An Update

OK, so we took Gracie to our vet. He doesn't think her patellar luxation is anywhere near bad enough to consider surgery. She walks normally and he said grade 2 luxations aren't that bad. He did say she might get arthritis later on because of it, though. He couldn't say with certainty that she won't progress to grade 3 luxation, but I didn't really expect him to be able to - he doesn't have a crystal ball, after all.

With regards her eye, he likened pigmentary keratitis to how the world looks to us wearing sunglasses. He said it would drive a person crazy but dogs just get on with things. We have some steroid eye drops for her, which we need to give her twice a day every day for the rest of her life. Luckily they were only $17 - although that's obviously going to end up costing a lot over the course of her lifetime! At least they're not like $50 a time though. That's what I thought they might cost. The vet said that the drops should stop her condition getting any worse, and hopefully will prevent her good eye from developing the condition too.

I'm still annoyed that we only just found out what APARN already knew - it doesn't seem very fair, really. I'm not sure how to broach the subject with them, obviously we're keeping Gracie but I think they ought to be aware that they should have told us what they knew. It was quite stressful to see that information last night, out of the blue. At least if they'd told us we would've known, and we could've got more information.

You know, I think Gracie knew something was up this morning because she hardly ate any of her breakfast (I mean, she ate maybe 15% of it - that's 15% of about a third of a cup, so really not much) and on the way to the vet she was whining a lot in the car. She doesn't normally do that. The difference this time was that we left Suzie at home. I wonder if she thought we were going to take her somewhere and leave her there? I mean, like her previous owner did when they surrendered her to APARN. In the vet's office she was shaking like a leaf. I just kept cuddling her and eventually she settled down. Poor little girl, I hate when she's scared like that.

It's such a relief that we can keep her - I really was starting to think that we'd have to give her back, we don't have thousands of dollars lying around for really expensive surgery; we're hoping to buy a house this year! Hopefully Gracie will never need surgery on her knees, if we're lucky they won't get any worse. As long as she has a good quality of life, that's the main thing.