“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” William Jennings Bryan

Thursday, April 1, 2010

April 1, 2010

The other day we came home to find that Louie had injured his blind eye. The eye was swollen, and tears drained from the bottom corner. When we peeled back his eyelid to see what was going on, his whole eye was a bright, wet, red. We could tell he was in pain, and upset from this pain that he could not understand or stop.

We called and the vet came out and examined him. He’s going to be ok. He must have hit his open eye with something, as he scraped up a very large portion of his cornea. Being blind in that eye, his eyelid does not, so did not, reflexively close to protect it. The vet gave us some medicine to help it heal.

Every day, three times a day, we give him eye drops – steroids and antibiotics. And he also takes his horse aspirin, nicknamed “bute”, twice a day.

Life gets no more interesting than trying to hold a 1,100 pound horse whose eye is 7 foot up in the air, while peeling back an eye lid and laying exactly one drop of this and one drop of that in his eye. The first treatment at 5:30 in the morning is a thriller! It’s definitely a two person job…

But Lou tries. He senses that we are helping, and at times he just leans his head into my arm and tilts his head sideways while Kath puts in the drops. Sometimes though, he wants little to do with this new ritual and lifts his head as high as he can to escape it. After some coaxing, he usually compromises and leans down just enough to get it over with.

After four days now, his eye is opened and the swelling is almost gone. He still has tears, but not as bad as it was. He should be back to his “normal” in a few more days.

The vet said that if he does it again, we will need to buy him a pirate patch to protect his eye! He was serious! Poor ‘ol Louie the Swashbuckler! “ Arrrrrrgg matey!” I really don’t know what to think of that! I don’t think Louie would make a very good pirate.

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