Sad Stella

To answer your question...yes. This is the saddest puppy you have ever seen. Well, except for those horribly sad depressing commercials where Sarah McLachlan songs play in the background while I sit watching halfway between crying and puking as the photos and videos flash of the actual saddest animals I have ever seen.

Back to Stella, unfortunately she has Distichiasis which basically means she has an extra row of eyelashes that were irritating her eyes. And because they are pretty much impossible to see without a magnifying glass the vet just thought she had an eye infection. By the time we took her to an eye specialist since it was not getting better, the irritation got so bad that she developed a corneal ulcer. She went into surgery to have the extra eyelashes removed. I hope the killed those little hair follicles because they were basically like little hard brush bristles cutting into her eyes every day. The doc said her surgery went well, but this is what she came home like...puffy swollen eyes, staples in her right eyelid to keep her lashes from getting in the way of the ulcer healing and a cone around her head that she hates with the passion of a thousand suns.

 They said it should take about 2 weeks at the least for the ulcer to completely heal and the staples and cone to come off. This sad face...for 2 weeks or more. I don't know if we can handle that.

She can't drink or eat out of her food bowl - we need to MacGuyver something up off the ground so her cone can go around the area of the bowl. We are supposed to put cream in her eyes...but she freaks out and with her eyes looking all swollen and painful we don't really feel right jamming cream into them. She hates taking pills and even wedged into a piece of cheese she magically eats all the cheese and spits out the pill. Or the pill stays in, but she does not swallow it and she starts to foam at the mouth because the pill starts to dissolve on her tongue.

All this to say, I feel horrible for her and wish there was something we could do for her to make this recovery go faster. Oh - and O'Reilly is loving this. He just stares at her like it is punishment for ruining his life by being born. He is king of the house again...for a few weeks at least.