Quigley's Splinter in the Eye

Well, today I had planned on reporting my progress with The Enclave : I spent an hour and half working on the last scene in ch 19 (or the first in ch 20 -- I haven't decided yet.) Around and after that I spent the day dealing with the latest Quigley crisis, and so that's what I'll report on.

When I took him out of the crate this morning, his left eye was squinting . So I called the vet and she said he wouldn't be doing that if it didn't hurt and there was probably something in it. So I went and put the crate into the car, and at 1:45 left to travel 20 minutes across town to the vet.

Turns out he did have something stuck in his eye, poking into the cornea.

They had to sedate him (which hadn't had any effect they said, but I could see it when they brought him back) to stain the eye and flush it out and see if she could brush off the object (hey, it's another foreign body somewhere it shouldn't be! And this time there really is one). The problem was, she didn't have the equipment to see it well enough to determine what it was and if it went all the way through the cornea, in which case surgery would be needed. So she referred us to an ophthalmic specialist across town.

After something like a 40 minute drive, we arrived, and Quigley was really feeling that sedation by then. Slept in the crate, drooled all over the place, didn't want to get out of the crate -- I had to pull him and his bedding out to get a hold of him and lift him out of the crate and then the car...

The specialist looked at his eye with his instruments and immediately determined that the foreign body had probably been in his eye a few days, that it was a strange bit of plant matter that he'd seen a few times in other dogs around this time of year, but he still doesn't know what it is. It had worked its way halfway through the cornea, which meant it would not be easily removed, and he'd have to fill in the hole. With Quigley under anesthesia, he would remove the object and then either fill the hole with medical superglue, or have to do a graft of tissue from the conjunctiva, which is what covers the white of the eye. He was hoping for the superglue, but if the cornea beneath the foreign body was mushy, he'd had to use the graft. Which would be a lot more expensive.

Regardless of which, it's still wildly expensive. Also, there are only two docs in town who do this. Our doctor was leaving for LA on a 6am flight to do surgeries over there, and the other one had a full schedule tomorrow, so our doc is doing it as I write this. I left Quigley there about 5 as they were taking him to surgery, and came home. When he's out they'll call us and we'll go back and pick him up. Probably around 7. Thankfully, it won't be as long a drive as it was from the vet's office.

Then there will be the recuperative care. I'm guessing there'll be a cone involved, but beyond that... who knows?

The workers at the vet's office kept talking about how weird this is, and how could this happen and... I'm almost laughing. Wearily, but laughing, none the less. Of COURSE it would be weird. And now that I have a dog back in the picture, he can take the book-deadline hits instead of me. Even though I take them, too, when he gets hit.

But it was so weird today, so familiar, to be trying to concentrate on the book and yet my mind distracted by the whole health issue. At least we know what it is, now and have begun to treat it.

Oh well. God's gonna have to deal with it, like He's been dealing with everything else. And I have to remind myself that He is for me, that He has a plan and it doesn't necessarily line up with mine. In fact, more and more, I KNOW that it doesn't line up with mine at all, and I am almost at the point of saying, "Plan? You want me to plan? Why in the world would I do that?"