We were saying goodbye to our son and his family, who were about to get into their car after a short visit. Taffy was running around, when he caught sight of someone hugging John. This was number one on the list of things humans were not permitted to do in Taffyworld. He came racing over, barking his head off and ran full tilt into the bottom corner of the open car door. That seemed odd, but to the extent we thought about it at all, we figured he had been so focused on reaching his idol and protecting him from all those pernicious hugs that he just hadn’t noticed the open door. Taffy was some sort of Corgi mix, and built low to the ground.
Within a few hours, a huge swelling appeared on Taffy’s abdomen. Again, that seemed odd. There were no cuts or abrasions from his collision with the car door. Nevertheless, alarmed by its sheer size – like a football – we took him to the vet. It was a hematoma (which occurs when the wall of a blood vessel is damaged, blood leaks outside it and clots to form a bump). There wasn’t much to be done except wait for it to go down, which it did.
The whole incident faded from our consciousness and life went on.
John was out one day when Taffy started pacing and whining for no apparent reason. He was swiping at his left eye. This came on so quickly that, alarmed, I called the vet right away. They gave us an appointment in a couple of hours. By the time I got him there, Taffy was in serious pain.
Mark, one of our two preferred vets, listened to the history, examined Taffy’s eyes, and told me he was pretty sure it was glaucoma, a build up of aqueous fluid behind the eye. Taffy had incredibly high pressure in his eye. Normal pressure levels are around 10 to 20 mmHg. High pressure would be something like 21 to 28 mmHg. Taffy was dealing with pressure higher than 50 in his left eye.
Mark explained that treatment would start with a series of several different types of drops and pills designed to bring down the pressure. We would have Taffy’s pressure re-checked within two weeks and see if anything had improved.
The drops had to be administered on a complicated schedule because some couldn’t be given within certain time frames of others. And they had to be administered at four hour intervals every 24 hours. This meant someone had to get up several times during the night to put these drops in Taffy’s eyes.
John is deaf. Once he takes out his hearing aids and goes to sleep, I doubt that even nuclear war would wake him. He offered to sleep with his hearing aids in, but even then, he is prone to sleeping though the loudest alarm clock. Besides, if the alarm was set high enough to walk him, it would certainly wake me as well.
Have I mentioned that Taffy hated me? Nevertheless, since I am a person of selfless nobility of character, I volunteered to do the nighttime eye drops.
Taffy must have known at some level that I was trying to help him, because he never objected to me handling his sore head in the middle of the night.
Two weeks later, we went back for a pressure check. The pressure was worse.
Mark took us through the options, none of which were great. They included the very real possibility that Taffy would have to have his eye removed. Other options included surgery to try to unblock the access that drained the fluid for the eyes, continuing with the drops and maybe other things. I don’t really know.
It was all just noise. We had pretty much checked out at “remove his eye”.
Mark suggested that we might want to consult an eye specialist at the big animal hospital in Ottawa. We leapt on this suggestion in the forlorn hope that possibly the specialist would have some equipment that could show another cause of this pressure, or would have other surgeries or therapies to suggest.
Once again it fell to my lot to take Taffy to the eye specialist. John is squeamish when it comes to anything medically related with people. When it comes to the suffering of animals, he dissolves into a quivering puddle of big weepy marshmallow fluff.
The specialist had lots of expensive looking equipment. He took his time, gently putting Taffy though a series of tests and examinations. One hour, and $700 later, he told me the same thing Mark had told us. Taffy had serious pressure behind his eye which was not responding to the drugs. It was so advanced that really the only option left was to remove the eye. We could have it removed and the lid sewn shut for several thousand dollars. We could have it removed and an artificial eye inserted, which would cost several thousand more.
I told him I would have to talk it over with John, and Taffy and I went our dejected way.
John was devastated by the news that the only dog who had ever been entirely devoted only to him, had to have an eye removed.
I suggested we make an appointment with our own trusted vet to talk over what was best to do.
This time we drew Amanda, the other vet at our clinic in whom we reposed complete confidence. She was her usual sympathetic, practical, confident and calm self. She reassured us that most dogs deal far better with this surgery than their owners do. She also told us that if we decided on the operation only to have the eye removed and the lids sewn shut, she would be happy to do that (and at a price approximately half of what was quoted to us at the big animal hospital). She said she would perfectly understand if we preferred to have the specialist do it.
