Merrylog

I love it, love it, love it when she howls. I should probably discourage it, but it’s just so darned CUTE when she puckers up her mouth and jumps into the air that I have to grin and then try to make her do it again so I can capture it on camera. :)

Seriously. Look at how the pores in her chin stand out when she howls. Just. So. Cute.

I miss play shots. :) I’m going to try to get the pug out to a park this weekend with a couple of additional “supervisors” for help, and maybe we can get some honest-to-goodness running-through-the-grass shots. But for now, I’ve been satisfying both of us by doing a little extra “fetch” time indoors. She has a blast with these new little rattle balls (“Boingo” balls) – they’re tough enough to chew on, but make a rattling noise as they roll, so she can follow them and find them better. As you can see, she’s still clearly a kook for her fetch time. :)

To everyone who posted comments, emailed privately and/or sent good thoughts our way over the last several days: thank you, so much! It was very healing to hear from all of you, to hear your good wishes and to be able to read so many affirming messages. I knew most or all of this in my head already – that the princess would be fine, that she would continue to be happy and full of love for play and belly rubs and really good treats, but it was wonderful to hear them “outside of my head” for a few days to help really sink the message in.

Our family had a very relaxing weekend, with lots of indoor play for madame pug and lots of time to reflect, calm down, and refocus… in other words, exactly what we needed.

We’ve given it a lot of thought and despite the possibility that there may be treatments out there that may be of help to the pug, the reality is that we’ve spent $5000 and a HUGE amount of personal time and energy on surgery, drops, unguents, creams, elizabethan collars and visits to the eye vet (who, despite my occasional grumbling, really has been top-notch support for us, even ensuring we have his home phone number at all times – he’s highly respected, the top of his field and also teaches these invaluable skills to other doctors at the best Vet college in Ontario – and he was also devastated to discover on our last visit that all of our hard work and energy will not end us up with a sighted pug). If this illness were life threatening, it would be a different case, perhaps, but as it is, I don’t think we’ll be continuing to seek other treatment options. Thank you, though, to everyone who wrote in or commented with options for us – honestly, I can’t begin to tell you what it meant to me.

I do already own a copy of Living with Blind Dogs; I’ve skimmed it here and there, and used some of its recommendations already, but had been hoping I wouldn’t have to read it end to end. :) Ah, never underestimate your ability to act like an ostrich! But I’ll be reading it over the next several months so we can ensure the best possible environment and life for Merry, regardless of how much or how little eyesight she’s left with.

Again, thank you everyone. Your comments and emails moved me a great deal this weekend – often to tears. I’m blessed indeed, to have so many people rooting for this little pooch and her family.

Well, it’s official. After months of me complaining to her eye vet that despite his assurances that she’s “seeing just fine” she is, in face, getting progressively worse each day with her eyesight… he has finally agreed with me that she’s getting worse.

Her left (non-surgical) eye is pretty much 100% gone now, with the caract having progressed fully. But her right (surgical) eye should be allowing her much better collision avoidance and yet it’s not. His official diagnosis is that the retina in that eye is disintegrating.

Unfortunately, there’s not really anything they can do to fix this. It will continue to disintegrate until she has no usable vision left in that eye, over the next year or so. Nor does he recommend surgery in the left eye to remove the catact, since the exact same retinal disintegration may happen in that eye as well. He cannot tell me what causes it; it may be genetic, it may be a response to the surgery.

Essentially, little miss has about a year left of usable, teeny bits of vision, and after that she’ll be completely blind.

My biggest concern at that point was to talk to him about keeping her eyeballs – not having to have them removed. He assured me that all of the problems she has with her eyes are okay and don’t cause, in and of themselves, loss of an eye, usually.

Left unsaid between us is that without any vision, she could easily walk right into something, puncturing an eye and possibly losing it that way.

