Doggles may be in our future

It turns out that Grete's swollen, squint-y eye was actually a corneal ulcer. Now, you should know that "corneal ulcer" is just fancy doctor-speak for "poked in the eye with something sharp."

I'm still not sure at all what happened. It might have happened last night when Jason and I were packing boxes at my old house. I noticed that Grete caught wind of something in the backyard and started doing her speed demon crazy laps at least once.

In any event, once we got to the doctor's office, the visit went something like this. With the better lighting, I was able to see the scratch on her left eye. It was probably 2mm x 1mm at the most. (I'm bad with small measurements. Just use that as a notion of scale for the next number.) The doc put the yellow stain in, and sure enough, with the black light, you could see a good sized spot on her eye.

Now here comes the scary part. The doc then explained that it's like a blister, and we need to remove the bits of the cornea around the scratch. She proceeds to put a topical on the eye, and she waits a little while. (This is all too familiar to me after last year's laser eye surgery.) Then, with a plain old doctor's q-tip, she scratches Grete's eye.... for quite a while. After she was finally done, I think the scratch was perhaps 3mm x 6 mm. It definitely doubled - maybe tripled in size.

We now have antibacterial eye drops that need to be used until her recheck on Friday the 30th. (Gentamicin Sulfate Ophthalmic Solution.)

For those keeping track of these things, here's the bill...
Office Visit $63.00
Stain $30
Drops $23.50
E-Collar $6

Here's the only upside. Next Friday, in addition to getting her eye rechecked, we're going to get blood drawn for the Wisdom Panel DNA test finally. More on that later.

Photo credit goes to JustUptown on flickr.