State of the Pug

All is not well in Blondie's world.

I don't write much about the pug here, which doesn't seem quite fair -- she was, after all, my first "baby." However, her last few days have really stunk, so I figure she deserves some air-time on the blog.

On Saturday, I noticed that her bulgy pug eyes were perhaps a little more boogery than usual. I resolved to keep an eye on it, as eye issues in pugs can become problematic quite quickly. By Sunday evening, her left eye had completely crusted over to the point where she couldn't really open it, and I knew we were in trouble. I suspected a corneal ulcer. She's had a couple of those in her seven years, and they haven't been too serious; the worst one required a few days of goopy eye ointment and an E-collar, one of those awful cone things that dogs have to wear to keep them from making injuries worse by biting or pawing or scratching. It's truly a pathetic sight on any animal, I think, but take a pug -- who can look as though you've run over their whole family when they're in a perfectly good mood -- and add one of those contraptions, and you've got I HAVE NO FRIENDS and I HAVEN'T EATEN IN DAYS and I AM ALL ALONE IN THE RAIN. I wasn't looking forward to that possibility.

We called the vet right away on Monday morning, and I took Blondie in after school. She was clearly miserable, with all sorts of crusty yellow goop around her eye (I was too afraid to look closely at the eye itself at that point), but let me tell you about my dog and the vet. She loves the vet, loves the vet with an undying adoration beyond all reason. The minute we scoot in the door she's all, "Look at me, look at me!" and the receptionists all coo at her and say, "THERE'S our Blondie! Look at her tail! She's so wiggly! Blondie! Blondie! There's a good girl!" She really struts her stuff all over the waiting room. And even though they do terrible things to her there -- they take her temperature in a rather uncomfortable place, for instance, and I always have them trim her nails, and for her, that is apparently just as bad as removing them would be -- she never stops throwing herself at people and licking and wiggling. We board her there whenever we take a trip that isn't dog-friendly, and when I go back to pick her up, the receptionists look at me glumly and say, "Oh. It's you." Then I have to wait while they march my pug through the clinic to say good-bye to every single vet, every single vet tech, and all the receptionists. And then they bring her back to me, wearing a bandana that they custom-made for her.

Anyway, she really loves the attention she gets at this place, and I trust them to take good care of her. So I tried not to panic when one of her vets (she has three, we love them all) peered at her eye and grimaced. The look on his face suggested that I should prepare myself to hear, "Sorry, but we're going to have to remove the eye." IT WAS THAT BAD.

Well, no, it wasn't that bad; Blondie isn't going to lose her eye (I hope). But it's pretty bad. She does indeed have a corneal ulcer, but it's a nasty one, right smack in the middle of her eye. It's visible even without the dye strip, like there really is just a big chunk torn out. It's horrifying. I have a pretty strong constitution when it comes to these things, I think, but I had a hard time looking at my dog's eye (and that green dye doesn't help. It made her eye all green and glowy and alien-like). I tried not to sob, "How did this happen? She's hardly outside, and she's never alone with the toddler, and the toddler is really gentle with her anyway..."

The vet said it probably was as simple as her running into something and reassured me that pugs can damage their eyes in a plain old room with walls and a door sometimes. First of all, they're not -- well, they're not the most graceful animals. Second of all, they have those really bulgy eyes (oh, how I love her huge brown eyes! HER POOR EYES!) and really slow blink reflexes. So when they run into something, or when they see something coming at them, they don't close their eyes in time. I couldn't think of anything Blondie could run into; when she's inside, she's normally lying in a heap in one of her beds, and she only moves quickly when I get her food dish (or when I make popcorn, which is her life's obsession). I suspect she injured her eye in the yard, either by wandering too close to the bush underneath our bedroom window, or by racing along the fence with the neighbor's dachsunds. She gets going so fast sometimes, and she's not looking straight ahead -- she's looking at those shrieky little dogs -- and I've seen her stumble and crash face-first into the fence when her momentum really gets going. (Ahem. I suppose now you're going to be tempted to make jokes about pugs and their FLAT FACES and how they ALWAYS LOOK LIKE THEY'VE CRASHED FACE-FIRST into something. Ha, ha.)

We were sent on our way with some goopy ointment, an E-collar, and orders to apply it every few hours. The vet thinks it will probably heal all right, hopefully with minimal scarring. Blondie gets E-collar breaks to drink water every few hours and to eat, and the rest of the time, she sits forlornly on the beanbag chair in the familiy room, the only place she can manage to get comfortable with this contraption on her head.

While we were there, I had her nails trimmed, because her day wasn't quite rotten enough. She struggled and thrashed and ended up bleeding pretty heavily from one toe (how she's never had one cut off is a miracle to me, and also the reason I will never, ever trim her nails myself). But she pranced into the hallway as cheerfully as ever, where she was promptly surrounded by people wearing scrubs telling her WHAT A GOOD LITTLE GIRL she was.