She said that if we wanted the false eye implanted however, we would have to go back to the specialist, as she would not do the operation. Although a lot of people prefer that option because it doesn’t look so grim, in her experience it only leads to problems. As there is no vision in that false eye, there is no blink reflex. Dust, pollen and particulates will get into the socket and cause infections. You also have to keep putting drops in to keep it lubricated and clean. All in all, an expensive mess.
She reassured us that although Taffy would come home from the surgery looking pretty grisly, once the sutures were removed it would mostly look like his eye was closed (they put a small silicone ball in behind to keep the eye socket looking more normal).
Because we trusted Amanda, we opted to have her do the surgery. The lower price was just a bonus.
You think you are prepared for what your dog will look like when he comes out of this kind of surgery. Nope. Not even a little bit.
Thick black sutures crawled across the seam of his closed eyelid. His face was shaved from he left ear to his chin and down his muzzle. His face was swollen and looked bruised.
It was heartbreaking to see him. Even more heartbreaking was the shock and anguish on John’s face. As the human who was less emotionally compromised, I did my best to keep cheerful and upbeat, but I was secretly pretty appalled too.
In fact, as Amanda had predicted, the only one of the three of us who seemed unimpressed with the horror of the situation was Taffy himself. He came trotting out the door from the surgery, his usual jaunty self, barking away. When he saw John he pulled at the lead to get to him, jumping up and yipping his delight.
By the Thanksgiving family gathering at our house, the stitches had come out. Taffy was more intent on checking out the newest member of the family than he was in receiving the sympathy of the guests.
The removed eye was going to go off for pathology. This would help determine the likelihood of glaucoma developing in the other eye.
We returned home. With ice packs and medication, Taffy’s swollen face returned to normal. Once the sutures came out, and the hair on his face grew back, the fact that he was missing an eye was not even noticeable except on close inspection.
The pathology came back. The good news was that there was no sign of any systemic or genetic condition that would suggest the other eye would also fall prey to this horrible condition. The bad news was that, as far as the pathologist could tell, the glaucoma had been caused by blunt force trauma.
We searched our memory for any incident of Taffy hitting his head. Much as I struggled with him, I had never resorted to bludgeoning him (except in my deepest, darkest fantasies). All we could think was that on one of the daily trips to Tim Horton’s in the front seat of the pickup, he had hit the dashboard when John braked suddenly.
Anyway, odd as it was, we put it behind us with great relief, comfortable in the belief that the terrible experience was not going to be repeated. Taffy was functioning great with his one remaining eye. All in all, we got off lightly.
A few months later, Taffy started showing signs of pain in his remaining eye.
Back to the vet’s. High pressures were occurring in that eye. With a horrible sense of doom, we went on the regime of drops. Once again, the drops accomplished nothing.
This time, there really was no decision to be made. There was no way to save his remaining eye. All we could do was try to reconcile ourselves to the fact that Taffy was about to go into the darkness and to stay there for the rest of his life.
We were both completely devastated. Taffy and I had reached a state approaching amiability during his original ordeal with glaucoma. But even if I had thought him the worst dog on the face of the planet, whose heart would not be wrung by the knowledge that he was going to go to the vet from where he would return sightless?
He had had such nice eyes too.
As for John, he received the news in stunned silence. He became an automaton, carrying out his dog and cat duties in the kennel in a miasma of unbelieving, bleak misery.
This time when we picked Taffy up from the vet’s, it took him a little while to identify that John was in the room. He was led out on a lead, bumping into the counter and the chairs, despite the vet tech’s best efforts to guide him. He was obviously confused and in distress. It was heart wrenching. But then John spoke and Taffy’s poor abused, sutured head swivelled unerringly in that direction. The yipping and barking and pulling started. We were both fighting back tears. That poor little dog.
We thought Taffy looked terrible after the first surgery. It was nothing to this. There was a horror show, Frankenstein monster-like quality to it. A face without eyes is just such an outrage against nature. The black sutures, the swelling, the bruising. To look on him was to weep.
This time at least, we felt that things could only get better. Taffy was a confident little guy. He had lived with us for something like five years now, and knew the property very well.
