Introducing Autumn One-eye Winterspring

A few months ago, Jeff and I got a new dog. Like Merit, Autumn is technically just a foster for now, but we are hoping our home is her forever home.

A police officer found her roaming the streets in north Philly and took her to the shelter. For the most part, she was in good health, but she had a pretty gruesome eye injury.

Nasty, isn't it? (Click the image for a larger view.)

The shelter gave us some pills to give her and some ointment to put on her eye. Let me tell you, it's REALLY hard to put ointment into the eye of a squirmy dog without damaging her eye even more.

After a few weeks, her eye was looking a little better, but not a lot. It wasn't as red and had become more pug eye than boil.




Over the next few weeks, we tried to figure out if she could see out of her injured eye. When we threw the ball for her, we noticed that if we threw it towards her good side, she could follow it, but if we threw it towards her bad side, she would lose it. She also bonked her head on things a few times. All signs pointed to her being blind in one eye.

We still wanted her to keep the eye, even if merely for aesthetic reasons. Two-eyed dogs don't look as freaky as one-eyed dogs, and Jeff and I are pretty big on our dogs being cute. (Have you seen Dylan? OMG, he's a freaking cutie!)

When we took Autumn in to get spayed, the doctor told us her eye wasn't looking as well as he would like and he wanted to just take the eye out. It was a little sad, but we knew that Autumn wouldn't be able to tell the difference since she was already blind in her "dead eye."

After the surgery, Autumn looked terrible. She acted just as happy and squirmy as ever, but she looked pretty disgusting.



For starters, half of her head was shaved, but also, she still had iodine on her fur, her wound itself looked like a hack job*, and her eye was oozing blood. Pretty freaking gross.

It has now been two weeks since the surgery and she's looking MUCH better, even if she still is a freaky one-eyed dog.



Autumn is still a puppy, and therefore is still troublesome, but she's a good girl who is learning quickly. Now if we can just get Dylan to stop being afraid of her, we can all live happily ever after.

*I imagine that shelter dogs serve as practice for vet students.