Lessons from Shadow

 Our pets are truly a part of our family, and what affects them affects us deeply as well. A few weeks ago, I noticed that my little old man dog, Shadow, was squinting a lot and had watery eyes. I began to get concerned and took him into our local vet.

 Shadow joined our family as a puppy 12 years ago. My youngest son, who was 9 at the time, loved our Golden Retriever, Ginger, but longed for a little dog his size that he could pick up or cuddle on his lap. Sure, Ginger would have loved to do this with him, but they weighed about the same amount, so this just didn't seem practical! He saved up his money and when he saw a flyer in one of the shops in Ocean Shores for puppies, he was sold! We got to go meet the parents and see what they were like, and my son chose the puppy that spoke to his heart. The day we brought the puppy home, we stopped at the hardware store so that I could run in and grab a couple of new food and water bowls for him, he could literally fit inside of Ginger's bowl. When I came out, I found my son and my mom watching a curious behavior of the puppy's, whenever they moved around the puppy would move to sit in their shadow. So, in essence, he named himself!

 Because Shadow is such a precious part of our family, we were deeply concerned about his eye and what could be going on, but we also feared the financial aspect of it. I have no intention of putting a price or value on a family member's vision, but we've been very budget conscious these last six months while my husband has been laid off. My first move was to call his regular vet in Ocean Shores that's been seeing him since he was born. Believe it or not, the vet at the beach is actually less expensive than the one in town near us! I asked if this seemed like something that could wait until we were back out at the ocean in December - maybe it was just watery eyes from allergies? They wisely erred on the side of caution though and said that you don't mess around with eyes and he should be seen immediately. So I called our old vet here in town that we used to take Ginger to and they were able to squeeze him in right away. 

 Oh how I prayed about that appointment! I wanted wisdom to make the right decision. I wanted a doctor that would be able to discern what exactly was up with our sweet little old man. And, I didn't want it to cost and arm and a leg! I prayed specifically that God would give us the right doctor and/or tech who would be able to recognize Shadow's issue. Can I just say, I have rarely seen a prayer answered so specifically! After examining Shadow, the doctor shared with us that she has a genetic condition called Corneal Dystrophy which causes her to get small ulcers in her corneas. This was what helped her to recognize that our dog had one of these. Can you imagine? God sent us a doctor that had the same eye issues as our dog!

 Still though, an eye ulcer sounds pretty awful, and pretty expensive. I was so worried that this would lead to a surgery costing thousands of dollars, right after I had cancelled our pet insurance to save money 😬. You're not going to believe the treatment we landed on for Shadow. At first we tried different eye drops: one for pain, one antibiotic, and one that was an ocular healing drop. After ten days, things just weren't looking better and we had to get more extreme. ENTER THE CONE OF SHAME!!! Yep, the doctor is pretty convinced that Shadow was rubbing his eyes, even though we hadn't seen him do this, so she sentenced him to a weekend in the cone. That poor dog! He had no sense of his size or shape now and kept bumping into everything around him, like a bat who had lost his echo location. He couldn't get his head down into his food dish, so we had to build him a food dish tower and switch him to a shallower bowl at the top. He couldn't get through his dog door. Correction, he could get out of his dog door if he tried hard enough, but he couldn't manage to get back in. So I kept finding him crying outside 🥺. The other treatment change the doctor recommended was a special serum they could make in the office for us. They drew blood from Shadow, allowed it to clot for 10 minutes, and then spun it down to separate the white blood cells. They took these white blood cells and created a special healing serum for us to administer. That's just about the coolest medicine I've ever heard of, and certainly something my doctor can't do in her office!

 The only catch was this had to be done every 6 hours. We decided on 11 and 5 for the drops, which meant that I would stay up and do the 11pm drops and my husband would go to bed early and then wake up and do the 5am drops. Thank goodness this was just short term! Not as short as we had hoped though. When we went in to have him rechecked three days later, the doctor said she saw dramatic improvement. This indicated to her that the cone was doing it's job and the serum was helping. She asked us to continue this treatment plan for the next five days.

 Sadly, the next day we ran out of serum! My belief is that the bottle was leaking, I often felt it wet and sticky when I took it out of it's container and there were drops clinging to it before I squeezed the sides at all. I think my husband leans towards the explanation that his wife with double vision and significantly decreasing clarity couldn't tell that she was putting a ton of drops in instead of one. Either way, the drops were gone and I was so afraid that we would have to pay hundreds of more dollars to replace them. I called into the vet and let them know the situation, and after looking into his case, they invited us to come in and they would make us a new serum for free! Praise God! This time they put it into syringes, which are trickier to administer correctly but definitely don't leak.

Here's the Thing: This has been a story of one answered prayer after another, but it's not over yet. My poor little Shadow is still snoring away wearing his cone of shame. My husband and I are planning to head out of town so I can go on a cruise this weekend, so my new prayer request for this situation is that when Shadow sees the vet on Friday, he gets the all clear to be on his own, with his boy who'll be watching over him while we're gone giving him any necessary drops at intervals that match with his work schedule. I'm looking forward to yet another answered prayer in this little doggy drama.