Evolution

This blog is evolving, as is everything else on this planet. So rather than having it be exclusively about someday farm, I am hereby throwing open the gates to the rest of my life. Which my non-existent audience will undoubtedly find just as boring as I do. So. Here goes nothing.

My sweet, blind mare Tag will be having her right eye removed Tuesday. After five and a half looong years of trying and failing to slow the progression of vision loss due to Equine Recurrent Uveitis (ERU for short, aka moonblindness, aka Periodic Opthalmia) , glaucoma has set in, secondary to the ERU. While glaucoma was not unanticipated, I did not expect it to sneak in the way it did. Looking back , I have known for several months that Tag was really not quite herself, but with everything else that was going on in my life last year I did not worry as much about it as I should have. So when Tag started a bad flare-up last week, I began treating it as usual, although it did prompt me to have the talk about enucleation with my vet that I kept forgetting to have. Vet encouraged me to have a consultation with a vet from a nearby equine urgent care clinic, as they have a specialty piece of equipment that vet does not have; i.e. a tono-pen. Tono-pens measure intra-ocular pressure, that is, the pressure inside the eyeball. Normal is below twenty, over twenty is glaucoma, over thirty is bad. Tag's left eye (also blind but thankfully flare-up free, for now, at least) was an excellent 16. Tag's right eye was a very alarming 87. 87!!!! What a migraine that must be causing. So do to the danger of the eyeball rupturing on it's own, I scheduled surgery post-haste, for this Tuesday.

The hard part is that I will be out of town for work when my baby goes under the knife. I will be able to bring her to the clinic on Monday morning, to help her make that transition, but I cannot be there for any of her post-op care. So Tag will stay at the clinic until I return, she will come back to the barn a week from Monday. I expect by that time she will be quite her old self, pain-free and spunkier. Lookout world.

On the "DarcC is a freak" front, the surgical vet, while surprised my request, has promised me that yes, I can have Tag's eyeball in a jar, assuming it comes out in one piece as planned. Apparently sometimes, well, they don't. For all the squeamish people who don't read this, I won't elaborate. That eyeball has cost me a lot of money, damnit; it's mine and I want it back. Someday in the hopefully distant future I want to be able to bury it with her so she's whole again. Or maybe I'll just keep it to freak out small children - it can become a neighborhood legend, Boo Radley-esque. I'll be the crazy eyeball lady. "did you know she keeps an eyeball in a jar? No-one really knows whose it is, but some say it was a little kid who gave her a dirty look one day..." Or something to that effect.