So apparently my dogs listen when I talk about work. I got home from my ER shift today to learn that my puppy has an infected eye that had been angry-looking and swollen shut all day. My wonderful spouse had already made a vet appointment.

The verdict? Anterior uveitis. You have to be kidding me. See picture below (two posts ago). Only in a dog-eye. Now since we're pretty sure my dog doesn't have ankylosing spondylitis (and I don't know enough about uveitis in dogs OR humans to really know what else causes it) we have no idea how it happened. She might have an allergy that set it off, she might have been exposed to something while we were at the Conservation Area yesterday, she might have had blunt trauma to the eye (possibly in the form of older dog's tooth while they were wrestling this morning)... who knows? But she definitely had cells and pus in the anterior chamber, she was markedly photophobic and her pupil was fixed and constricted. Lovely.

So as was the case with my patient last week (minus the stat opthalmology consult)... atropine drops q4h for 24 hours, then q8h, then q12h, then daily to keep the pupil dilated. Steroid ointment on the same schedule, but then twice daily for a grand total of EIGHT weeks. And the puppy is NOT impressed. But at least she won't be going blind in her left eye anytime soon. We hope.

So here's what anterior uveitis looks like in a 7-month-old puppy.


If life continues to imitate work I expect to be extracting a quarter from my dog's nose next week.