Blind Dog Stories

15.5 yr. old Shitzu already 80% blind, ruptured his eye 10 days ago

October 25, 2017 by Teresa 2 Comments

Buggz - blind dog My old Shitzu who is relatively healthy(except kidney disease & hypothyroidism) was out in the kitchen 10 days ago eating his dinner, he all the sudden came running out yelping, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong and the more I tried to comfort him the more he screamed, I was freaked! Finally after about 45 mins he calmed down enough for me to check him out, his left eye was weepy.

We got him to the vet first thing in the morning, his eye was bleeding and had a visible pin prick that was leaking, when the vet went to take a look Buggz his screaming started again! The Vet told me the eye had to come out, but then changed his mind and we are trying to see if it can heal, the vet said if it wasn’t for Buggz’s age the eye would be taken out.

So now after 10 days of antibiotics,eye drops every 2 hrs. and eye ointment 2 times a night and of course painkillers and wearing a cone 24 hrs. a day, his eye is looking much better, still looks like a pimple with a whitehead, and the white of his eye is bloodshot still but it looks way better and hopefully is healing!

He goes back to the vet on Friday for another re-check. If anyone has had similar happenings please let me know!
The photo is of his eye the first day after injury.

What happened to Murphy

July 2, 2013 by Suzette 5 Comments

Murphy is a 7 year old male Dachshund. He is so full of life! I have two Dachshunds and by far, Murphy was my favorite! (Sorry Guiness).

Murphy wasn’t like a regular Dachshund. He ran and played and jumped to catch Frisbees and his treats. He rustled with me and my son on the floor.

One day, I noticed that he wasn’t able to catch the treats in his mouth. they were smacking him on the face. Similarly, I noticed that he wasn’t playing with us or his mate. I watched him for a few days and tried to understand what might have happened. I took him into the vets office and they confirmed his was blind. Nothing was wrong with his eyes, they said. They were perfect. It could be something back in his brain however. Finding out would only tell me that he could possibly have a tumor – and that would kill me because I could never afford that kind of surgery.

So on his word, we just started making him more comfortable and use to functioning blind.

Backstory – one week before I noticed his blindness, my 3 year old son overfed Murphy to the point that Murphy developed bloat. Not once but 2 times I had to take him to the vet for him to have fluids and be monitored. Bloat, I was told, could kill him.

Now, forward to the blindness, I suggested that there was a relationship between the bloats and his blindness but the Vet reassured me there was not.

I am looking to help Murphy re-gain some of his spunk. He was so happy go lucky but now is depressed and sad.How do I help my little angel re-gain his vitality?

Sammy’s Story: Lessons Taught by Sammy

August 8, 2012 by Paula - ADMIN 4 Comments

After finding Sammy on Facebook, I contacted his owner Ace Collins to ask if he could share Sammy’s story with us. Ace agreed and below you can read about this beautiful blind collie, how he came to be with Ace and what they have both been through over the past 10 months. This is only the first installment. When you get to the end of this article ensure you click on the link to take you to Ace’s blog where you can read month by month updates on Sammy.

We have welcomed a new member into our family. His name is Samson and he is a dog that was rescued by Almost Home Rescue group of Ohio (www.almosthomeohio.org). Sammy is a mahogany collie between four three and four years old. He was born with five different eye issues including detached retinas. Thus he cannot even see light and has always lived in a completely dark world. Up until seven months ago he was locked in a cage in a small mobile home with more than seventy other collies. He lived in filth, had never been to a vet and didn’t have enough to eat. Naturally when these dogs were rescued the blind dog was viewed, as being one that most thought should be put down. Thanks Almost Home and two incredible women, Grace Bowels, who fostered Sammy, and Charlene Molnar, who keeps the options for special need dogs open, Sammy was saved. Over the past seven months Grace has worked with wonders with him. She even drove him from Michigan to Central Illinois in order to get him into our hands. Now Sammy is home with us.

My initial observations on his trip to Arkansas with me and his first day in our home have been fascinating. It took him less than an hour to completely map out the first floor of our house. He now has our large backyard mapped out as well. He can run full speed and avoid the trees, land chairs and our fence. He had learned to climb the steep steps up to our second floor, but has yet to master going down by himself. That will take a while and some work on my part. As he is blind, stepping off into what seems like nothing on a wood service is not a natural thing to do. Thus Kathy and I will have to prove ourselves to Sammy in order for him to have faith in our lead. I know that will come and we don’t mind waiting for it.

He is an incredibly happy dog. He is curious and alert. He wants to make friends with everyone one and everything (including the cats). Tiger is not sure about this canine-feline friendship yet. He is also a gentle soul who prances when he walks. In many ways he seems like a teddy bear. His ability to so quickly map our home tells me he is very smart, thus training him should be easy. My first walk with he and Baby (our other collie) was interesting. He tends to wander from side to side a bit, rather than walk in a straight line like most dogs I have owned. To me this seems natural as he is not sight oriented. He also seems to listen to Baby’s steps to judge where he needs to be and what kind of surface is ahead. Thus I can see how his “vision” works and so I am developing a language to help him know what is coming.

About once an hour he comes over to my desk and lays his head on my knee, but he is not demanding. And he loves to hear the sound of either Kathy’s or my voice. To watch his ears and face as I talk to him is simply amazing. It is like he is trying to understand each nuance and tone.

With good fortune we will have Sammy for at least a decade. I am sure that during those years we will learn far more from him than he will from us. His being blind will no doubt enrich our lives and likely teach us how to deal better with humans who have disabilities. In fact, I can see Kathy adapting new strategies for the classroom from what Sammy shares with us.

