Merrylog

Merry, once again “shaking a paw” in exchange for a treat. Note the long tongue in anticipation of said treat. She’s so adorable – and so treat focused – that there are days when I think we could literally teach her anything!

Happy 2012! It’s January – and it’s been a chilly start to the new year. Luckily,  the puglet has many ways of keeping warm: cuddling with humans, wearing fabulous sweaters, and bundling up in Mom’s favourite blanket. Hope your new year has been cuddly warm as well!

I literally cannot believe that tomorrow is the last day of 2011. How did that happen? It has been such an insane year that I feel like I’ve missed most of it! However – thanks to all of your kind comments over the past few days – I have finally finished processing a couple of more holiday shots of the princess pug just in time for… New Year’s Eve. Le sigh! Since she is an extra adorable elf this year, we hope you find ‘em worth waiting for. ;)

Well, I didn’t quite get it up before the fat man in the red suit came to town, but I did at least secure one shot of the princess pug in her Santa coat and candy cane collar and leash set. I hope to get a few more of her later today in front of the tree, so hopefully this won’t be your only dose of Merry Christmas (ha).

It was so wonderful to get all of your kind comments to the last photo! Honestly, I’ve been so remiss with the blog since Merry’s eye issues began in June that I’d feared we’d lost all of our readers. :)

The pug had a lovely, fun-filled holiday with new collars and treats and toys and many many people paying attention to her, feeding her on the sly, and generally making sure she felt like the pampered princess that she is. Hope your holidays were just as wonderful!

Where on earth did the autumn go? Well, I can tell you – learning how to parent a teenager full-time, and playing nursemaid to a pug with a (still) bad eye. As a result Merrylog has languished for far too long without an update.

What’s new in the world of Merry? I wish I could tell you that her eye was 100% back to normal, but the truth is we’re still healing the ulcer although it’s now superficial (it no longer picks up stain during an exam, which means it’s in the top layers of the eye only). But the real problem has been the glaucoma. She still flirts in between 20 and 30 in eye pressure, and she’s basically on the maximum eye meds she can be to reduce pressure. What that boils down to is a crapshoot of eye vet visits – will the pressure shoot sky high again? Will the pressure be stable? Will even this high but stable, ish, pressure be so much that eventually they may have to take the eye/kill the eye anyway?

Oh, to have a single two week period where we’re not worrying about the furball! :)

However, as you can see, the princess has been learning new tricks! Just a month or two ago, my stepdaughter taught her how to shake a paw and now she’ll come up to you and just waggle her paw in the air hoping to get a treat. It’s adorable.

I thank all four of you who are still reading this for your continuing patience. I promise, at least ONE holiday photo of the puglet before the big guy in the red suit comes! :)

It is a relief to be able to give the pug some playtime outlets, though we still have to be very careful indeed. We have to sit with her while she plays to ensure she doesn’t hurt herself, and have to limit playtime to this one toy which is incredibly soft and won’t hurt her little eyeball. As you can see, Merry’s not particularly thrilled about it either. It holds her attention for a few minutes but then she’s rolling on her side looking for belly rubs.

Luckily, we’re only too happy to provide that.

The expression on her face was so priceless I had to share it with you. ;) However, this photo also really nicely summed up my feelings about waking up before 6 am on a Saturday just so I could go down to Toronto’s biggest farmer’s market and beat the crowds. I love the food, love the market, but oh my gosh this is an ungodly weekend hour!

The princess received some great news yesterday – she has healed enough for us to allow her some playtime with one of her uber squishy and soft anemones. It’s not quite fetch, but it is progress! We’re all thrilled and relieved to be able to give the pug something to do other than walk, cuddle and sleep.

The princess and I actually went to the park today and, for a bare few minutes while tempting her with her favourite treats, I de-coned her so I could get a photo of that gorgeous little face. As you can see, she still has plenty of attitude. :)

The “bad part” of her eye is in the right eye (the left one, in this photo). The white halo you see at the far edge is the ulcer. All of the red you see at the top is blood and blood vessels coming in from all corners of the eye to heal the ulcer. While the white part seems to be spreading a little, the main wound itself is nearly healed – just another few weeks, the doctor thinks.

Hopefully. In pug vet world, things can change on a dime and have more than once so far!

I’m going to try to get better at posting photos and updates, folks, but the reality is she’s still on 4+ hours of eye med routine a day. That plus our normal routine doesn’t leave a lot of extra time! :) Bear with me, things will get better as the eye finishes healing and her med routine settles down.

As always, thank you to every single one of you reading, emailing, and posting comments. You’re all Support Rockstars and Merry, her daddy and I all appreciate it so much!

A lot of people in a lot of places made changes to their lives in late September of 2001. Even folks in different countries – like Canada – were given a good kick in the pants reminder about mortality and the fragile nature of life ten years ago. While I had already decided that I wanted a pug I just wasn’t sure I could handle the work and effort required to raise a pug on my own. But the events ten years ago were definitely a kick in the pants for me. They made me realize “what are you waiting for, exactly?” – and I started calling pug breeders that very week. By September 30th, I had found and fallen in love with a little four month old pug named Merry and cajoled the breeder into allowing me to buy her instead of keeping her for breeding stock.

It was one of the two happiest decisions in my life (the other being marrying the fantastic Hubby).

As you can see, the puglet still isn’t very photogenic yet (every meagre photo I find time to take in between eye drops looks just like this one – cone head supreme) but I am happy to report that she is healing wonderfully and has a disturbingly healing gloop of red over her right eye, which the doctors assure me is good and blood heals things but mostly I just think it looks sore. ;) We’re hopefully a month or so from being able to remove the cone (!!) and look forward to the day when the princess can start navigating without it!

After a great deal of dithering and wondering whether we’d be able to take our scheduled vacation due to three-times-a-week-at-the-eye-vet, we managed to luck out with her eye and finally it started to fill up with healing blood, which is what we were all waiting for, and her glaucoma stabilized thanks to over the top eye pressure meds, so we were able to take our week off. Yay!

This year’s vacation wasn’t nearly as fun for the pug, I hate to say, since she couldn’t do a huge amount outside with the whole cone/blind thing (you have no idea how tough it is to walk a blind pug wearing a cone! Her sense of direction is completely thrown off and she walks all over the place and has to be watched Very Carefully). However I did try to make sure we cuddled her plenty when in the cottage and she did at least get to soak up wonderful breeze coming off the lake and a nice sunny area to lie in (she loved lying in this doorway all week long).

We’ve had one checkup since we got back and things are still progressing, though the eye doc is now muttering about some scarring. Since the pug was 90% blind anyway, I can’t see that it will make a huge difference, but we’ll have to wait and see. He still generally feels good about the eye and tells us that it is healing, which is the important thing. And we’re now on every TWO weeks for visits, a record for us this summer!

Thank you to ALL of you for your love, support, and comments in the last post. Now that we’re actually back home and not running back to the eye vet 3x weekly, I plan to get more pictures of the delectable princess up here for everyone to enjoy. :)