Relieved

Note: This post is about personal stuff. Skip if you only want professional updates.

Around the middle of January, I found out that my dog Gypsy needed double surgery: one to fix a ruptured tendon in her back leg, another to fix an ulcer in her eye. Since Gypsy is twelve, general anesthesia is risky and the recovery time for her leg was over two months with her in a cage. Before anyone says "So? She's just a dog," I love Gypsy and my other dog, Loki, as if I were blood related to them, and since Gypsy has been with me for the past twelve years, I am ridiculously attached to her. Thus, this was/is a big deal to me.

Back to the surgeries. Gypsy's leg and eye surgery went fine, so we moved out of state about two weeks afterward as planned. Two weeks after that, Gypsy's eye started to act up again. We took her to a new vet, who informed us that her eye ulcer was back and she needed another surgery. So, Gypsy had her second eye surgery, which also required at-home care consisting of 4 different medicated eye drops four times a day, spacing each drop at least five minutes apart (that's a total of 16 times a day my hubby and I would have to hold her down, squirt drops in her eyes, then keep her in the Cone of Shame so she didn't scratch her painful eye and make it worse. Gypsy was as upset about this as I was, because you can't explain to a dog that this is for their own good. Instead, she probably thought that we were only torturing her for our own inexplicable, cruel amusement.)

About two weeks later at her recheck appointment, we got more bad news from the vet: Gypsy's eye ulcer still wasn't healed and she needed a third surgery. That would also mean another two weeks of four different eye drops a day, four times a day, and if her ulcer became infected, her condition would go from bad to worse. So, eye surgery number four happened. About ten days later at her next recheck, we received more bad news: the ulcer had healed in the old spots, but new ulcers had cropped up. The vet surmised that Gypsy's age caused a degenerative issue where fluids in her eye weren't being dispersed as they should be. Instead, they built up until they "bubbled," causing the ulcers. The vet proposed a new, more extensive corneal procedure that would produce scar tissue on her cornea, with the hope that the scar tissues would act as a shield against this bubbling up. Then, more at-home care with the eye drops would help her eye to disperse fluids as it should naturally. But, there was a catch: because all previous procedures had failed, if this didn't work, then the only other option would be to remove Gypsy's eye entirely.

We went with the more extensive, fifth eye surgery and the 4 drops, 4x a day at-home follow up care. For the past two weeks, I have been bracing myself for the worst because, to be honest, 2016 has kinda sucked so far (my mother's unexpected passing, a book release being pushed back over a year, pre-orders getting erroneously canceled, moving issues, more business issues, family issues, this, etc.) So, I was expecting to hear that the Gypsy's eye hadn't healed and we'd need to have it removed. Aside from how upsetting this would be for me, it would be worse for Gypsy, who would have to undergo another risk with surgical anesthesia, risks of infection after the surgery, visual limitations from losing an eye, plus be in a cone for another few weeks, which she hates and the poor thing has already been in a cone for three straight months.

In fact, I had so prepared myself for bad news that yesterday, when the vet told me all of Gypsy's ulcers had finally healed, I didn't believe him. I spent the rest of the day expecting him to call and say some version of "Psyche!" Today, the relief is setting in at last, and I hope that this good news heralds a brighter 2016 to come.

In closing, Gypsy's vision is a little limited in one eye now, but she still has both of them, and we have finally been able to put away the Cone of Shame. I will spend the rest of the day enjoying that good news, and when she comes in for her usual pets this afternoon as I'm writing, it'll make me smile even more than normal :).