barbara on the left. Charlotte and Len's dog Max, an Aussie, is on the ramp behind them.

It's not as bad as it looks, and now we think we know what's going on. Darla had begun bleeding from her eyes during the process of administering the course of topical medications. At first we couldn't tell where the blood was coming from, because it would just starting running down from the corners of her eyes. Her eyeballs seemed fine, and we eventually determined the bleeding was from the eyelids themselves. But why?

I emailed that photo and others to the ophthalmologist in Burlington, Dr. Vivian Jamieson, and her vet tech Rachel, early yesterday morning. (They were off Monday.) An hour later Rachel called and put Dr. Jamieson on the line. In her 30 years of practice, she said she'd never seen anything like this before. I said, "Well, we always like to give our veterinarians something new and different." She was worried that the bleeding was from the corneal suture sites, but I assured her that the eyeballs looked fine, we saw no bleeding from those locations, and that Darla wasn't squinting and tearing (which are signs of pain and discomfort with the eye). Indeed, once the bleeding stopped — and it always did, usually about 30 minutes after giving her the drops — she looked quite normal, and she held her eyes open. They were bright and clear.

After some discussion, she concluded it was probably the glaucoma medications that were causing a reaction of some sort with her eyelid tissue. Now, this is a problem because in the post-op phase there is always the risk of pressure spikes, which is why glaucoma meds are on the roster. And in one test on Darla last week, Dr. Jamieson found that the drainage angles in her eyes were constricted, which meant she was already at somewhat higher risk for glaucoma in the future. Darla isn't pre-ordained to develop glaucoma later, but it does mean this is something that needs careful and sustained monitoring, and that Darla might need to stay on glaucoma meds as a preventative measure long-term if her pressures begin climbing.

In the meantime, we have bleeding eyes to deal with. So Dr. Jamieson decided to have us hold off on administering the glaucoma medications and see if the bleeding stops. The key to being able to do this was our ability to check her eye pressures, which we can do because we have the diagnostic tool, the Tono-Pen. Dr. Jamieson asked me to start checking her pressures within six hours of her last glaucoma medications, and to report our results to her. Alayne took this photo of me testing Darla's eye pressures yesterday evening:

The great news:  Normal pressures!  I tested her eyes again this morning and we still had normal pressures. So this was a real relief. Rachel told me today they were very happy to hear it and that we should continue to withhold the glaucoma meds and monitor her eye pressures daily. 

This girl who came to us a few months ago completely blind can now see again! Yes, Darla's cataract surgery was a success and her vision is restored. I took that photo of her at lunch on Sunday, where she was giving me the (new) stare-down over what she thought I should be sharing with her. (Share I did.)

It used to be that when I was finished eating and would have a treat or two left for her, I'd put it on a fork, bring it over to her, and say "gentle … gentle" as I guided it towards her mouth. She would carefully open her mouth and gently take the morsel. I learned on Saturday, as she suddenly leaped up to grab the morsel off the fork, that I need to update the technique.

I went back to Burlington on Friday to pick her up at the eye clinic. I was in the exam room, going over the discharge instructions with the vet tech, Rachel, when the ophthalmologist, Dr. Jamieson, brought Darla down the hall and opened the door. I looked at Darla and called her name. "Darla, honey, it's me!"  She looked up and her tail started wagging. I crouched down, and she walked right over to me and pressed her head into my lap. She stood there, tail wagging, leaning into me. I don't know what was going through her head, but my emotions were getting the better of me and my eyes started welling up. I just couldn't believe we were able to give this beautiful girl her eyesight back.