Our 11 year old female dapple dachshund had both eyes enucleated (right on 6/10/16, left on 5/30/18 despite a round the clock administration of a myriad of drops over a two year period). She has adapted very well to her total blindness. She seems very happy and is very comfortable navigating our home and property. She has compensated very well with her hearing and sense of smell and a third sense not yet identified by science, lol. She seems to almost have bat radar at times…maybe senses changes in air pressure near objects? I only know it is real and quite amazing.
We take her on a 1+ mile daily walk in our neighborhood with our younger male dachshund and she knows the way by heart. I recently started taking her off lease to give her some sense of freedom and see how she does. (Of course, we are always ready to intervene whenever a car or other people or animals approach). I usually communicate with her throughout the walk with words like, “this way”, “step”, “careful”, etc to help her have confidence and avoid any surprises.
I took some recent videos to show how well she does and uploaded them to my Google drive. In these videos, I didn’t tell her anything and you can see how well she does totally on her own, following the sidewalk, knowing when to cross the street, turn the corner, navigate to our back door, etc. I know that videos like these would have been a big comfort to us during the time we were struggling so hard with maintaining her vision and devastated by the thought of blindness.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1npjdI-5pgGRn-uqGdqG6ciU0-0DR8iej?usp=sharing
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