Cheatgrass in the Eye

Poor Owie — we came home from a very joyful morning walk today and Owen climbed into a corner of the couch and curled up. Then I noticed something sticking out of his eye! An eye that was sort of swollen and puffy. There was a piece of cheatgrass sticking out of his eye! Cheatgrass is this terrible stuff that grows everywhere around here — it’s a grass seed, with a long tail on it, but it’s barbed with gazillions of little barbs and it’s famous for worming its way into dogs skins, and infecting their blood.

So, I pulled the piece of cheatgrass out of Owen’s eye — which took a couple of tries as it was really lodged in there, poor guy. And then I went and found the bottle of saline solution in the doggy first aid kit, and tried to flush out the eye — but dogs, they have a third eyelid — and well, I didn’t have enough hands to simultaneously hold down the dog, pry open his eyelids, squirt the saline in for long enough to make sure I’d flushed everything, and so, after several hours of telling myself he was fine, that i was being paranoid, that I’d gotten it out — I made the mistake of googling “dog cheatgass eye” only to discover that the little barbs that make cheatgrass so dangerous, also mean that those little barbs could still be in Owie’s eye.

So, off to the vet. Seventy dollars and a lot of flushing, and wiping out Owie’s eye with a q-tip, and putting florescent dye in so we could see the scratch on his cornea, we now have antiobiotic ointment for the doggy eye, and I had a mad-looking dog all night who had one eye the color of Mountain Dew.