eye of the mister

Not sure what really happened, but it did. And it was something we'd never thought of.
Our little shih-tzu/pug-ish cross, Mr Coco, injured his one and only eye. [see what happened to his other eye here] And it got bad fast. Infected to the point of a deep ulcer which required surgery by a veterinary ophthalmologist. Surgery that required a graft of his own eyelid tissue to fill in and cover the ulcer. It's been almost a month since I took him to the emergency vet, and three weeks since his surgery. He's had to wear a cone every day since and will continue to wear it until at least the end of the month.
He's got a big blind spot in his eye now, and it's always going to look different. But it's there.

And he's a champ. 

With various eye drop regimens multiple times a day for the last three weeks (and the next few weeks to come), he's only put up a few real tantrums. Sometimes he snaps at the bottle of eye drops in a futile attempt to stop the drops, but can I blame him, really? 

He loves his walkies but gets tired easily - the cone is cumbersome and inhibits his ability to really get into something to smell. He wants to play with his stuffies but they're hard to get with the cone on. But on it will stay until we get the 'all clear' from the vet. This eye is gold.

But all of this just reinforces my belief in the resilience of animals and their ability to live one day at a time. I'm pretty sure he's not pining about days gone by when he could see fine out of his eye, or even when he had two. And by the way he's trying to run and play, it doesn't seem like he's worrying about injuring it again, or possibly losing it. That's for us humans to worry about. But we have to keep that worry in check and appreciate each day that this little turkey is in our lives. So when he looks at us with that one big, beautiful eye of his, he won't see anything but love... at that moment in time.
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​Here are some photos from the past few weeks:

the ulcer - that big divot

the stitch.

the day the stitches came out.