Y’know folks, you’ve all heard me talk time and time again about the fact that she was going to go blind eventually – a reality I’ve had to deal with the past year, regardless of what the doctors were saying, since I was the one watching her walk into things – but hearing it from the eye vet yesterday had a terrible finality to it that really shook me. I’m afraid we came home after roaming the city yesterday from appointment to appointment and just crashed, sleeping cuddled together on the couch while my brain took a little vacation from this new reality.

Tomorrow I will be my determined, cheerful self – ensuring that the wee pug has as fabulous a life as I can make of it, despite her lack of vision, and as much autonomy as I can teach her in the upcoming months. But today, I’m pretty sad. She has such pretty eyes. She loves to go and do so many things. Argh. Sorry to bring you all down on the verge of another lovely summer weekend, but there it is.

Playing inside can’t be too much of a hardship; lookit that tongue. :) Actually we’d be playing indoors a lot this time of year anyway, since it’s going up to 29 or 30 C every day and 37 with the humidity. (That’s 99 degrees or so, for our US/non-metric readers.) Pugs can overheat and die in this kind of weather, so we’ve always been careful with her in the summer and spent most of our outdoor time in the evenings, when it’s cooler.

Did I mention I miss San Francisco? I loved the weather there; perfect pug weather, not too hot, not too cold, and not TOO much rain (like Seattle). Sigh.

I know I haven’t posted a lot of “pug in the park” pics lately, but the truth is it’s getting more and more difficult to play in the park, even in small, well-fenced in parks that get little foot traffic. Merry’s eyesight is just very minimal these days, and while playing with a ball that makes noise as it rolls helps her to keep track of the ball, she then loses her “playmate” and roams all over looking for them – you pretty much have to clap your hands or keep talking the entire time. Even with those cues, she often gets lost or finds the ball but doesn’t pick it up, just kind of mouths it then wanders off.

Sigh.

Luckily, playing indoors is still great fun for the pug – she retrieves the ball and brings it to you over and over again. Occasionally, she’ll lose the ball, but she sniffs around for it and can often find it – not always, sometimes you have to help, but often she’s good.

We try to keep her playing just as much as we can; I don’t want her world to become so small and dark that she’s afraid to keep playing at home. I’m afraid that her eyesight getting worse right around the time we stopped having a backyard is as much responsible for the “park issue” as anything else. Lack of practice means lack of familiarity, which means she’s probably scared and can’t orient herself.

I couldn’t get many shots – every time I started taking photos in the park, she’d get lost, so I had to make do with “guess” shots – holding the camera at my chest or waist while keeping my eyes and voice trained on her. A few turned out; this is one of them. :)

Folks, this wasn’t meant to depress everyone – but I did want to warn you why you may not be seeing many more outdoor play shots any longer. What I may do is go back through my huge archive of unposted pictures and occasionally treat you with a Merry-from-the-past outdoor play session. :)

See what happens when you only work three days out of a week (and most of that buried under a pile of email from your vacation)? You look up – and suddenly, it’s the weekend again.

Happy 4th to all our US readers – and enjoy the weekend!

When I typed in the title for this image – pretty in pink – I thought to myself: “Oh, that’s so obvious. Surely you’ve used that before?”

Weeeell, turns out I have. Four other times! (Go figure.) So if you’re interested in a piece of Merrylog history, check out pretty in pink IV, III, II, and I. Spanning four years of the princess’s life!

(Plus: it’s scary to see how much better my photography is now – or, more accurately, how much more I sucked at photography back then. Oh, to be able to go back to when Merry was young and could see perfectly and take the shots I know I could get now!)

The princess was very happy to get home last night; she spent most of the evening licking the floors, sniffing the corners, laying in every dog bed on the main floor (we have four of them, and yes, I know I’m a nut) and generally enjoying a bit of downtime after her visit with Grandma and Grandpa.

As for the grownups in the house: we missed the little spud like crazy, but it was lovely to get away and relax and refocus on each other, after everything that’s been going on lately. :) We also took gigabytes and gigabytes worth of photos. Yay!