I plan on writing much more about Lessons From Sammy as we continue forward. For the moment I just wanted to share with you our initial observations.

>>You can read all the latest on Sammy at Ace’s blog here – Month by Month Updates on Sammy

Lucy’s Story: Her Struggle with Glaucoma, Eye Removal and Blindness

August 5, 2012 by Paula - ADMIN 12 Comments

In late October 2011, I did what most dog owners do and took my dogs to get their yearly vaccinations. It was a very hot summers day and Bronnie (my sighted dog) somehow came off her leash and made a mad dash up the road chasing something or other. By the time we got her back and in the car, (which by the way you could have baked a roast in, it was that hot), both dogs arrived at the vet hot and bothered and were declared to be too overheated to be given their vaccinations. So after spending an hour or so at the vet that included a wash down in nice cold water…which they loved by the way (I’m being sarcastic here), they had their vaccinations and we took them home.

The next day when I came home from work, I was greeted at the door by Lucy looking extremely unhappy. She is usually a bright and happy dog so I knew straight away she wasn’t well and her right eye was closed and oozing some yucky stuff out of it. I immediately thought she must have had a reaction to the vaccinations so took her straight back to the vet to get her checked out. The young vet wasn’t quite sure what it was, perhaps uveitis and/or conjunctivitis, but he didn’t think it had anything to do with the vaccinations. He wanted the head vet to take a look but he wouldn’t be in until the next morning. I was prescribed Amazin (an eye ointment) to put in her eye and told to come back in the morning.

The next morning I take her in first thing and the head vet looks her over and tells me that it looks like glaucoma. In hindsight if she had been diagnosed straight away the eye might have been saved but there’s no point looking to the past and in reality the eye would probably have gone eventually anyway. But for the moment I don’t know any of this so I take her home and start her on Xalatan and Trusopt drops.

Over the next six weeks she had regular weekly tests to check the pressure in her eye. At the time, I didn’t know what was a good pressure reading and what wasn’t but now when I look back I realize that they weren’t good…averaging around 40. They should ideally be in the teens and lower. I also didn’t know that she would have been in pain with all of this. She didn’t look like she was in pain so I can only hope that it wasn’t severe but there would have been some sort of pain and probably pretty much constant for six weeks.

During this time, the head vet had been overseas and when he returned and checked the eye he pretty much came to the same conclusion that I had reached by that point, and that was that the eye had to come out. She had no sight in it and the drops weren’t making much difference to the pressure. As devastating as it was for me, I knew she would cope so we scheduled to have her eye out the next Tuesday…only a week or so before Christmas.

On the day that I took her in I was pretty calm about it all. It was only when I put her in the cage at the vet’s office that it suddenly hit me and as I left I got a bit teary. During the day I couldn’t concentrate. I wasn’t worried about the eye being removed at that point, but more worried about her getting through the operation okay. I couldn’t wait for the phone call from the vet and when it finally came and they said that she had come out of the operation okay and could be picked up, I was very much relieved.

When I went to pick her up I was expecting her to be groggy and out of sorts, but on the contrary. She was bright and happy and very excited to see me. I must admit, she did look a bit odd to me at first. It does take a bit of getting used. Whenever I take her out, people can’t help but look and you can see the look on their faces…it takes them a second or two to actually realize that her eye has been removed.

My only other concern at that point, was that the vet had mentioned that glaucoma is hereditary in cocker spaniels so it was most likely that the other eye would go the same way. This hit me harder than everything that had happened so far because I realized then that she would be permanently blind. I’ll be honest and say that my first reaction was that I would have to put her down. That was my ignorance showing at that point. I just assumed that blind dogs couldn’t function without their sight. I laugh at that now because I know that the opposite is the case. Blind dogs cope quite well with blindness, probably much better than humans.

Fortunately just reading a few blind dog stories on the net changed my attitude completely. I was still concerned about her eventually losing her sight but I knew that if other people lived happily with their blind dogs then I could as well.

After the operation, all went well. Lucy could still see with her other eye so nothing much had really changed. I started feeding both her and my other dog Bronnie, a proper diet with no commercially manufactured foods…raw meats, raw bones, some vegetables thrown in here and there and good supplement. I thought this might keep the glaucoma at bay but unfortunately this wasn’t to be the case.

In May 2012, about a week after I returned from overseas we woke up to find that Lucy was blind in her other eye. Fortunately this time, I realized what was going on and after a quick trip to the vet, and some Xalatan drops, the pressure dropped and her sight returned.

The Xalatan drops seemed to do the trick and held the pressure back for a couple of months. I was also giving her vitamin C as I had read about others success with it. However, it didn’t last long and in July 2012 she lost her sight again and this time it was obvious that no amount of drops were going to do the trick. The pain for her would have been unbearable – she was miserable and I could tell she was in a lot of pain.

The eye vet had suggested laser surgery and after one more severe spike I decided to try it to see if her sight could be saved. So we set out with only a half hours notice on a four hour trip to the eye specialist in Sydney. It was a real relief to finally get her there because I knew they would work at getting the pressure down. She had a terrible couple of days with the pain and I didn’t want to see her suffer any longer.

They managed to get her pressure down overnight and operated the next day. Unfortunately it wasn’t as successful as we all would have liked. Lucy went through two laser surgeries, had various injections in her eye and spent over a week at the eye clinic. Eventually, they had done as much as they could do with the eye and told me that only time will tell now. She has been home for over a week and still no sight but the trauma to the eye was pretty intense and it will take time for things to quieten down. I would like to see her get some sort of sight back to her eye even if it is only shadows but I know that even if she stays permanently blind she will cope and so will I.