He followed the same fixed regime as the dogs in the kennel. In Taffy’s life, the same things happened in the same order every day. He was almost never thrust into new or unexpected situations or places. He could, literally, navigate the house, the kennel and the walking paths blind.
He had no more eyes to lose. As I pointed out to John, as far as Taffy knew, the lights had gone out for everyone, and this development was just a natural occurrence that we were all participating in.
All true. And none of it diminished the pity and the horror we felt every time we looked at his poor abused face.
We gave him his meds and iced his swollen face. We reassured each other that once the swelling had gone down and the sutures were out, it would be better.
Except the swelling didn’t go down. In fact, it got worse. He was bleeding from the nose and sneezing and spraying blood everywhere. The last animal of our acquaintance to do that was John’s mother’s cat. She was found to have a tumour behind her eye, and had to be euthanized.
Taffy stopped eating and drinking. John was absolutely beside himself.
Back we went to Amanda, who did every examination and test she could with every diagnostic tool at her disposal. Consultations were had with the big vet hospital and several specialists there.
Things were so bad with Taffy at this point, that John actually asked if it was time to say goodbye.
This from the man who, when one of our cats developed a tumour in her face, eventually causing her eye to bulge out and creating an open wound on her face, not only tended that wound, but when she stopped eating and drinking, force fed her water with an eyedropper.
To say that he does not easily give up on his pets is an understatement.
And here he was, was tears running down his face, asking if it was time to let go of the animal that he had probably been most closely bonded to in his entire life.
Amanda patted his arm and said that there was one more thing she wanted to try, with our permission. She assured us that when she felt there was no more hope, she would tell us.
Despite the negative results from a blood clotting test, Amanda was still convinced that failure to clot was the culprit. She proposed bringing in one of her own dogs to give Taffy a whole blood transfusion. The theory was that the fresh blood would clot and stop the bleed. Systems would then hopefully return to normal.
We agreed, even though by now, the little guy was absolutely shaking in fear anytime we tried to take him though the door to the place where everything had gone dark.
We wondered if we were doing the right thing, subjecting him to more trauma. We tried to prepare for the worst.
When we picked Taffy up after the transfusion, there was an IV shunt in his leg, delivering steroids. I had to flush this IV several time, including at 2 a.m. I swear I don’t need to go to vet tech school. I learned most of that stuff already what with the kennel, and diabetic cats, and now Taffy.
We had an anxious night, waiting to see if his face was less swollen in the morning. When we examined him, it seemed to us that the swelling in the right side of his muzzle had indeed diminished. He started eating mushy food with great alacrity.
To our immense relief, Amanda’s instincts were right. The transfusion worked, the swelling went down quickly and within days, Taffy was back to his obstreperous self.
We didn’t know what to do to thank all of the people who had helped him, including the two vet techs who sat on the floor with him and fed him dog food mixed up with water off of popsicle sticks. I made a few dozen cookies, as that is what I do – feed people.
Looking back, we wondered if the incident with the car door was the start of all this. The fact that he had run into the door at all, suggested that his eyesight in his left eye was already going, or perhaps gone entirely. We wondered if this blood clotting problem was a factor in the huge hematoma that developed from that. We wondered if the “blunt force trauma” that the pathology report indicated was the culprit in the glaucoma in the left eye, was a relatively minor bump on the head which resulted in some internal bleeding behind the eye which in turn caused the build up of pressure.
Whatever the cause, we were so thankful for our wonderful country vet who had solved the problem, and for the fact that Taffy was such confident dog, he took it all in his stride. He functioned as if he had eyes.
He got very annoyed if anyone tried to help him up into the pick up truck. He took himself for walks on the dog walking paths around the kennel and unerringly found his way home.
Thankfully, what could have been a tragedy, had a happy ending.
For a short while at least.
Eighteen months later, Taffy developed liver failure. Interestingly, liver function is a factor in blood clotting problems. It’s possible that was the root cause of all Taffy’s problems. We investigated every treatment possibility, but this time to no avail. We had to let him go.
It was a hard, hard thing for John, who still finds it difficult to talk about Taffy.
One of our clients was an artist. I commissioned her to do a portrait of Taffy. I admit I got choked up when I saw it.
She had given Taffy back his eyes.
