Its been a long haul, so I won’t bore you with the details. And we’ll gloss over the gory bits. But its worth noting, as a cautionary tale.

Six weeks ago. A small granule of swimming pool chlorine. A serious chemical burn to the eye. Numerous visits to the vet. The first lot of surgery. Two setbacks, and any number of eyedrops, injections, pills and pomades. And that blessed silly collar.

I was ‘helping’ clean the swimming pool – it needed transforming from a dark, greeny-black duck pond into something clean, transparent and sparkling. It had been well dosed with tablets of strong chlorine, and it was whilst hosing down the filters the following day that a bit of this solid chlorine went into my eye.

We dashed off to the emergency vet as soon as They noticed my eye all red, closed and swollen. Over the phone the vet had told us to do nothing, in case it was a detached retina. But with hindsight, a really, really good dowsing with water immediately may well have been beneficial. The vet checked that it wasn’t a grass seed or other foreign body. Gave me a pain killing injection. Diagnosis : chemical burn.

Setback No 1 : You know that little claw on a dog’s wrist. Think its called a dewclaw. That must have caught in my eye, during a particularly vigorous rubbing. Did even more damage. That’s when the collar came in.

Setback No 2 : To be technical, the corneal epithelium had become detached from the stroma. The cornea is made up of several layers, and these are two of them. Having become unglued, it was healing back all rucked and irregular.  An operation under general anaesthetic was needed to to scrape away the affected tissue. Corneal Epithelial Debridement if you care to Google it. Eye sewn shut to help healing. Bloody marvellous.

Thats when I was told to wait 2 weeks, cross my fingers (difficult) and hope that all would heal and be hunk dory… (see preceding post)